Flyover people
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The other day, a local radio station played a song that had been released in 1975 — America’s “Sister Golden Hair.”
I don’t hear that tune very often, but the melody brought the words right back to me, and I sang along in the car.
Music is a time machine. Take The Grass Roots, for example. On the rare occasion that I hear one of their songs, I feel like I’m 17 again. I rode to high school with a boy who played The Grass Roots’ Greatest Hits on his 8-track player. Over and over.
Songs tuck themselves away into our subconscious minds. If “Sooner or Later” started playing right now, the lyrics would come from my mouth without even thinking about them.
Years and songs, well, they tend to pile up on us.
As I contemplated that piling up of music and time, my mind slipped back to an afternoon in the ’60s in the basement of our home in Pawnee Rock.
My 8-year-old fingers plinked the right-hand melody of “Beautiful Dreamer” on our old upright piano.
As I played the Stephen Foster song, Mom cut out a dress, her scissors grinding on the wooden table with each cut through the blue polyester fabric.
Mom sang along with my erratic playing. She knew the words to “Beautiful Dreamer.”
Our multi-purpose room in the basement held the black-and-white television set, the piano, and Mom’s sewing machine. This was not a cozy room; it had lime-green cinderblock walls and a sheet of linoleum covering the cement floor.
My parents had paid $10 for that piano, buying it used from the Pawnee Rock Christian Church.
One afternoon I watched Dad lower the piano into our basement by tying a rope around it and around the tree just outside the back door. He eased it down the wooden stairway.
The piano wouldn’t stay in tune, but I’ve never been able to hold a tune either. (Perhaps my vocal talents were led astray by that off-key instrument.)
Some of the ivories were chipped or missing and the black paint had worn off the ends of the B-flat and F-sharp in the middle of the keyboard.
Nevertheless, I was delighted when the piano came into our basement and into our lives. I liked playing music, enjoyed turning notes into songs.
I took piano lessons and was learning how to coordinate left and right hands. But after playing those lesson-book songs with their big black notes and child-aimed lyrics repeatedly, I longed for real music.
The songs in our hymnals had too many notes on each hand for me to play, but I found some easier songs. Mom had a music book with a hundred or so popular, but not necessarily current, American tunes.
My fingers found their awkward way through the melody line of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Mom knew the words.
I played “Oh! Susanna,” “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Greensleeves.” Mom sang along.
When I played “Aura Lee,” Mom told me that Elvis Presley had used that same tune for his song “Love Me Tender.” So I played it again and she sang Elvis’ lyrics.
“How can you know the words to every song?” I asked, marveling at my mother’s obvious intelligence.
“Oh, you just hear the songs over and over and you learn the words,” she explained.
Now sure, Mom was old (33!), but still, I couldn’t imagine anyone having listened to hundreds of songs enough times to have memorized all the words to each of them.
The other day, as I sang along with the radio, old songs, new songs, one song after another, I thought about what Mom had said, and realized I had reached that place, the place where the words come easily.
Years and lyrics, they do pile up on you.
Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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Posted by bharz (anonymous) on January 21, 2009 at 8:28 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Great story, Cheryl. I'm reminded over and over that folks that are no longer able to communicate any other way can sing the words to a song they learned long ago, or at least hum along with the melody. Music is a beautiful gift.
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