“If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.”
M Barrie quote from Peter Pan
They’d tricked four- year- old me into thinking that a tonsillectomy would be a short adventure followed by ice cream.
No one mentioned how frustrated I’d be when I couldn’t count to ten as the black mask fit over my nose, or how befuddled afterwards, or that I’d throw up the ice cream. It was not fair and my throat hurt.
I returned to myself only when Daddy slid a 78, maybe Brahms, onto the Stromberg Carlson turntable. And I could cuddle down, comforted and at home, into the blue patterned davenport. A decade and a new sofa later, Mother had the wisdom to tuck me up in a quilt when I had cramps, and put Rachmaninoff to spinning. Music as medicine.
And breath and flight and joy. I can’t remember life without music. I can’t remember life without music that came, unbidden, to serve a particular moment, a new home, a new time, a changing purpose, a desperate need, an unlikely love.
Before I was allowed to manage the record player myself, Mother put on Peter and the Wolf or The Carnival of the Animals and encouraged me to sit on the floor next to the square cloth speaker. Asked me to listen for Grandfather, the wolf, kangaroos, the swan. She’d swoop me over to the Grand Canyon and let me hear mules clip-clopping down Bright Angel Trail. Or dare me to face the trolls in the Hall of the Mountain King. Ferde Grofe’ and Edvard Grieg. Story music for a child’s imagination.
In the house on Ash Street, the second-hand Mason and Hamblin piano anchored the east wall of our living room—counterpoint to the fireplace and mirrored, knotty-pine west wall. As beautiful a piece of furniture as any we owned. And for as long as I remember, awash in lesson books: John Thompson, Michael Aaron, Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, the Golden Book and the Gray Book of Favorite Songs. The big, heavy black volume of popular pieces from the 20s and 30s that Mother had had bound for herself. And always several hymnals.
I followed my sister’s piano lesson patterns, learning first from Mother and “Teaching Little Fingers to Play.” Graduating to the simplest songs written for beginners. Trying out sharps and flats. Safely beyond boring kiddy songs, Mother turned us over to Mrs. Johnson for weekly lessons and twice yearly recitals. Widowed, well-dressed she sat to my left, where I became familiar with the tufts of white hair in her ears, her deeply wrinkled neck, and dangly earrings that stretched her soft lobes. Ice cream bars provided after each recital didn’t erase my debilitating anxiety this time either.
When it became apparent that lessons would not produce concert pianists, Mother required us to stick with Mrs. Johnson until we were in high school. Then allowed us to decide for ourselves. Beethoven’s simplified Fur Elise was the culmination of my classical talent at the keyboard as a high school sophomore. Way more than practicing assignments, I loved being able to play when no one else was home, accompanying my off-key self. Anything sentimental or strident, music that had been popular in my parents’ youth: Love’s Old Sweet Song, Loch Lomond, Annie Laurie, Old Folks at Home, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Beautiful Dreamer. And hymns, preferably with flats rather than sharps.
Notwithstanding my musical limitations, church and classical music carried me from birth through college. Church services twice a Sunday, stitched together with hymns, accompanied by a massive pipe organ and a well-trained choir. A congregation perfectly able to sing four-part harmony unaccompanied at the park after a picnic pot-luck. College and high school orchestras, choirs, string quartets, ensembles, concerts. Operettas and musicals—the stuff of my romantic fantasies. The four of us singing rounds in the second-hand blue Chrysler coming back from Kansas City. Daddy putting Sheep May Safely Graze on the record player Sunday mornings. Two years in the Messiah chorus (where chorus colleagues kept me on key). Christmas carols in our darkened living room, Sonja and I taking turns at the piano.
I had preferences: Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, John Philip Sousa. And dislikes: anything classical with tinkly little runs, minuets, or endless variations. I tolerated Perry Como and Lawrence Welk. But didn’t get to hear Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ricky Nelson, Chubby Checker—the music of a darkened and dangerous Teen Town. Or the Sixties’ folk singers who headlined protests and movements.
Still, I carry with me growing up moments preserved in music: my Grandmother Sherfy standing as straight as she could in the sanctuary, singing from memory: “Silently Now I wait for thee, ready my God thy will to see, open my eyes, illumine me, spirit divine.” Clearing off the Stromberg-Carlson every Saturday morning—wiping away dust patterned by a doily and feeling the musical vibrations that the phonograph waited to produce. Kansas sun setting over wheat fields as the last a cappella harmonized note of Day is Dying in the West faded.
