Introduction
Imagine this:
You’re walking down a hallway, and you hear very loud heavy metal music pouring out of a door that’s just ahead of you. When you get to the door, you peer around the doorframe and see Johann Sebastian Bach duct-taped to a chair, planted in front of a pair of very large stereo speakers*, long white wig flapping in the breeze from the speakers as he’s sonically force-fed Metallica at 110 decibels at a range of three feet.
That vision was the initial stimulus for the stories in this volume. It dropped into my mind when I closed the covers of the hard copy edition of the first Grantville Gazette and idly wondered about what changes music might go through as a result of the Ring of Fire.
Three hundred and sixty-nine years of musical development and changes get dropped in the lap of the musicians of 1631 all at once: classical, gospel, jazz, blues, country, folk, rock, blue-grass, rap, hip-hop . . . You name it, it came back with Grantville.
These stories are about how a handful of those down-time musicians reacted.
Enjoy.
*JBL L200’s, to be specific.