If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

– Orson Welles.

This morning I was listening to another episode of the History of the English Language podcast. Some of this history of language made me think of the above quote by Orson Welles. It can be applied in many different ways.

If you take Flamenco at face value it is a Spanish folk music. Go back a few years, however, and you will discover multiple influences from around the world. There is the relatively recent influence of Africa, via the Caribbean, of rhythms that became Rumba and Tango. There is the influence of Northern India via the Roma who created Flamenco. But you can go farther back still and hear that much of Flamenco is related to or borrowed from Arabic music. Any Arab drummer would be completely comfortable playing 12/8 rhythms such as Bulería or Soleá.

Something similar can be found in the history of most countries. In England, before the Anglo Saxon immigrants arrived, there were the Celts. In the USA before the arrival of European immigrants, there were native peoples. And if you go even further back those peoples were immigrants who came from the North. Germany, which only became a nation state in 1875, was at one point a bunch of Germanic tribes that went south from Scandinavia and what is now northern Germany.

One might say, how you frame your political agenda depends, of course, on where you stop your history. Don’t stop, I say, always keep going. We are all just visitors anyway.