Songs my parents sang when I was a child and the first music I recall hearing / The power of music in the lives of children

My mother sang, "Go to sleepy, little baby ..."  Her mother must have sung that song to her.  I don't remember my mother singing anything except that song.

My father sang only the choruses to songs he would have heard as a child and teenager, "Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes ..." and "Come Josephine in my flying machine and away we'll go, away we'll go ..."  Both of these songs annoyed my mother, but they made me smile.

(My mother's name was Josephine.)

Every time I asked my father if he would buy me a horse, he would sing these words, "When your hair has turned to silver, I will buy a horse for you." My father would have heard that song when he was in high school.

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Besides those four songs, I don't recall any singing in our home.  I must have heard hymns and organ or piano music from ages 2 to 3 at church but have no clear memory of music as an important part of my early life until my father bought our family a television in 1953 or 1954 when I was 3 or 4 years old.  

I went to YouTube to find the music and songs that I remember hearing on television and in Disney movies, which were the only movies we were allowed to see.

Then there was Elvis Presley:

Listen for Flight of the Bumble Bee, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov:

Much of the instrumental and vocal music I remember came from Walt Disney TV shows and Walt Disney movies, notably "Fantasia."

There was nothing that captured my attention and inspired awe more than hearing Mahalia Jackson for the first time as I was playing quietly in our living room and heard her distinctive voice.  I was moved by the sound of her voice in a way I had not been moved before by any singing I had heard previously but did not hear her voice again for many years.

From age 6 on, I listened to rock and roll on the radio and on television with a passion.  I was unable to carry a tune but did my best to sing along with other children during music time at school.  I was not chosen to be in glee clubs when I tried out at two different times and I gave up on singing.  I scored so low on musical instrument aptitude tests that they gave me rhythm sticks and then they found that I couldn't keep the beat.

Still I loved the music on the radio, finding it a necessary and positive part of my life.

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I am curious to know what part music played in the early lives of others in this blogging community.  

What is the first music you remember hearing?  Was music important to your parents?  Were there music instruments in your home?

1961: Library books and music on the radio

In 1961, at the beginning of the summer when I was 11 years old, I decided to make a list of every library book I read.  Extremely self-conscious about my body that was much more developed than other girls my age , I spent much of that summer lying in my bed reading books.  I had my first menstrual period the previous August when I was still 10 years old and felt that my childhood was over way too soon.  I was tall for my age and went on my first diet at 10 years old, thinking I was overweight because I weighed more than almost everyone in my 5th grade class.  I stopped going out to play with the neighborhood kids and started watching "American Bandstand" on television.  That may have been when I began taking long solitary walks with our family dog, part of my unsuccessful strategy for losing weight.  I started reading books for teenage girls, but my favorite books were those that took me completely away from my life and societal expectations and into lives that I wished were mine and to places I wished I could go, including other worlds.  I did not want to live in the world I was growing up in.

Looking at this long list of books, there are many of which I have absolutely no recollection.  Some I only remembered when I saw the author's name.  The ones I remember vividly were about children and horses, dogs, magic and other worlds.

Some of the books must have been quite short because it appears that I read over 100 books between mid-June and early September.  I do remember that there was an element of competition in connection with this list.  My sense of self-esteem was very low but I was proud of the fact that I was good at reading and could read the books from the library that were designated as above my grade level.  I thought that it would be wonderful to be a writer or an illustrator and, using small notepads, wrote two handwritten books, both about horses, one of which had a few illustrations.  They were very much based on books I had read about children and horses.

I'm wondering if any of you read some of the books in my summer of 1961 book list.

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And then there was the wonderful music on the radio.  I couldn't sing or dance and felt horribly inadequate in every social way, but I knew the lyrics to all these songs and felt all the emotions they evoked in my 11-year-old heart.

Living in the present, looking back in time / Boundless Love

My grandfather visited Killarney and from there went to the Gap of Dunloe via Pony and Trap after returning from France in World War I, where he served as a doctor. From the Gap of Dunloe, he walked to a high place where he could see Black Valley. He describes this in a letter to my grandmother who was at home with their young children, my mother and my uncle, in Hastings, Minnesota, waiting for his return.

My grandfather was 48 years old at the time.  My mother was 3 years old.  My uncle was 8.  My grandmother was 34.

My grandfather was born of German immigrant parents in Boston.  My grandmother's family in Boston had roots in Canada, Ireland, England and Scotland.  I was born in California but have lived in Washington State since I was 24 years old.  After leaving Europe in the 1800s, every generation of my family has moved great distances from where the previous generation settled.  Prior to that, they lived for generations in the same general areas in Norway, Germany, Ireland, England and Scotland.  When I go to YouTube and look at film footage showing where my ancestors lived and traveled, the landscape looks familiar to me.

