As I write my final story for the Seattle P-I, the newspaper is preparing to go to press for the last time — after 146 years of publication.

Trust me, there wasn’t a pop music critic in those early years, and my memory of that era is pretty fuzzy.

But Stephen Foster, the so-called father of American music (1826-1864), was writing tunes like “Oh! Susanna,” “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” He was a superstar in his day. Think of what he started with a few notes on paper.

Notes on paper have filled hundreds of reporter notebooks in my career at the P-I. Even in this era of laptops and BlackBerrys, I still use notebooks to chronicle the antics of musicians on stage. Stacks of them are filled with scrawled words that only I can read.

My time on the music beat — from 1983 to the present — has been a wild ride, with hundreds of interviews with some pretty famous people and hundreds of concert reviews.

It has been an honor to write about music in a city that has helped launch the careers of Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, The Sonics, Ventures, Wailers, Heart, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Death Cab for Cutie, among many others.

People often ask me to name a favorite concert, but there have been so many, from big arena shows to little piano-bar performances. I couldn’t pick just one.

Among my most recent favorites was a Patsy Cline tribute concert March 5 at the Columbia City Theater featuring local singers Rachael Flotard, Kim Virant, Star Anna, Kristen Ward and Victoria Wimer Contreras. Collectively, they captured the spirit of Cline and her music in a stirring, heartfelt concert.

But I’d be remiss not to mention the historic “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., during the week of Barack Obama’s inauguration. Standing among millions of other Americans on that chilly January day to watch a string of performers and tributes was among the most moving concert experiences I have ever had.

My first concert review for the P-I actually came in October 1979, when I saw Lenny and Squiggy of “Happy Days” at a Burien nightclub. It was a silly show, but readers enjoyed my goofy little review, which led to a series of assignments before I was officially hired as a reporter and critic in 1983.

It marked a real commitment by the P-I to popular music coverage, which had been a part-time beat for many years in the very capable hands of my predecessor, the late George Arthur.

In the ’80s, the beat focused primarily on national touring acts. But a new Seattle scene was gaining momentum in local garages and grungy nightclubs.

It finally exploded in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when grunge became the sound heard around the world. Local music fans, myself included, were amazed when Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album knocked Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 album chart.

Then the bottom fell out when Kurt Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in April 1994. It was an incredibly depressing milestone after several years of euphoria. A crew of P-I reporters, myself included, covered developments over the course of a week. Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow, shell-shocked by his death, told me: “I’m tough and I can take anything. But I can’t take this.”

I’ve had many adventures in the past two decades at the P-I. In the late ’80s, I was invited to a birthday party for Pia Zadora at the late mobster Sam Giancana’s heavily guarded estate in Las Vegas. Party guests included Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, and Jermaine Jackson.

A trip to Arizona and New Mexico to cover the Southwest leg of Pearl Jam’s 1993 tour resulted in an unexpected visit to Eddie Vedder’s Albuquerque hotel room, where Vedder worked on a personal video and talked about the group’s rapid rise to fame while I sipped red wine.

I’m gratified the Northwest is still producing great musicians, among them Blue Scholars, Fleet Foxes, Brandi Carlile and the Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band. There are many other performers to be discovered in the future.

Though the printed Seattle P-I that hits your doorstep each morning will be gone, a streamlined Web-only daily will continue at seattlepi.com. I hope the new Web site continues to cover the Northwest’s vibrant music scene and not concede that coverage to other media.

Meanwhile, I will launch my own Web site in the coming week. Keep an eye out for genestout.com.