It’s Family History Month in the U.S. so I thought I’d share some stories and songs. If you want to practice writing about family history but have trouble coming up with ideas, here are a couple of silly prompts to get you started:
Your great-grandmother has been on Facebook for three hours. What has she done?
You can seat any four generations of your family around one table. Who are they, and who starts the argument?
OK. Enough of that. I came here to tell you a story about a vanishing record.
The Search
It was a rainy winter evening last December, and I was hunting down homestead paperwork about Grandpa’s 40 acres in Mars, Nebraska.
I found it on FamilySearch. This is a top favorite site with family history enthusiasts. It’s all free, and it has lots of old documents. Just one problem: they can scan documents way faster than they can index them.
(You know, like the index at the back of a book? Without an index you have to go hunt down the records for Antelope County and then page through them one by one. Yawn.)
But then they added Full Text Search, and now you can go in and say things like, “Show me everything that mentions Orland Carver in Nebraska between 1900-1912”, and it will find things that haven’t been indexed.
What a gold mine! I found so many things that day, I stopped downloading and just started saving links.
The Link
A few weeks later I went back to find it. I thought, I’ll just click the link and get my document. So I clicked, and boom, nothing. Just a big “restricted” message.
Maybe I saved it wrong?
When you find a document on FamilySearch, you can attach it to a person in the big shared FamilySearch tree. And I thought I did that, so I checked. But wouldn’t you know it. When you attach a record that way, what you’ve attached is just the link. And the link is still restricted no matter which way you click it.
Which I knew at one time. I just forgot. Or didn’t remember. One of those.
Why would it go restricted? Why would it go restricted? This is probably an agreement between FamilySearch and Antelope County that changed, and maybe FamilySearch can’t show me this record at home anymore unless I present myself in person.
So what was I to do? Change out of my pajamas and drive all the way to the FamilySearch Center to get it?
For me, that’s a three-mile drive. But for many people, it would be a long trip.
I made a video about that here, but today I want to tell you about …
The Song
Since I couldn’t access the record, I turned my attention to the obvious solution: a song about the situation.
But what musical style?
Something I’ve learned while playing around with AI-generated music is that it helps to choose the musical style first. Then you can shape the lyrics to fit the style.
But I’m really not very good at musical styles. You’ve got Renaissance, Baroque, jazz, pop, country, those weird art songs they made me sing in college. Broad categories. But what about the 400 million subcategories?
I mean, really, what is dubstep?
For this song I wanted something a little gritty that reminded me of homestead life. Then I thought of Arlo Guthrie and Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, which we used to inflict on the kids every Thanksgiving. So I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, this is called talking blues.
It’s great for telling stories that might ramble a little bit and don’t fit into a uniform “Mary Had a Little Lamb” rhythm.
Imagine a storyteller sitting on a stool, keeping time by tapping his boot heel against the floor while he sings a story. The guitar (and maybe a bass) starts in with this boomp-pah boomp-pah rhythm, which is usually called boom-chick.
(I don’t know why. We used to raise chicks. They didn’t sound like that!)
(Also, if you want to hear a really good example of boom-chick, go listen to Jim Croce’s You Don’t Mess Around with Jim.)
I thought it might be good to add a bit of southern blues-rock, or what do they call it, folk-funk? I don’t know what they call it. That’s my problem! So I asked ChatGPT for suggestions.
That’s right. I’m over here asking one AI how to talk to another AI.
Here is my song, titled: Restricted.
Did I ever get to the FamilySearch Center to download Grandpa’s record from Mars? No, because eventually I came across a copy. On my hard drive. In a file named image04.jpg. Uh huh.
The Details
If you want to try this for yourself …
What’s fun about AI music is that you get to learn about new music forms and history while creating something to tell your own story.
If you have trouble writing lyrics, here are some ideas:
Search the internet to find out how your chosen musical style is usually shaped. Is it three verses with a chorus and a bridge? Are the lines usually short or long? What are some example songs where you can see the lyrics?
Then try it yourself and ask your favorite AI for help when you get stuck. (Don’t have AI think for you. Ask it to help you think more clearly.)
Alternatively, pester a human. My humans get tired of this.
Here is the exact Suno prompt I used. It should give you a starting point in other music generators as well. And no, I’m not sure why it is all capitalized. It just came out that way.
Talking-Blues Folk With A Steady Upbeat Groove, Clear, Warm Vocals With A Touch Of Swing And Personality, Acoustic Guitar And Upright Bass Drive The Rhythm, Add Light Snare Or Hand Percussion For Movement, Energetic But Natural, Like A Storyteller Tapping A Boot Heel While He Talks
If you use this and it doesn’t feel quite like what you want, try changing one small thing at a time.
And when you do get it the way you like it, don’t just save the link.
Download!
Links:
My YouTube Video about this story:
More about Alice’s Restaurant Massacree
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant
The Song: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=WaKIX6oaSLs&si=ATdIWl8DCj736w1z
More about You Don’t Mess Around with Jim
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Don%27t_Mess_Around_with_Jim_(song)
The Song: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=hickVDiW8k0&si=wAAJmuWMk73LPdTh
My favorite overall Suno Reference person (not affiliated) is Travis Nicholson:
More about Talking Blues
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_blues
Find a FamilySearch Center
And yes, they used to be Family History Centers, or FHC as we fondly called them. Now that they are FamilySearch Centers, I guess they are … FSC? Are we saying that fondly?
Suno
There are a number of other music generators available. Examples: ElevenLabs Music, Google Flow Music, Mozart AI. I don’t have much experience with them yet so can’t offer specific tips.