But my training to sing what I cannot say. To this day my speech defect emerges when I am stressed out. When the stuttering portion begins, I switch to singing. Part of the training was to soften the modulations so that it sounds like something close to normal speech.

Pass me the salt...

Parts of my history that are related to this are that I am tricultural, my parents being from different ethnic backgrounds and the culture where I now live, and that my parents were performers and musicians, as well as that I was not allowed to express myself directly in ways that contradicted either of them while they did allow me to sing.

So music is my life. I know a lot of songs from many ethnicities, and American pop, country, r&b. When I feel like there is something just underneath that needs to be expressed and I can't do it directly, there are songs that I can sing. I also just really enjoy music.

Thanks for sharing the Chinese one I like it. Well, and it's not alays about 'liking' it, is it? but about how well it expresses whatever it is.

The first two posts put me in mind of Korean drums, so I'll share one of those:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmiCI_cW-60

When I don't like a song, I like to know precisely what it is I don't like about it. I will play it over and over until I have found every fingernail on the chalkboard. Often I will do revisions to shape it into something I do like.

I am totally hooked on live drum corps of all cultures. In my senses, electronics simply cannot capture the primal force of percussionists coordinating their pulses. Get me breathing heavy...

Thanks for the video link. Great training insights.

Yea, that multi-culturalism is an American trademark. From Canada to Argentina, most of us seem to be mixed bags. If I ever meet a culturally pure American, I have a ton of questions I have been waiting to ask. I have met a few purebreds, but they, too, live in our crazy world. ;-) No wonder we're all nutz.

xa1nbowxR, thanks for posting about being tricultural. I'm just bicultural, Spanish & English, but it's been part of my life daily and still is. Every day at my job half my work day is in English and half in Spanish. Song is often the glue that holds it all together.

This has been a great thread, arfie!

I looked up 'lamentos' out of curiosity, and listened to a few. Here are some links. Not sure if this is what you meant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dObcnghiiQw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRsmc8vDN0

Do you have other examples?

Polish music sometimes has a kind of existentialist tone to even festive music. Like they have not quite the ability to just let go and be like innocent children being happy.

great music for us PTSD folks.

Drums help me work out my adrenalin when I need that, and sometimes I need something to sooth the savage beast in me.

Here is some Native American contemporary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04hcdkQY0ZQ

wow, I like this thread. It seems many of us relate to the more primitive level of communication when our verbal skills alone get blocked.

I sang with Joanne Shenandoah once.

Here's another contemporary Native American song I really like:

Brule - Buffalo Moon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGVLTAtqzhM

Might be easier to define the blues than los lamentos. Maybe. Music is even harder to pigeon hole than the people who love it. For sure, I will listen to the Enanitos Verdes out of any bin you pull them out of.

Here is my personal favorite lamento. It is - according to me - a song about a man wishing to make peace with his father.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwUYzw1UHik

I'm going to put two versions of this Polish song. The the first one has the traditional melody done very well, and since it's a song of the mountain people the little echo in it is great, but it has the modern drum thing in it , which to me distracts, the pictures are wonderful. the song is that there is one goralu/mountain man asking another why he left the mountains, and the other responds that he had to because he was hungry. The story of many people who leave their homelands in rural areas forced to go where there is food in a city or other country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRuNIBf0rk8

When Karol Woitila left Poland to go to Rome, the first visit back to Poland, they sang this song..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUuT-dKXvZg

I have to do one more post, and then will be quiet for a bit and listen to others..

I have to put some yodels on. I come from an area in the US West where there were Germans who brought yodelling, and I have to share some yodels :P

Franzl Lang

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQhqikWnQCU

Slim whitman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bZS1-en398

Swiis classic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMxBlxRbBk0


ahh and then there is whisltling, but.. I'll do that sometime later.. this last song is a nice one to finish with for now.

music is my life

I especially liked Gralu czy cie ni al. Poland was behind the Iron Curtain when I was in Europe. Sure wish I could have seen it.

My most requested song in Spanish is, Wayay. I picked it up in Bolivia. Before I laid my incompetent flat pick on it, it was a huayno about a huayno. I have dug for a translation for wayay (why - I) and still not found one. I think ol' Slim Whitman might be the translator to hire.

arfie, if you can go Bolivian like that, you might like a blast from my South American past, too. It's a guy named Jaime Roos. He's still around. The song's Retirada (Retreat), from back in the bad days of the 1980s when the dictatorships still ruled before democracy came. The song's not political in itself. It's just about having to "retreat" from home and live in exile abroad, which I had to do along with so many You hear the lament build, and it's in that minor key. Then it bursts into drum rolls and chanting over and over that we don't ever want to say goodbye again.

Roos was allowed to perform Retirada once at one single concert back in South America on a short trip the military junta allowed him from his exile in Europe. I was on the front row of that concert. We in the audience cheered so long after Retirada the the military literally had to clear us from the concert hall with riot police. We just had so much pent up feeling that this song uncorked after so many years under the dictators. It was music therapy that night for about 20,000 people at once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6JEl_tz9yk

Also, there's this song by the group Enanitos Verdes literally called Lamento Boliviano you might like--more of a pop song, really. I like the live version, because it shows how South American audiences like us sing along so loudly. Cheers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f1ECanFw7E

An online friend of mine shared with me some Arabic music.
One genre is called nasheed. A nasheed is, I am told, national music, educational/teaching music. Some of it is very Islamic, while some of it is more general and of the heart. I found a few that have English subtitles. Many songs are about devotion to the mother, as a special source of tenderness and Love in a man's life, and a good wife is seen as a gift from Allah, like an angel in his life.

here's one,, it is sad, about mother

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeBxr8T51Bw

one about wife

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx4TS94K0lY&NR=1&feature=endscreen

xa1nbowxR , thanks so much. I watched them both and really loved them. There's an intersection between Arabic and Spanish music, there has been for centuries. Such feeling.

a classic in Spanish"

Malaguenya Salerosa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SHFAWOdvPw

I like the emotions in Latin music, both Spanish and Italian

here's an Italian one. It's about the famous singer Caruso, and speaks of his voyage to America

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYZWbzEmWY0

muji, the Moors occupied much of Spain for a long time, and there was much cultural sharing in certain parts of Spain.
I have some songs that are fairly new, thanks to Shakira's interest in belly dance, which is actually some in common with flamenco.

I have a new computer so don't have all those saved. I'm trying to think of a few that I shared with my friend.

hehe how about this I found while browsing, not what I was looking for but is interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHe9E7edMuk

The belly dance that Shakira and many do currently is really only excerpts of parts that Westerners consider the most fun.

I'll have to search more later, but for now,, got me thinking of flamenco, new flamenco, and the Gipsy Kings!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LweA7NLPB0c