The term Yacht Rock is clever but not accurate. I started yacht racing at age seven and I can assure you that yacht people from the late 1970s to the early 1980s were not big fans of the music now called Yacht Rock. OTOH: I have had several people tell me with great authority that Jimmy Buffett is not Yacht Rock and Buffet was huge in yacht-racing circles. If you went to any Southern Ocean Racing Conference (SORC) or America's Cup race from those years you could count and hearing a lot of Jimmy Buffett and often on seeing the man himself.
In the past I've called this music Fern Bar music but that isn't really helpful either.
In any case, what really distinguished this music was its audience and that audience was female. It appealed to a subset of young women of the era. I don't know how you'd define them. They were feminist but individualistic rather than movement feminists. I remember them for being smooth, clean and wearing a lot of Indian cotton and leather sandals.
If I sound romantic about them it is because they were the girls I looked up to when I was between ten to thirteen and I saw these young-but-older-than-me women whose ages ran from about seventeen to twenty-nine. They were the subject of most of my daydreams and if you'd asked me at that age who my ideal love was, I'd have described a woman of that type. Luckily for me, these women had younger sisters who aspired to grow up to be like them and when they did ...
The music too seemed to grow out of 1960s hippie culture that had been clean-scrubbed. You might sneer at it but it was damn pleasant stuff to spent time with—just like those women.
It's hard to say exactly when the musical genre that needs a name really started but there was a moment when it was suddenly there. And the first song that had all the elements was this one:
The next song in the series is here.
In the past I've called this music Fern Bar music but that isn't really helpful either.
In any case, what really distinguished this music was its audience and that audience was female. It appealed to a subset of young women of the era. I don't know how you'd define them. They were feminist but individualistic rather than movement feminists. I remember them for being smooth, clean and wearing a lot of Indian cotton and leather sandals.
If I sound romantic about them it is because they were the girls I looked up to when I was between ten to thirteen and I saw these young-but-older-than-me women whose ages ran from about seventeen to twenty-nine. They were the subject of most of my daydreams and if you'd asked me at that age who my ideal love was, I'd have described a woman of that type. Luckily for me, these women had younger sisters who aspired to grow up to be like them and when they did ...
The music too seemed to grow out of 1960s hippie culture that had been clean-scrubbed. You might sneer at it but it was damn pleasant stuff to spent time with—just like those women.
It's hard to say exactly when the musical genre that needs a name really started but there was a moment when it was suddenly there. And the first song that had all the elements was this one:
The next song in the series is here.
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