Hello fellow members of the M.C.M.A.
I just joined and would like to thank whoever it is that is doing all the work that enables the association and this website to exist.
I have played the guitar and faked the piano, for a long time. I usually have the most to say musically, when I have been doing other things, and have not been able to play my guitar, just because I have been too busy. At the risk of sounding trite, I would say that I make my best most honest music, after doing some kind of manual labour.
I wait for a riff or rhythm to appear, and add words and emotion, a chord progression a chorus, and there it is. Ten minutes of something. If I had a multi-track recorder rented, I would make up some guitar bits or bass lines, but the real essence of what makes a simple song worthwhile, is the honesty. It has a short half life for the one who created it. Conversely, a simple song like Me and Bobby McGee, can fascinate and inspire others for years, even if they never hitch-hiked through the coal mines of Kentucky.
What I would like to do, is mine that vein of honesty, take it away from the prospector, who has done his work, and let some one else refine it. A pile of rock to a gold chain that anyone could wear.
Couldn't this technology, this digitisation of every thing, allow us to create a foundry of sound? A communal project whose direction could be suggested by everyone but decided by an anonymous majority. The result would be a song by the Manitoba Country Music Association.

The outline of a song is presented on line, in a format that would allow participants to add tracks.
Limiting the number of total tracks to the song would be to six or eight would be advisable. The suggested additional tracks could be voted on, or they could just keep appearing and changing, just like the cowboy, blues and folk ballads that became the songs we know after being passed through the hands and mouths of players and singers of wildly varying abilities, dropping or adding what ever suited them.
Nashville sounds like Nashville, Austin sounds like Austin. Is it possible in a time when most of our influences are more likely to be from ipods than from geography, weather, grandparents or tradition, to sound like Manitobans? The sod hut sound of the prairies!
Song mining might turn up a lot of rehashed interpretations of well know themes and scales, but it just might give people a chance to play something new. A song like a public park. Play it like you want to.