Music when I was young

Archive: Listening

Moon River is the first song I remember. I'm sure it was a hit at the time, Andy Williams had a TV show back then (and made the Osmonds famous). It might've had little more airtime since Johnny Mercer, who wrote the lyrics was a hometown boy.

Or maybe it was Roses are Red. That was a song I frequently paid a dime to hear I'm just not sure when my parents took me to honky-tonks. Probably before I entered elementary school. It would've been back when I spent my weekdays divided between the evilly named Happy Land nursery school and my grandparents, staying with my parents mostly on the weekends. I'd forget about the redneck music for a long time.

"Breakfast With Burl" is what comes to mind when I try to remember music when I was a little kid. Burl, whoever he was, would play songs and slurp coffee (maybe even real coffee) over the air. I liked the Mammas and Papas Puff the Magic Dragon -if that song is about pot, the lyrics are talking about giving it up. Uncomprehending as I was of the lyrics Love Child, anything by The Supremes were favorites. And I remember the sad woman who had one less egg to fry.

There must've been hundreds of other songs that recorded themselves in my brain. That is why I have the commonplace experience of knowing songs I don't remember hearing.

The radio would be the only way I'd know music for many years. Later, living with my parents all the time, my father thankfully away fishing, fornicating and drinking, my mother played WEAS. Savannah's only country music station. (They were much less common even in the South back then.) The only song I remember is one sung by a man who married a woman who 'wasn't a country music lover.' She thought Kitty Wells was a place cats went to drink and Ernest Tubb was s serious place to take a bath. Ir probably wasn't a good song, but I'd love to know anything about it. But even consulting the most knowledgeable of my shop's country music buyers has never led anywhere.

In high school I discovered that Savannah's Carnegie public library had records as well as books. I know that I listened to Chopin's funeral march because the Red Skull played it before he killed Allied military officers. How I discovered Gregorian Chants or (as commonplace as it is) the Messiah I've forgotten.

Victor and John came to Savannah and with them I'd start listening to the current rock of the time. Much of it was the inevitable music of the time: Jimi Hendrix (their Siamese was a fan), the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Arthur Brown (who I heard a preacher quote), Cat Stevens and many groups whose name don't come to mind. John's passion for T-Rex was distinctive for the time.

Not sure why they had an album by the Association. Living up to my image as an honest weblogger I must confess to listen to them singing dreck like "Cherish" and weep. Once I'd discovered my sexuality I went into adolescence in overdrive. Gordon and I were exchanging letters about then and he sent me Alice Cooper's Love it to Death as an antidote (hard to believe that Cooper produced a couple of decent albums, isn't it?). I was about to turn 18 and hearing Cooper sing "I'm 18" was to the good.