Playing For Change: Music On The Streets
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LFA | 2025-09-05 | #music #society
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Sometimes you discover a wonderful thing just by accident. I don't
know if it ever happened to you that you have a song in your head and
you can't stop hearing it and wanting to hear it over and over again.
Sometimes this happens to me and it turns out that today the song was
(Sittin 'On) The Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding.

I obviously have the song so I started to playing it on my computer
in repeat mode. Suddenly I wanted to share it with my people on
Mastodon so I went to Invidious.io and I started looking for it. A
video cover of a man sitting on the street with a guitar caught my
attention.

Street musicians always interest me because many of them are great
musicians with a lot of talent and they play on the streets precisely
because they love music and share their art in exchange for what we
want to give them, if we want to give them something. So I clicked
the link and surprise! I've discovered a very interesting musical
project: Playing for Change[1].

Playing For Change is a project that was born in 2002 and its current
main goal is funding and producing  videos of musicians performing in
their natural environments and combine their talents and cultural
power.

The main voice in the video that captivated me is Roger Ridley and on
the project's website they tell that when one of the project's
founders, Mark Johnson, asked him how it was possible that someone
with a voice like his was playing on the street, he replied: "Man I'm
in the joy business, I come out to be with the people.". Those words
summarize perfectly what I've seen in the video.

Without further delay I share the link to the video. I really hope you
will enjoy it as much as I did it:

- Invidious: https://invidious.f5.si/watch?v=Es3Vsfzdr14
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es3Vsfzdr14

And yes, as some of you'll have already guessed, right now I'm
playing this version of the song over and over again and I keep
listening to it as I write these lines. This kind of thing makes me
to don't loose faith and hope in the human race.

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[1] https://playingforchange.com/
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(c) 2025 Lucio F. Albenga - All rights reserved