Friday Five: Pop Music

Mary Beth at RevGalBlogPals says:

“Happy Friday to you all!
The sad news of Michael Jackson's untimely death has me thinking about music and its effects on us - individually, as cultures, as generations. Let's think about the soundtracks of our lives...”
1) What sort of music did you listen to as a child - this would likely have been determined or influenced by your parents? Or perhaps your family wasn't musical...was the news the background? the radio? Singing around the piano?

We didn’t have a record player until I was about 11 years old, so up till then it was radio. From age 7 to 9 it was the Armed Forces Network, which had a lot of variety – everything from country and western to rock and roll to folk music, and a song called “I Just Want to Be Elvis Presley’s Sergeant.” When I was 10 I got my own clock radio and listened to WINS and another station from New York; the former was top 40 and the latter included Oscar Brand’s folk show, Martin Block’s Make-Believe Ballroom and even radio serials. I still like the folk and Great American Songbook genres best of all.

2) Going ahead to teenage years, is there a song that says "high school" (or whatever it might've been called where you lived") to you?

It’s hard to pick just one song for all of high school – maybe because I went to three of them? – but for the summer between high school and college there are three songs that take me right back whenever I hear them: The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha,

Red Rubber Ball by The Cyrkle

,

and Summer in the City by the Lovin’ Spoonful.

3) What is your favorite music for a lift on a down day? (hint: go to www.pandora.com and type in a performer/composer...see what you come up with!)

I typed in Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, and so far, 6 songs in, it’s the best luck I’ve ever had with Pandora. I called the station “Auntie Knickers’ Cheery Songs Radio.” However I can’t figure out how to share it other than by emailing everybody, which is just not on. I know there’s a way to put a link on Facebook but I don’t know how to do it. Anyway, there’s Kweskin, Tom Rush, Steve Goodman, Dave Van Ronk, and some other jug band, Dock Boggs – he’s singing “Hard Times in the Wise County Jail” but somehow it’s cheery.

Of course, if I’m really miserable, I play Christmas music out of season, but there are rules about that, so it doesn’t happen often.

4) Who is your favorite performer of all time?

Right this minute I’ll go with Emmylou Harris. But it could change tomorrow or even this afternoon. Can you guess I have eclectic tastes?
5) What is your favorite style of music for worship?

I can’t be doing with repetitious praise music. Other than that I like a lot of variety – from plainsong to Fanny Crosby, Bach to bluegrass. I’m pretty easy to please. One other thing I don’t like is lyrics that clunk – usually in modern hymns that sound more like a General Synod resolution than poetry in praise of God. I’m not mentioning any names.

Music for My Movie Meme

Here's a fun exercise that Sisterfilms put on her blog FilmAching. Let's see how it goes. Like SF, I am going to keep the Christmas music out of it, since I have so much that this would become either a Christmas movie or something too, too ironic for words.

So, here's how it works:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc). 

2. Put it on shuffle.

3. Press play.

4. For every question, type the song that's playing.

5. When you go to a new question, press the next button.

6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool...

Opening Credits:

Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley by Lonnie Donegan

Waking Up:

Missing by The Roches

First Day of School:

Sufferin' by Gordon Bok

Falling in Love:

Tuba mirum from Mozart Requiem in D Minor, Berlin Philharmonic, von Karajan, soloists

Fight Song:

Paint me, Redoute by June Tabor

Breaking Up:

Waltz Down the Aisle from Anything Goes

Prom:

Mending Wall by Robert Frost, read by the poet

Life's Just OK:

The Lady is a Tramp by Frank Sinatra

Mental Breakdown:

I'll Take My Sorrow Straight by Iris DeMent

Driving:

I'm Walking Behind You by Frank Sinatra [this is really funny since I don't drive!]

Flashback:

Safe at Anchor by Kate Wolf

Getting Back Together:

The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze from The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan (D'Oyly Carte Opera Co.)

Birth of Child:

The Homestead on the Farm by The Carter Family

Wedding:

Bill Morgan and His Gal by Priscilla Herdman, Anne Hills and Cindy Mangsen 

Final Battle:

World in Union by the South Wales Burma Star Male Voice Choir

Death Scene:

Walk Down by the Water by Bill Staines

Funeral Song:

The Me I Used to Be by the Austin Lounge Lizards

End Credits:

The Twa Sisters by Dorothy Fourbister, collected for The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (i.e. the Child Ballads)

Well, what this proves is that I have a fairly eclectic music collection. I have to say this probably doesn't work as well with Windows Media Player as it would if I had an iPod. I ended up just pressing the "next" button a random number of times without looking. Let me know in comments if you play and where.

