Finding things online

I never get over the astonishment at Google's capacity to find things I've lost.

If there's anything I don't know or I've forgotten, I ask as if Google were an actual person, and almost always find an answer — with a few supplementary questions sometimes, just as would happen in a conversation with a friend.

So last night while everyone else in our house was out at choir, I was listening to music in my room. Very rarely am I the only one home, and I dislike earbuds/earphones, and I don't like to disturb the others by playing music when they're home, especially in the evening when we've all settled down in our cells, so to speak — Thursday, being choir, is a good night. No one home but us chickens.

I was wandering happily from song to song, when I took a fancy to listen to The Soul of Man Never Dies. I looked it up and there were several versions on Youtube, mostly men, mostly American bluegrass — which I like but wasn't what I had in mind. 

I used to have that song in my personal collection of music. Back in 2012 when I downsized everything radically, I gave away my collection of CDs, first having moved the songs onto my computer. 

Time went by. I changed my computer, I changed my phone, and somewhere along the line I inadvertently set up a second iTunes account, when my email address morphed from Googlemail to Gmail. At some point when I got a new phone and went to sync my phone and computer, I could only go with the one account for music (obviously, to be synced) and thus lost the music I'd not bought on iTunes in electronic form but only moved across from CDs. In among it was the version I used to have (and loved) of The Soul of Man Never Dies.

I searched, but couldn't find it. So I thought back to when I first heard it, which was when we were living in Aylesbury. Tony and I moved there when we got married in 2006, and only stayed three years before moving back to Hastings at the end of 2009. It took me a while to get to know Aylesbury, and find where concerts happened and where the Quaker Meeting House was and all that sort of thing. I used to go to the lunchtime concerts in the church; they were free, so I went most weeks, but only went once that I can remember to the paying sort that happened in a little theatre in the evening — to hear the woman who sang The Soul of Man Never Dies. 

I remembered the concert, and the woman. I remember she said she liked Berocca (vitamins) which I'd never heard of and checked out later and didn't especially enjoy. But I couldn't remember her name.

I reckoned this must have been around 2007, to allow enough time for me to have got to know the town, so I did a Google search for "English woman folk singer Aylesbury 2007", and there she was — Kate Rusby.

So I searched again for "Kate Rusby The Soul of Man Never Dies" — which is how I discovered the reason I couldn't find it before is Kate Rusby calls that song Canaan's Land.

And here, for your listening pleasure, it is.