Porter Baffrey's Blog

  The group that I will be doing my discussion post on will be the Athabascans. Over the years I have learned more and more about the native indigenous groups to where I grew up, whether it is from natives, work, or school. One thing that has stayed consistent is the love for music and how they incorporate it into their day to day lives.  The above video shows an example of the Athabascan Ida'ina K'eljeshna at an AFN convention. AFN is the Alaska Federation of Natives Conference that happens every year either in Fairbanks or Anchorage. They dance for a variety of reasons from celebration to mourning (Travel Alaska). Athabascans have three main groups of music that they have, washtub, stick dance, and mask dance. Stick dance is only performed at end-of-life things and if it is performed at other times it was said to bring bad luck. When they dance to mourn, it is a way for them to commit to live, and go on with their lives. That’s what the songs mean. The way they position thei...

  The two above are examples of electric guitar songs with distinct electric guitar solos. Overall I have decided on my blog post on the guitar and the transformation between the acoustic guitar into the electric guitar. I will be discussing the history and the reason that the electric guitar came to existence. Over the years electric guitars have gotten a lot more popular in day-to-day music. The acoustic or the traditional guitar was the most common guitar until the early 1900s when the electric guitar came out. This transition led to more genres of music and a more distinct sound. While it was originally introduced in the 1930’s the electric guitar did not get popular until the 1950s and 1960s. According to Wikipedia, the reason that bands used the electric guitar was because “ It uses one or mor e pickups to convert the vibration of its strings into electrical signals , which ultimately are reproduced as sound by loudspeakers . The sound is sometimes shaped or electronically a...

  The song that I have chosen is Freight Train by Alan Jackson. This song is a fairly recent song and was released on March 30, 2010, in the United States. While the song itself was not written by Alan Jackson, but rather by Fred Eaglesmith, it was composed by Alan Jackson and produced by Keith Stegall. This is a very upbeat song that encourages people to dance and sing with its upbeat tempo and lyrics. Freight Train is 4:39 in length with 121 bpm. While this song is on Alan Jackson's album, it was originally written and released in 1998 by Fred Eaglesmith. The lyrics of this song hold a message that can be interpreted in many different ways. I personally believe that the song is about something that is much deeper than just an upbeat song. While the voice inflection sounds like a more upbeat song, the lyrics themselves talk about a devastating heartbreak and about how he falls behind in life, and sounds like he just wants to talk to someone about what he is going through. This ...