Thoughts on a set of bookends

At the Halls of Holly Fair at church, we had long tables to put the books on, and no bookends. Well, we had one pair. One of the people working on the Attic Treasures area brought these down because they were broken and therefore unsalable. One of the sombreros was held on with tape, and there were a couple of chips as well. After the sale I got to take them home, and a little epoxy glue has reaffixed the sombrero. They will help a little on my basement bookshelves -- I only need about 29 more pairs now.

I wondered if it was just the brokenness that caused these to be deaccessioned by their previous owner. The image of the lazy Mexican man sleeping under his sombrero was quite a common one in the 1950s, perhaps even more than the little black jockey some people had in their front yards. I'm sure you can find these images even now in vintage shops, arrayed on tablecloths and dishtowels as well as sculpted into bookends. And, of course, there was this song, made famous by a blonde girl from North Dakota:


I can't imagine someone recording a song like this today and having it become a nationwide hit (then again, with the fragmentation of musical tastes and genres, has there been a nationwide hit since The Macarena?)
Even a lot of the comments on YouTube referenced the racist attitudes in the song, liking it in spite of themselves and also because Peggy Lee sang it. I'm not sure if non-Hispanic people in the 50s really bought this stereotype. Many were exposed to Mexican migrant workers, certainly some of the hardest-working people you could find. Not only in the borderlands, but even in St. Paul, Minnesota, there were Mexican-American communities as industrious as the Scandinavians and Irish who were their neighbors. And yet -- are old images and attitudes like those evoked by the bookends and the song, part of the reason there is so much resentment against illegal aliens (who are thought of as primarily Hispanic) in some communities? I read about two complaints: one is that illegals take jobs away from Americans, but the other is that they will use services that Americans pay taxes for (i.e., they are lazy). It's a puzzlement (to quote another 50s song). A lot of thoughts for one pair of bookends.

Down Memory Lane

OK, couldn't resist. Here are some of the songs I associate with the summer of '66. Some may have come out earlier, but they were still showing up on car radios and clock radios that summer.
I'm not sure we heard too much more from The Cyrkle, although "Turn-Down Day" is also one I remember. Maybe their hair was just too short. A lot of people have covered this song, but this is the one that was playing back then:


In those days, one actually heard songs from Broadway musicals on Top 40 radio. Here's the one we were hearing that summer, although I couldn't find the late Robert Goulet's version; we'll have to "make do" with Bryn Terfel.


That summer was my first experience as a regular city bus rider, certainly not my last. Alas, when it rained I didn't meet a nice young man, I had to make do with my host's Harvard golf umbrella (nice and big though!) Anyway, that's probably why this song stuck with me. The video is newer but the audio is the classic version.


And here's one that I remember more clearly from the last couple of months of high school, but which was probably still getting airtime come summer. Yes, this kind of music got played then too.


Anybody else from my misspent youth want to chime in with some other suggestions?

"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is"

Toby LeBoutillier is a guy who's worked at Maine Public Radio pretty much since it began. Now, he hosts a Friday afternoon radio show on which he plays hits of the corresponding weeks over the past 10 decades. Today, the first one was from 1907, "Red Wing." Immediately I was about 4 years old with tears streaming down my cheeks as my mother sang me the song, which I found ineffably sad. (Of course, I was a most sentimental child, and even cried at "Oh, Susannah.") My mother was born some years after 1907 and probably learned the song from her parents.
Years later, during the Folk Revival of the 1960s, I learned another song to the same tune, which also came into my head and brought with it thoughts of another relative. Woody Guthrie used the tune for "Union Maid." My daughter-in-law, The Collector of Biomorphic Dishes, is on strike at the University of Minnesota right now with her fellow AFSCME members. Stick to the union and stick it to the bosses, J!
As the program moves on, Toby plays "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi." That makes me think of Onkel Hankie Pants' cousin, The Horsewoman (see June 18 post). Onkel H remonstrated with me at the time, apparently he didn't think that a suitable appellation for his lovely cousin. I told him she was lucky I didn't call her The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, because she was, when she was at the above-mentioned U. I rather think she might prefer The Horsewoman. Those Clydesdales are pretty reliable.
The rest of today's selections were not as evocative, though I've always liked the tune of "Darktown Strutters' Ball" ; however, I've mentally rewritten one line as
"I'm gonna dance all over your shoes
When the band plays the Jelly Roll Blues"
because that's the way I dance!
By the way, the quotation in the title of the post is, of course, by Noel Coward, in his play Private Lives. I make no value judgment on the music, but Bach it ain't. Now I'm off to the first of two nights of Rodgers and Hammerstein.