October Road

Another month in this very strange year has flown by, and it’s time for my recap of that month’s posts, my fourth of these. Thank you for your support: you keep reading them and I’ll keep posting them! First things first, though, as there is a little piece of finishing up to do. Last month’s round-up had a title I had borrowed, and I invited you to tell me whence it came. No one tried, so I’m going to tell you now! The post was my first in October and, as before, it contained links to all the previous month’s offerings, in case you’d missed one (how very dare you!). It was called:

September, Now It’s Gone

I adapted the title from one of the most beautiful songs I know, a song about love, family, and mortality:

I hope Roseanne won’t mind – I love the song and that video, and borrowing the title is my little homage to her and her father. If you don’t already know, I’ll tell you where this month’s title comes from at the end of the piece.

As usual, music featured in a lot of my posts last month. There were, of course, the usual Tuesday Tunes – four of them, starting with

Tuesday Tunes 29: More Sixties

which included music from The Equals, The Hollies, Simon Dupree And The Big Sound, Cream and The Easybeats.

Next in the series was

Tuesday Tunes 30: Sixties USA

in which we heard from The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Neil Diamond, The Monkees and Crosby, Stills & Nash. I had promised to include some music from the USA in the series, and devoting a whole post to that seemed a good way to do it.

I then turned my attention to albums, for the final post from the Sixties:

Tuesday Tunes 31: Sixties Albums

which included music from The Moody Blues, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Byrds (again!), The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. I think that selection in itself is ample proof of what a great decade that was in which to grow up and get interested in music.

The final Tuesday Tunes post of the month saw me move into the next decade with

Tuesday Tunes 32: Into The Seventies

which was the first of two posts I’m planning for singles, before moving onto albums – as I was doing myself in buying records at that time. This post featured Status Quo, Deep Purple, Elton John, David Bowie and Jethro Tull. Again – not a bad time for music!

Not wanting to lose sight of why I began blogging in the first place, I produced my usual piece to mark World Mental Health Day on 10th October:

World Mental Health Day 2020

and followed that up with a post showing how music can affect our hopes and emotions, in

Stairway To…Hope – A Return

which was an update and edit of a post I originally wrote in 2015, about one of my all-time favourite songs, and how it demonstrates that music can be so powerful for us.

I returned to the mental health theme again in the first of two posts marking Halloween. This was the serious one:

Halloween – My Regular Reminder

This is, as its title suggests, a recurring theme for me: Halloween shouldn’t be a time for stigmatising those who are suffering from mental health issues but, sadly, some still need to be reminded of that.

The fun Halloween post came yesterday to round off my month:

Halloween Tunes 2020

This was a bumper post, including music from Michael Jackson, Bobby Boris Pickett, Ray Parker Jr, Sheb Wooley, The Automatic, Black Widow, Redbone and Warren Zevon – just the eight songs, plus an extended version of one of them! It was also my 450th post, though somehow I doubt that (m)any of you will remember the first!

To save you having to wait till next month, I did say earlier that I’d tell you where I got this month’s round-up title from. It’s going to have to be a static video, I’m afraid, as I could only find two live versions of this, and they suffered from poor sound quality and over-enthusiastic (and loud) American audiences. It’s a typically great song from a great artist, and it deserves to be heard properly, I think:

See you again next month, I trust 😊

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