Sound Century Daily

There is something that I have known all my professional career. A music, performing arts scene cannot emerge without an original sound with works that define a city, region or state. For Detroit is was Motown. In Nashville it was Music Row. In Memphis it was Beale Street, Blues and Sun Records. New Orleans, Jazz and Dixieland.

There have been certain original sounds that have come from Colorado and yet they have been by singular artists or bands. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Hot Rize, Rob Mullins, Kellis Etheridge and Intuition. Clubs and studios have largely come and gone. The late Jill Sobule, Pam Brooks who is now Pamela Z, The Mother Folkers, Big Head Todd, Grubstake, and Dakota Blonde, Rich Moore and Molly O'Brien, and a community of Colorado Bluegrass players who earnestly gave their heart and soul to their Colorado Crafted Songs. There are more and so apologies to my friends I missed.

As a lifelong member of the Musical Theater, Singer Songwriter and Celtic Music Scenes, I have subscribed to the school of Folk that Pete Seeger initiated. "Folk Music, is something old, something new, something borrowed and something new." And as I have attempted to rescue the concerts and musicals of inspiration from my time and a generation before me, I have found a wall of hands out for a share of our labor of love. And there is where the opportunity for the best of Colorado music can come to rise!

The digital world and music licsences are a fickled place. Public cafes and farmer's markets are paying ASCAP and BMI to get the '70s pop lists of Tribute Bands and Neil Young rip offs to recycle pop songs. On the other side of the coin, streaming services are taking music from Sound Cloud without paying a dime to music publishers or artists. The only people who are not making money are the ones who created the songs, recordings and publishers.

The human juke box players and performers are not the ones who are being asked to pay the price, the establishments who would have hired them to run Karoke night are electing to abandon live and streaming music.

Unless they only hire "something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue." Or as we know it, "traditional, original or public domain." And that's where Sound Century Academy and Ark Valley Wind and Percussion come in. Categorizing, indexing, publishing, recording thousands of songs from a dozen genres. The Rocky Mountain Sound of Stories and Songs, Traditional, Country, Folk, Blues, Jazz, Musicals, Poetry in the public domain set to music, documentary and instrumental, Hymns and Spirituals, Bluegrass, Children's Music. Donate the music we save and distribute the music we make.

Harry Tuft always tells me "Get back to the mission."

The mission of Sound Century is to preserve, protect and pass down the stories and songs through recording arts to future generations.

And just think, when you go into your favorite coffee shop you will hear something you are hearing for the first time, or something you haven't heard for a long time, instead of an imitation of something you wish you heard for the last time.

Richard Arnold Beattie

719-877-3476