Jaromir Nohavica is a prolific Czech folk songwriter who provided the background to all car trips in my youth, before we switched to Deep Purple. In elementary school, I knew dozens of his songs but was staunchly unaware of the hip music of my day (fourth grade: N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys - my ignorance made me firmly uncool).
The remarkable thing about Nohavica is the spectrum of the human experience that he adresses. On one side, twenty/thirty years ago he was a man who wrote and sang brilliant protest songs against the regime in a grey time when most people kept their heads down. (It's pretty easy to protest the government in a country that has at least a theoretical notion of free speech; it takes a lot more personal bravery when you know consider the consequences in a totalitarian state). He wasn't allowed to record, but his songs survived and circulated through illegal concerts and tapes and twenty years after they were written my friends and I were still singing them around fires. At the same time he wasn't strictly, or even primarily, a protest song writer - he has hundreds of songs, silly and serious, about history, love, the metro, soccer, having children, alcoholism, and sex and life and death. His songs aren't all great, but they all seem to at least authentically comment some facet of a human experience that is both very universal and very specific. He still sings through the decades - when I was thirteen I heard him sing a song called "The plane from Prague to Montreal" at the Czech embassy in Washington, D.C.
This song is called Muzeum and it's about a tram ride in the town of Opava and a museum and life and eternity.
