Family Singing

Dan with his guitar; Mary with "Emily," her double-bass.
Dave, J. and Dan making "country music."
J. with his mother's restored vintage autoharp.

Mary, Sharon, J., Dan, Dave on a summer evening.

Kathy, Mary, J., Sharon, Dave.

I grew up as part of a family that has been making music for generations. My maternal grandmother, an accomplished pianist, played "dinner music" at the summer hotels in her youth, sometimes joined by her brother on fiddle, her cousin on banjo. Later she played in a corner of the darkened "town hall" while the reels of a "silent movie" jerked and sparkled through a drama of intrigue and narrow escapes. She provided music for church services, as did her sister, and later, carrying on the tradition, her daughter and her sister's daughters sat at piano or organ on a Sunday morning while choir and congregation raised their voices in hymns of the faith. I have likewise played piano [less often--and less skillfully-- an organ] for my own church and area congregations who found themselves temporarily without a musician.

We lived in several rooms of my grandfather's farmhouse until I was 5. I have memories of relatives coming to visit on Sunday afternoons. When a meal was finished and talk had run down, everyone drifted to the parlor where my mother took her seat before the old piano. Popular tunes from "sheet music" were tried out, followed by old familiars from The Golden Book of Songs. As the sun slanted golden shadows through the parlour's west windows, the group turned to hymns, for which they needed no printed notes or words. Faces shone, the effortless harmonies soared robustly, each voice in perfect pitch.

My Mother taught me to sing before I could read words, years before she began to unfold the mystery of the black shapes which filled the lines and spaces of a musical staff. I can't recall at what point I could look at the "notes" and hear their sound in my mind before it was struck on the keyboard. She taught music in the public schools for many years, was still taking a few private pupils for piano lessons as she entered her 80's. The last time I was with her, at the nursing home where she spent much of her last two years, we played 4-handed piano in the social room. Mother's eyesight and her memory had failed, but we played the hymns and old songs with scarecly a false note.

We had no piano for a number of years after J. and I married. We put records on the 33 rpm turntable and sang with Tennesse Ernie Ford [hymns and gospel songs] or Johnny Cash and the Carter family. We copied words onto paper and sang again with the recordings until we were confident enough to sing for others at church. We sang often when our children were growing up, especially on long winter evenings. We had a succession of old upright pianos--some better than others.

We have found folks to sing with in Wyoming. About every six weeks our friend Dave drives 2 1/2 hours from the town where he and his wife Kathy live, loading his big van with tools, air compressor, high-intesity lamps, so that he can set up in the front of the quilt shop to service and repair sewing machines. He brings his guitar and on the evening that he eats supper with us, we look forward to an hour or so of singing.

This week we had two such occaisions: Tuesday evening at our house and Wednesday evening at Mary's home. Sometimes Kathy can leave her work long enough to make the trip with Dave, adding her strong warm voice and the throb of guitar or mandolin. We sing until someone reluctantly reminds us that we all have to get up for work in the morning.

When we went to Vermont late in August for my Dad's funeral, we took an afternoon away from sadness and tasks to be done, a time to meet with my cousins "across the lake" in New York. We had never made music as a group, but we sang the old hymns that our grandparents and great grandparents sang together; three women who sing harmony seemingly plucked from nowhere, the notes heard in our heads, two of our husbands, a guitar. Sadly, we realized belatedly that no one thought to take pictures. We were too absorbed in singing--just as the generations of our family had always done.

This comment on family singing is from the Farm Diary notes of Henry Beston which end each chapter in "Northern Farm; A Chronicle of Maine."

"How pleasant to spend some time with a singing family! During my own lifetime, one of the most dismal social changes of our world has been the disappearance of singing as part of human life and the work that has to be done. People used to sing, now you scarcely hear anyone even whistle. The world is poorer for the loss. There is nothing like music for giving one a sense of solidarity, and it lightens both labor and the heart."