Having just written about my personal inclination towards niche interests, it’s worth considering the flip side; activities which gain from being widely shared.
There’s a story about the decline of hitchhiking that says it had been a normal activity and then, during the 70s, as there were fewer hitchhikers a higher percentage of people hitchhiking were weird or antisocial and it made drivers less likely to pick up riders. This isn't the whole story but, in general, when something goes from a common activity to a niche activity, it changes the composition of the group of people involved in it.
The reverse happens as well. When I was playing Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager, there was a clear type of person you met through gaming and my impression is that, these days, all sorts of people game.
I was thinking about this after an exchange with
in which he reminisced about musical variety shows in the 70s[Donny and Marie Osmond] .....ah, the glitzy, outrageous, way-over-the-top '70s, hour-long weeknight variety show. If you were anything even close to a Top 40 chart-topping, reasonably attractive person or group (with at least 2...maybe 3 hits....you know, established a track record!), your agent, by that time, should've secured you a network variety show! Osmonds, Glen, Hudson Bros., Cher (followed by Sonny & Cher), Bobby Goldsboro, Mac Davis, Captain & Tennille....and, that's just a partial list!
These variety shows taped weekly, usually running a few weeks ahead of air-date. Still, in one week, the rehearsals, the costumes, the choreography, the "comedy" writing ("Look, Marie, a caterpillar under the ice!"), more endless rehearsals. But, it was de rigeuer, and everybody did it (if you had a show)!
My impression is that, pre-WWII, making music was a common social activity. It didn’t require that people would get together for the purpose of making music but, rather, when people gathered, singing or playing music was a common part of social interaction.
For example Susie Bright recently wrote (now paywalled) about her experience with music growing up:
In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.
“I was surprised how many songs the average person knew back then,” he said.
He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.”
Ouch. That's sad but true. I think how many songs I know by heart, and they pale in comparison to my parent's musical memory. My mom not only sang all the songs, she knew all the dances that went with them.
Michael Smith (b1941) wrote a tribute to his father in which he remembers “Car trips to Pennsylvania / When all of us would sing / He sang Bells Of Saint Mary's /And he sounded just like Bing”
‘s essay on Mason Williams and the Smothers Brothers describes the way in which musical creativity was one element of the comedy and commentary of the show.Music was to be a major part of The Comedy Hour. There were, of course, the sketches that Tom and Dick built around various folk songs. There were also the musical acts that appeared on the show. In this sense, the show was not much different than The Ed Sullivan Show, which preceded The Comedy Hour on Sunday nights. Neither strayed too far from featuring the most palatable of the popular groups of the time, including Jefferson Airplane, the Association and Paul Revere & the Raiders. Where The Comedy Hour went further, however, was providing Pete Seeger his first network-television exposure in over a decade and a half. There was the explosion—a far more powerful one than expected—that concluded the Who’s performance of ‘My Generation.’ Tom and Dick tried (unsuccessfully) to have Harry Belafonte sing ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ to footage of the mayhem at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
I think about the 60s or 70s variety show as part of the transition where the adults grew up in a world in which social music was common and it was starting to fade among younger generations (fade but not disappear, of course).
With any discussion of pastimes falling away, I do think the most important explanation is simply that there are more choices about what to do. When I mentioned John Warner discussing songs from the logging camps; that wasn’t reflection of the fact that loggers were an unusually musical group. But, rather, as he says
They only worked in the winter when they could move those heavy logs on ice and snow. There were no roads in or out so they couldn’t come at home at night. They stayed up there from .. November through March or April. They all lived in the shanty.
Similarly, sea shanties grow out of people spending a lot of time working together in cramped quarters with very few options for entertainment. These transition reflect a change to wealthier society with more options for leisure and is, broadly, a good thing. However, it is worth noting that the characteristics of an activity shift when it goes from being a part of the common culture to a hobby for a smaller self-selected group.
While the musical/variety series began to fade by the late 1970s, MTV took over its role. It became cooler and more creative to a whole new generation.
Thanks so much for the shout-out of my essay on Mason Williams and the Smothers Brothers