My Personal Black History Month

A friend of mine who is my age (give or take a year), is in the process of training for Dancing with the Stars. He’s a Star. Don’t ask.

I gave up dancing years ago, not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t have any willing partners. But I do love music, especially dance music. And I love listening to music even if I am not dancing.

So how did I let time take me away from music?

As technology progressed, I listened to music less and less. First, satellite radio gave me access to cable TV in my car. Then Audible started me listening to books. Then came podcasts. The most recent innovation to come between me and music has been Clubhouse, a chat app I joined at the beginning of the Covid lockdown in 2020.

But last week I started a new morning routine — music instead of the usual news. People have been telling me to turn off the news since Covid began, especially because I’ve been suffering from anxiety and depression. But I masochistically resisted, thinking that as a citizen of the world, I had to be hooked up to information on a near-constant basis.

Anyway, looking through my Spotify lists for something to listen to, while driving to take the dogs to the park I came across a playlist sent to me a couple of years ago by my favorite octogenarian dancer-with-the-stars. It’s a random compilation of songs that were popular between 1957–1965, when I was finishing high school and going to college. I was doing a lot of dancing in those days.