By 1968, launched in graduate school in Eugene, I had my own clock radio and began to wake up to the music of my generation. At least the soft rock side of it. Monday, Monday; Long and Winding Road; Leavin’ on a Jet Plane; Acquarius/Let the Sunshine In; Ticket to Ride. The Mamas and Papas, John Denver, the Carpenters brought me from the confines of church and classical pieces into the wider issues of those years and my own belated growing up. Tender, tentative, adventurous times. I’d not have gone to Woodstock even if I’d been closer. I ate exactly one magic brownie. But I’d only just begun and I wanted to live on Proud Mary’s river.
In 1971, my first permanent job at Gettysburg afforded me a lovely gabled apartment at the edge of the National Cemetery. I owned a bed, a bistro table, a Victorian love seat and chair, and a stereo. For which I had a starter collection of my own records. Movie music, Exodus and Carousel. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, with its Take Five that I soon played down to scratches. My cousin Gary and Benny Watson had introduced me to jazz and the understanding that music grew more powerful when musicians played off each other’s strengths and moods. Porgy and Bess; Peter, Paul, and Mary. Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, a gift from my high school debate coach, with its lavish musical soundtrack. Yes, and my own Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. Whose Piano Concerto Number One I played the first morning I woke up to the echoing and enchanted spaces of my own home.
But Gettysburg brought with it a daily diet of Civil War music. There as we started the introductory film for visitors. There as the Cyclorama light and sound portrayal of the third day’s battle began and ended. There in campfire programs and the tinny repetitiveness of battlefield interpretive speakers. Simple tunes. Old tunes. Reedy, thin, tied together with fife and drums. The bugle calls that regiments understood as commands, as encouragement. The brass flourishes that—with all the fruitless pomp of Napoleonic drama—sent thousands of men to their deaths. Campfire tunes, too, banjo accompanied, melancholy, lonesome. By decree and custom, music served as a Civil War battlefield weapon and so a part of our research and interpretive work. Osmosis did the rest. When Johnny Comes Marching Home; The Vacant Chair; Maryland, My Maryland; Just Before the Battle, Mother; Battle Cry of Freedom; Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground run now in my blood.
A chance meeting shifted my work from Gettysburg to a historian’s position in Washington D. C., the National Park Service headquarters. I transferred with a newly-purchased, thousand-pound historic upright piano that the movers somehow maneuvered into my tiny World War II vintage apartment. A year later I’d begun an unusual love affair (see my essay “Reckless.”). And the man to whom I devoted weekends loved opera, washed-in-the-blood gospel hymns, post-Civil War army tunes, especially Garry Owen of 7th Cavalry fame, military tattoos, Scottish and British ceremonial music. That old upright and the stereo came in handy. As did my early love for colorful, strident, chord-rich dramatic music. We formed our own Saturday night duo and hosted exuberant Christmas sing-alongs for friends. I purchased a pawnshop trumpet for Bob and acquired early 1900s hymnals. Neighbors were remarkably tolerant of our full-bore renditions of Sound the Battle Cry and Bringing in the Sheaves.
There were operas too stern to get my heart around, but Bob loved the flowery ones: La Boheme, Tosca, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, Carmen, and best of show from my perspective, Faust. Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, Gounod. Even some Gilbert and Sullivan. Maybe the soaps of the opera world and I didn’t care. The music soared and raged and laughed. And came to us in many places. Beyond the capabilities of our own hi-fi’s, Washington gave us Wolf Trap and the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress auditorium, Ford’s Theater, and even an easy train ride to New York City.
Right along with the Twilight Tattoo at the Marine Barracks, concerts in Arlington Cemetery, and military bands playing all across the Mall. The music of our republic before it acquired toxic or twisted sentimental undercurrents. We kept a picnic basket ready to transport hors d’oeuvres and cocktails.
In 1980, when I left Washington, alone, I paid Mayflower an outrageous sum to ship that thousand-pound piano to Montana and into a badly built condo. I was shy about turning the stereo or the piano loose with military marches or boisterous hymns given my close neighbors. But glad to christen this utterly whimsical and immense change in life with old favorite music.
Two years out, Dave Walter became a constant in my life and enough at home in that funky condo to be found, in the dark–lighted cigarette and Michelob in hand– playing Joan Baez’ Forever Young and Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. Wrestling with where his life had taken him, where he wanted it to go and whether he could make it there. It was a privilege to slide down on the floor with Dave and share the questions and the music.
