No. of Recommendations: 1
Not just their style and influence, but their actual performances could be listened to 100 years from now. I think it's possible that maybe some of them may be held in high regard 50 or 100 years hence.
We'll see. Or maybe we won't, since you and I are somewhat older folks. But I wonder if this will be true for artists who are notable because of their performances, rather than being composers.
This part of the discussion got kicked off by a poster being taken aback by a mid-20's person not knowing Clapton (or Santana, but Santana wasn't so widely known even in his day, so that's not all that surprising). Any student of guitar (or even of popular music generally) would know him, of course - but he probably doesn't have much cultural relevance or penetration these days.
I wonder - will any performers have that? Unlike the composers, whose works get performed anew by modern musicians time and again, someone who's notable for being a virtuoso performer only has the work as it existed during their actual performing career. It's recorded, but somewhat 'frozen' in time. Will those recordings get pulled out of the metaphorical vault to be listened to by a modern audience?
I think there might be a lifespan - that the actual performances can't outlive their audiences and find new ones the way composers can. Gen X is finding the Beatles and the Doors, but I don't think they're finding Benny Goodman or Duke Ellington or Al Jolson or Jimmy Dorsey, Dinah Shore or Doris Day or the Andrews Sisters. They'll know Crosby's Christmas stuff, but they're not pulling any of his other early works. Maybe Ella Fitzgerald or Nat King Cole.
I think the earliest artists that still has any enduring cultural footprint for hteir performances would be Holliday or Sinatra (and the latter because his career was so long - he was a contemporary of Elvis but had a new generational hit in New York, New York at the cusp of the 1980's). But I think any performer who was done by the fifties is mostly gone to modern listeners, other than the ones who are actively digging/researching.
Can you think of any others?
