What are the chances?

[AndyV]

To be honest with you. I didn't make it up. I heard it when I sat in on an old timey jam session, I don't remember where, but it was in the back of a bar.

One fellow said, when I opened my case, "good, another mandolinner joins us."

And it stuck with me.

I think of it like violinist, fiddler : mandolinist, mandolinner.

A mandolinner might spill beer on his instrument. A mandolinist is much more likely to spill wine.

Mandolinner, mandolouter... can't we all just get along?

[Tomando]

My maternal grandfather played the Uke-banjo - that's what got me started back in 1962,
Ivan

Love seeing vintage longhand penmanship! A dying art…😢

[OldSausage]

Love seeing vintage longhand penmanship! A dying art…��

Especially from a banjo picker.

[sblock]

I doubt that this statement is true. What data do you have to support this? I would think the advent of radio and then TV actually led to a significant increase in the number of young people wanting to play an instrument from the big band era forward. A Pete Seeger album led me to nag my mother constantly until she bought me a banjo. What an impact the Beatles had on the number of guitar players in the world is amazing. Bob Dylan led to my first guitar which I still have. I once worked at a small company, fourteen in all, and six of us played the guitar.

You have this backwards, I think. Or perhaps you're confusing a fraction with an absolute number?

Before the advent of radio, and of sound recording, and especially during in the Edwardian era, evening entertainment in Europe and North America mostly consisted of family and friends gathering around and making music, dancing, reciting literature, etc. Live performance was the only option! This state of affairs had held true for centuries, in fact. The overall FRACTION of the total population that played music (however badly) was significantly greater before the advent of radio and TV. In terms of absolute numbers, however, the number of instrument (guitar, mandolin, violin, piano, whatever) players was indeed smaller, because the populations of Europe and North America were significantly smaller at the time. Because of (nearly) exponential population growth, there are probably more guitarists alive today than the sum of all guitarists who ever lived in the past generations, all put together. But despite the Folk Era of the '50-60s and the Beatles Era after that, and then Dylan, the fraction of musicians among the general population is lower today than it was in former times, thanks to the advent of musical recording. Today, sadly, many schools are dropping music-education programs. Not only are there very few mandolin orchestras in existence today, there are very few orchestras, period!

The overall lack of electricity and general poverty in the Appalachian Mountains and other rural areas of 19th and early-20th century America is part of the reason why these places maintained such a strong tradition of musical performance, right up into the mid-20th century. They kept alive the folk traditions of Europe long after the urban areas dropped these (think Tin Pan Alley), and they tended to produce more live music, proportionally speaking, than city dwellers, who had easy access to on-stage and recorded performances.

[AndyV]

That depends how many generations separate your from that time. And you know for certain that none of your ancestors died in childhood. Having survived that, even in 1900, their chances of living to a good age were very decent. 24 only means your great grandparents and their parents were alive at that time. Why not? If you are from a younger generation than me, and/or your ancestors had children young, you could have more than 100 ancestors alive in 1900.

How can the numbers of generations separating me from 1900 have anything to do with how many of my ancestors were alive then?

1 person (If year of birth is 1900, they aren't playing mandolin yet, but that's beside the point.)
2 parent
4 grand parents
8 great grand parents (very unlikely in 1900, life expectancy 40-50 years)
16 great-great
32 great-great-great (With every generation giving birth at 15 years this group is 75 years old. They really beat the odds to see 1900. Life expectancy in 1800 to 1850 was mid to late 30's.)

[Roger Adams]

My dad played mandolin and guitar, and taught both my brother and I to play guitar. I remember him playing "Kentucky" on an old "tater bug" mandolin, that a fella traded to him for a tank of gasoline.

He told me once that while working for the Santa Fe RR during "the war", he had on old guitar that he used to bang away on and sing to pass the time between trains. He said he was singing and playing away one evening when a freight train made a stop for water, and the brakeman stuck his head in the door and listened for a couple a minutes. As dad finished his song, the brakeman asked him if he was married. He said, "No, why do you ask.?" The brakeman said, "well, that's good, because it could be a short haul to the divorce!"

[OldSausage]

How can the numbers of generations separating me from 1900 have anything to do with how many of my ancestors were alive then?

1 person (If year of birth is 1900, they aren't playing mandolin yet, but that's beside the point.)
2 parent
4 grand parents
8 great grand parents (very unlikely in 1900, life expectancy 40-50 years)
16 great-great
32 great-great-great (With every generation giving birth at 15 years this group is 75 years old. They really beat the odds to see 1900. Life expectancy in 1800 to 1850 was mid to late 30's.)

It depends how old you are, obviously. But it's all about the number of generations - and about how short those generations are.

Let's be more generous and say one generation is 20 years:
You're 20. You were born in 1998.
Your mother was born in 1978. 2 parents
Your grandma in 1958: 4 grandparents
Your great grandma in 1938. 8 great grandparents
Your great great grandma in 1918 - 16 of those
Your great great great grandma in 1898 - 32 of those
Your great great great great grandma, born in 1878 is only 22 years old - 64 of those
Then most likely some of your 128 great great great great great grandparents are alive too at a mere 42 years. So, well over 100 ancestors, alive in 1900.

It's also important to remember that although generic life expectancy was lower in the past, the figures are heavily skewed because of the extremely high rates of childhood mortality, and if you made it to adulthood your chances of reaching 60 or even 70 and beyond were really not so shabby.

[mugbucket]

My dad left me 8-track cassettes. So, he played those and the radio.

Everyone else was preoccupied with coal mining, farming and not starving. The USAF was my ticket out of that cycle, and I've been through phases of bass/acoustic guitars before discovering the mandolin.

[AndyV]

I had considered the impact of childhood mortality (obviously this greatly lessens the number of possible progenitors) on average life expectancy, but then wondered how much that was balanced by adult deaths in warfare. None of this skews the average life expectancy figures. They are what they are.

Your numbers do make sense, and work especially well if I were now 20. Many other thing would work much better if I was that young.
This leaves me wondering what the average age of forum members is. I see a lot of people mention what they were doing in the 70's and early 80's which gives the impression they are boomers.

[AndyV]

Love seeing vintage longhand penmanship! A dying art…��

Appears to be fountain pen too, right?

[OldSausage]

I had considered the impact of childhood mortality (obviously this greatly lessens the number of possible progenitors) on average life expectancy, but then wondered how much that was balanced by adult deaths in warfare. None of this skews the average life expectancy figures. They are what they are.

In the latter part of the 19th century, roughly 40% of the world's children died before age 5. (https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality), whereas deaths from warfare were somewhere between 0.005% and 0.02%, and so could not have balanced infant mortality (https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace).

My point is simply that since none of our ancestors can have died in childhood, we can't assess their life expectancy by looking at an average for all people including children, we have to look instead at life expectancy for people of child-bearing age and above (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy).

Your numbers do make sense, and work especially well if I were now 20. Many other thing would work much better if I was that young.
This leaves me wondering what the average age of forum members is. I see a lot of people mention what they were doing in the 70's and early 80's which gives the impression they are boomers.

From my completely subjective observations I would estimate the average age is 64.