“Hey, Big Bopper just died!” my sister, Mary Sue cried as she burst into our bedroom that February morning. We younger kids were well aware of Big Bopper and his Chantilly Lace song and sang it routinely while running about the house. My sister had introduced us to many ’50’s musicians. My earliest favorite was the wonderful wonderful voice of Johnny Mathis – I stared at his album cover that confirmed he was an angel. Mary also danced at the…
My mother had a beautiful singing voice, and she had passion. Her songs expressed a depth emotion that could always silence her gaggle of children. An image I can still conjure is watching her head lifted, her eyes fixed on the sky, the wind blowing through her hair as she burst into “Oh, Danny Boy”. Her Irish Catholic heritage demanded a Catholic education for us kids. Many times my sisters and I sang with the school choir in the balcony…
You reminded me of those roller skating rinks on Sundays. All of my cousins and I would load up from all these different towns and go there and they’d be playing music and we’d roller skate around the circle. And all those big dance halls. Those big barns where everyone went and danced every Saturday. It was so fun. That was Cedar Rapids. Then there were barns that had huge dance floors where people would go on Saturdays and dance….
The other thing I’ve learned, or that surprised me, is that I’ve enjoyed my last few years more than any other years in my life. And that I’m actually in love—when I got married when I was younger, we weren’t really in love. We liked each other a lot, and we wanted to move out to California together, and she wanted to get away from her parents and we ended up being married. We had children, but we still weren’t…
For me, I think it’s absolutely wonderful that I’ve let go of trying to be who other people think I should be and learned I can do incredible things that I never dreamed I could do. I dance three days a week, I do yoga, I do tai chi, and sing in a couple choirs. People always said I was going to be an artist, you know, that’s what I should be, that’s what I was good at. I spent…
Approach each day prepared to experience an orchestra of sound, a painting of colors, and a bank of emotions. All contribute to the beauty and the mistakes of the human experience. Each day offers us a chance to mine the treasures of this earth, to sink into the dark caves of the soul, and the time to wash off the soot and to create a better day. The rocks of today can then become the gold nuggets of tomorrow.
Every era of war brings about peace songs. My favorite was “One Tin Soldier” and “Last Night I had the Strangest Dream”. Other songs came about like “Ohio” as some students were killed while protesting the war. When our world is rocked by fear we seek stability by searching for harmony.
As the years move along, the memory bank is amazing to me. You can remember things that happened 60 years ago, and they seem just as clear. Old friends, especially close friends, who were part of your life at a certain age—they remain in your mind. Many years later, you encounter them again, and it’s a curious rush of many feelings—recollection of the way we were. Looking at the lines on her face—I’m sure she took note of the lines…
I celebrated my 75th birthday at Uptown Bill’s by playing music for two hours with friends. I had been playing a lot of blues and ragtime with one guy, and he was ill that night and couldn’t make it, so he sent his only begotten son, who had graduated from the conservatory at UM Kansas City. A couple weeks later he called me up and said, “Can I play music with you?” I said, you can play music with your…
When I was a teenager we weren’t allowed to listen to “our” music unless it was back in the bedroom on my sister’s old transistor, because my parents wanted FM, not AM, where the teenager music was. AM was the teenager music, like the Beatles and rock-n-roll. FM was what the parents listened to, stuff from the 40s and musicals and jazz and elevator music. My mother learned to like “One Toke Over the Line”—she didn’t know what it was…