Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.

Not long ago, I was riding in a car with some friends and their two daughters, a sixth-grader and a fourth-grader. The kids were in charge of the music, and I was quite pleased, but somewhat surprised, when they dialed up and rocked out to a song by Queen.

A couple of youngsters grooving to a song that is nearly fifty years old. That reminded me of one of my proudest parenting moments, the day when our then eight-year-old daughter heard a song by the Doors on the car radio and called out “That’s Jim Morrison.”

My friends’ daughters enjoying Queen got me thinking about my relationship with fifty-year-old music when I was their age. Their liking a Queen song in 2024 would be the equivalent of me, in 1968, getting excited by an Al Jolson tune from 1918. I can assure you that that never happened.

But here’s what did happen. When I was in my mid-twenties, my father gave me a cassette tape (remember them?) that had songs by big bands led by one of the Dorsey brothers, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and Benny Goodman. That was the music of my father’s youth. I was hooked, and I wore that tape out.

Several years later I found myself in a record store (remember them?) and I went looking for some more Benny Goodman music. What I nabbed was a CD (remember them?) of Benny Goodman’s famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Man, oh man.

I don’t know that the CD was life-changing – I didn’t quit my job, buy a clarinet, and start a swing band – but it did have a big impact on me. I remember one night when I had to stay late at work to finish a paper I was scheduled to deliver at an archaeology conference and I played that CD for hours on a boom box (remember them?) while I drafted my paper.

Eventually, I nearly memorized that CD; as the final notes of one song fade out, my mind subconsciously starts to play the first notes of the next one. I’ve often said that if I ever get my hands on a time machine, the first thing I’ll do is use it to go see Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert. I owe my father an everlasting debt of gratitude for introducing me to BG.

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The size of my debt grew exponentially several years later when a budget crisis gobbled up my state job as a historic preservationist and forced a career change. My new job milking cows required two forty-minute commutes to and from the farm each day.

My father, who knew that I enjoyed the jazz he had introduced me to, and knew that my car had a cassette player (remember them?), started going to his local library, checking out jazz records (remember them?), and taping the records for me. Every couple of weeks, another five or six cassettes of jazz would show up in my mailbox.

I’m sure that my father enjoyed listening to the music as he recorded it for me, but still, all those trips to the library were a labor of love, and in the process, my father introduced me to any number of great musicians, including the incomparable clarinetist Sidney Bechet.

Just as my father passed his music down to me, I’ve tried to do the same thing, somewhat more modestly, with our daughter. Years ago, she and I spent many hours together in the car driving to AAU basketball tournaments, and I took charge of the CD player. As a rule, I alternated between the seminal bluesman Robert Johnson and the 1938 Benny Goodman concert.

I’m sure I’ve listened to that CD more than a hundred times, and it just doesn’t get old. Benny Goodman is Jimi Hendrix, or perhaps Eric Clapton, on the clarinet, and Gene Krupa (who once taught KISS’s Peter Criss!) is Keith Moon. I always get a kick out of Lionel Hampton’s braying like a goat when he plays with BG in the trio and quartet.

Then there is the next-to-last song on the CD, a twelve-minute rendition of Louis Prima’s Sing, Sing, Sing which is, hands down, my favorite song ever. The band is in full throat, and the solos are brilliant.

BG ends his final solo with my favorite note in all of music; he holds a really high note and just when you think he’s out of breath, he jumps even higher to a sweet little tweet. The next solo, by Jess Stacey on the piano, is regarded by many as the best two minutes of his career. As Stacy’s last note fades away, Gene Krupa jumps in with thirty seconds of drum work that sounds like a machine gun. When Sing, Sing, Sing came on as we were heading to a basketball tournament, it was all I could do to keep my speed under eighty.

But more important than the sheer joy of listening to that milestone masterpiece of swing music was sharing it with our daughter, just as my father had shared his music with me.