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Looking at a lifetime of art work

From 1955 when I was five years old:

to 1966:

to 1974:

to 1982:

to 1983:

to 1986:

to "First Calendar" (1987):

to

 "Untitled" (1990)"

to

"Calendar Series:  62nd Month / Self-Portrait with Brothers of Mercy and Night Falling from the Sky" (1990)

to Mandala #1 (2014):

to "Left-Handed Untitled Unfinished" (July 2022)

to  Mandala #69:  Left-Handed Self-Portrait Drawn from Memory of Imaginary Brothers and Boundless Love 

(July 2022)

It just occurred to me, as I have finished Mandala #69,  that there were 71 paintings in my Calendar Series, begun in 1987 and finished in 1992, after which I found myself less and less able to sit down at my art table for any extended period of time due to emotional turmoil that I thought would never end.  2014 was a turning point.  Sustainable creative energy returned.  It was beginning to wane again, when I discovered I could draw with my left hand in early January of 2022.  Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and all that has followed this year, I've not done as much drawing as in previous years but the creative energy is there, beyond my wildest dreams.

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I'm going to stay here in this beautiful cloudy place, in this community, doing yoga, reading, drawing with my left hand, blogging, walking with friends, doing what I can against all odds, no matter what happens.  When the sun shines here, it is beautiful in another way.

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"Boundless Love"

Home / The beauty and the terrible realities we face / Finding balance

 

Interview: Falling Together

Krista Tippett:

I usually start my conversations with an inquiry about the spiritual background of your childhood. And however you would define that. And, as I look at the sweep of your writing, I see so many elements that to me are profoundly spiritual, a long sense of time or a robust commitment to hope. You describe your childhood in so many ways, and in one place — these are words you use, “A scrawny, battered little kid in a violent house.” And I wonder how you would think about that notion of the spiritual background of your childhood. And it occurs to me that perhaps some of these things were seeded by absence, as much as by presence.

Rebecca Solnit:

I think that’s true. And when you asked that question, what comes to mind is kind of a map of where most of my childhood took place. I wrote somewhere that I had an inside-out childhood, because every place was safe but home. If you went just on the other side of the backyard fence was a quarter horse stud farm and then dairy farms and open space. And the landscape and the animals, domestic and wild, were this huge refuge, and really fed encouraged me, and there was a sense of community with the non-human. And so that was if you went north, even just to the other side of the fence and beyond, just endless open space, and oak trees, and grasslands, and wildlife.

And then if you went south, there was a really great public library. And the minute I learned how to read, it was as though I’d been given this huge treasure. Every book was a box I suddenly knew how to open, and in it, I could meet people, go to other worlds, go deep in all kinds of ways. And I spent my childhood in the hills and in the books. So that was not maybe what people think of conventionally as spirituality, but that was my company, my encouragement, my teaching, my community.

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Rebecca Solnit:
I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face.

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Rebecca Solnit grew up in much the way I did, walking in the hills of Northern California, reading books.  Northern California is her home and one of the two places I can call home.  Her writing continues to inspire me.

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My friend, Yom, came alone from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.  Along with other refugee women, she was given a job doing industrial sewing for Columbia Sportswear at the place where I was working as a sewing machine operator.  We were both in our mid-20s.  We have been friends for nearly 50 years.  For many years, Yom saved her money and bought a home for herself in Seattle and began to create a garden.  Yom married Chris.  Yom and Chris adopted a baby boy from an orphanage in Vietnam nearly 20 years ago.  He just finished his first year of college.  Chris made this video of Yom's beloved garden.  

Meditation: Imagining Interdependence Day

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons -- b. 1944

Krista Tippett -- b. 1960

Rev. Lucas Johnson --  b. Late 1970s or early 1980s

This conversation from 2014 (including transcript) with its talk of community and coalitions and change and not giving up, generation after generation, against all odds, has lifted my spirits today.   

Nothing has given me a better perspective on the current state of the world than listening to all the conversations from the On Being Project under the heading of Across Generations.  

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All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. 

(John Steinbeck)

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First Streptocarpus bloom yesterday, coinciding with a day that I will always remember when I was at the ocean with R.  It was 1968, another turbulent year in the history of the world.  We were 18 years old and in love.  

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1968

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Revisited in 2022

"... So let us not talk falsely now / the hour is gettin' late ..."

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"Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it.  Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it."

Thanks to Beth from Alive On All Channels for these words from Rebecca Solnit.

Meditating with eyes open

Breakthrough and Gratitude

After watching a copy of this documentary that I checked out from our public library, I was able to sit down at my drawing table and go forward in drawing with my non-dominant left hand, deeply moved by the undying spirit of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the context of all that is presently surfacing in our beloved and always challenging world.