Well, that forum topic "what is your favourite song?" got me going....

I sing Blackbird (The Beatles) and Mining for Gold (traditional song, but learned it from a Cowboy Junkies CD) to my little boy... along with 1960s and 1970s protest songs LOL from before I became conscious of music. I sing him The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald too, a song about a ship that was lost in a bad November storm on huge Lake Superior (the largest freshwater lake in the world, sits between Canada and the USA). And I sing him Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and other cool old spiritual songs. Paul Robeson is amazing.

Hey I learned something really cool about some of those old African-American slave songs: some of them incorporated code words to help slaves escaping from the south to Canada or to the northern US, where there was no longer any slavery. The network of safe houses, places where they could get free food or lodging or a ride on to the next town, were all together called the "underground railroad". Swing Low, Sweet Chariot actually is talking about the underground railroad and escaping over the "river Jordan" (a metaphor for escaping across the line to freedom). I learned it at a small museum in southwestern Ontario (the province I live in in Canada) where there was for a very long time a large settlement of escaped slaves and their descendants who lived free as farmers. Most returned to the USA when slavery ended, but some remained in the area and their descendants are there still, in an otherwise very white area LOL.

Hmm... I like some Nirvana, Teen Spirit is cool, Lithium, several others. Tori Amos: Spark, Suede, Bells for Her, Waitress, Professional Widow, Raspberry Swirl, many many others. Fleetwood Mac: Landslide, that is a great old song, Stevie Nicks has a great voice for that kind of song. I'm a Cowboy Junkies junky Bjork: Violently Happy, many others. RHCP: Californication. Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Chile, 15 minutes of pure psychedelic high energy electric blues. Orishas is an excellent hiphop band, very political except they sing everything in Spanish, which I don't speak LOL. They're all Cuban emigres living in Spain and France. John Lee Hooker: Never Get Out of These Blues Alive, Hobo Blues, Boogie Chillen, Crawlin' King Snake. Linkin Park (ÅÔ§¡Ô¹¼Ñ¡ LOL): several. Lou Reed: Sweet Jane, Waiting for the Man (actually I guess those are Velvet Underground, not just Lou Reed). A lot of Moby and Saint Germain. Still love many Beatles songs I grew up with (although they were already history ... I'm not THAT old): Come Together, I Am The Walrus, most of the White Album.

I could go on and on and on.... My reasonably big CD collection and large online collection is very important to me... I love music

But I have to single out Sympathy for the Devil as the single greatest rock'n'roll song ever (or maybe Jumpin' Jack Flash). See the page on my website for why: http://www.geocities.com/carl_heinrich_kern/devilsympathy.html#whygreatest