Another year out and Dave’s daughters, Emily and Amanda, were an integral part of our lives. We acquired all the Frances books as bedtime stories and ultimately a fistful of Rosenschontz tapes. A silly Canadian folk duo who sang childhood morals to spritely 1970s rock music. We knew every song by heart. And come naptime up at the Walter cabins, I’m afraid I inflicted Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond on the girls as well.
By then, for reasons that now no longer look like reasons at all, we’d begun attending an offshoot Episcopalian congregation. So small that Dave joined the vestry and I became the pianist. I was back with my hymnal collection, able to choose songs I liked and could play, rather than being constrained by a minister’s themes.
The musical miracle of those years occurred in the fall of 1986 after our May marriage and house warming. Dave, who’d followed Ian and Sylvia as folksingers in the 1960s, learned that a cowboy-regenerated Ian Tyson was coming to sing in Helena’s local 4-H hall. We went. And never looked back—never missed another concert within driving distance. Never hesitated to buy the next tape and the next tape. Although reluctant to join our Tyson fan club at a concert, Em and Amanda learned Ian’s full repertoire as well. And in all the enormity and bustle of the next twenty years, Tyson remained a constant—rarely replaced by any other music in the miles between Helena and Polebridge. Always Navajo Rug. Always The Gift.
I enjoyed one more brief return to hymns. When Dave began researching the Civilian Public Service men who maintained Glacier during World War II, we were invited to join the reunions of the 80-year-olds. Pacifists–Mennonites and Brethren– who had been given the choice of alternative service to the nation in lieu of fighting. After a day conducting oral history interviews, we shyly joined the full group for dinner and vespers and were immersed again in sweet, four-part a cappella harmonies. Music that carried their commitments.
Dave died in July 2006. The following January, still defenseless in grief, I asked our best friends Ron and Claire if they would go with me to an Ian Tyson concert. As they had done all year, they scooped me up and shepherded me to a simple hall and let me cry my way through the evening. But Ron and Claire, that weekend and others, with utter compassion and wisdom, added to my musical portfolio. I fell hard for Leonard Cohen and Corb Lund and Rodney Crowell, Emmy Lou Harris, Greg Brown, Lyle Lovett.
And that meant that when an enterprising young woman launched the Red Ants Pants Music Festival every summer on a ranch 70 miles east, I was there. Dust and sun and gopher holes. The Festival further expanded my late-in-life musical loves: James McMurtry, Guy Clark, The Red Molly, Parsonsfield, Darrell Scott, The Trishas, Wailin’ Jennys.
The long winter evenings of widowhood give me time and impetus to roam through YouTube, as well. Follow three handsome Italian boys, Il Volvo, for awhile, or return to their mentors, The Three Tenors. To go back and find Ian and Sylvia in the 60s or Rodney Crowell in the 90s. Study Corb Lund’s lyrics for the history they capture.
Bless Facebook, too, for all the music and opportunities I’ve met there. Without it, I would never have seen an invitation to join Mary Karr and Rodney Crowell on the Greek Island of Patmos for a memoir writing salon. Not only did I get to hear Rodney sing Song for Life for me, half the participants were themselves musicians—artists of both words and melodies. They are all now intertwined in my life.
When Amanda’s middle school orchestra class gave its first public performance, I arrived home from work, already in professional clothes and, to her astonishment and protests, added jewelry and high heels. It was a concert after all. In those faraway McPherson years, we dressed in our best for such events. And the wealthy ladies in town exhumed their fox fur wraps from mothballs to throw over their shoulders. Above all else, we were respectful—no gum, no whispering, no wriggling. In 1992, however, Amanda was right. Her “concert” was in the gymnasium; most parents noisily departed after their child performed; and no other mother tried to navigate the bleachers in heels.
Now, give me jeans and mountains and an endless sky– and music for which I cannot sit still. Let me dance, if only in my chair, to Rodney’s Earthbound and Still Learning How to Fly on The Long Journey Home.
For me, every genre of music I’ve loved offers gossamer moments—moments where the universe in all its complexity takes a breath and unfolds: the last notes of Nessum Dorma; Leonard Cohen’s, Take This Waltz, as the trumpet rises and brings the dance to a close; the ripe silence before the final “Amen” in the Messiah’s Amen Chorus; the whispered wisdom of Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight “. . . that ol’ highway goes on forever.”; and The Lost Chord’s profound yearning. ©
