I have been in Grand Junction since the end of April. The Grand Valley really has amazing visual distances from one end of the valley to another, and even though it is a valley, it is at 4600 feet above sea level. It is surrounded by higher mesas and mountains in all directions.
Soon I drive back to Washington for a few weeks. That is a distance, too, 1200 miles with Sol Duc cat. She doesn’t really enjoy the car. I wonder if she will enjoy going home. Will she like the cloud settling over us, as if the bottom of it is grazing the roof tops? I did not like those clouds when I first moved to Washington but now they feel as if they enfold us and comfort us, an intimacy with the sky.
The Ballad of the Shape of Things is one of those songs that I learned very young and from my cousins, so I did not know who recorded it. Another “dead girl song” only this one is a “dead guy song”. I loved the puns: “They say he died of the chickenpox. In part I must agree, one chick too many had he.” I also liked songs with words I didn’t know: transom, in this one. We were fairly bloodthirsty kids and happily learned songs about death, unfaithful lovers, murder, betrayal, noble suicide to save the highwayman, and so forth. My Darling Clementine, another dead girl song. We had a very educational childhood in song.
We needed the triangular “garment thin that fastens on with a safety pin” explained at the end of the song, because the cloth diapers we’d experienced were rectangular. I find memorizing things that rhyme and especially if there is a story and a tune, much easier than memorizing the varied side effects of drugs such as ACE inhibitors. The story behind the side effects escapes me, though maybe there is one! Think of that, a ballad of the ACE inhibitors, with each one having its individual good and bad effects! I am certain that I could make up a story, even if we don’t really understand all the effects.
In college, late 1950s and on, they would have a sing. My father played guitar, they would invite all their friends, and sing folk songs. They used the book in the photograph, Song Fest, edited by Dick and Beth Best. Last published in 1955, I think.
I have no memory of the book itself. However, a friend of my father’s bound his copy in 2003 in leather. When I saw it, I searched on line and bought my own. It has words AND MUSIC and a chord progression. When I opened it, I know a song from about every third or fourth page.
My sister and I memorized the songs. We both had hundreds of songs memorized, many from this book, or from records. We photocopied a Beatles record insert and memorized all the words on a long car trip once.
I don’t know much about the Intercollegiate Outing Club Association, but there are still copies of Song Fest on line. My parents had to edit a number of the songs for two small children, since we were picking them up. They chose silly songs, “Dead Girl Songs” (Banks of the Ohio, Long Black Veil, My Darling Clementine, Cockles and Mussels) and work/protest songs. They rarely sang sentimental songs, except for lullabies. I loved to sing. We used to have reel to reel tape with my little sister singing a fifth off when she was three or four, but it disintegrated.
My father, Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway, was a fabulous musician. He sang in prep school, in college, in choruses on the east coast, in Rainshadow Chorale from 1997 until his death in 2013. He loved Bach and the Band and loved to encourage other people to sing. He was in our Community Chorus for years, to help new singers. People must try out for Rainshadow Chorale, but Community Chorus is for anyone who wants to join and sing. After my father died, men would say, “I would try to stand near your father in Community Chorus, to help learn the part. He was so good.”
Here is one of the lullabies from Song Fest:
At the Sings, my parents would start with a song and then go around the room, asking other people to pick songs. Sometimes people were shy, but my folks were really good at getting people to sing. Sometimes we’d have multiple guitars and other instruments. My sister and I had favorite songs too!
This is Malcolm K. Ottaway, my father, singing the Humpty Dumpty Blues in 2009.
He made them up when I was two. Here are the two stories that my mother would tell and that I finally linked.
In the early 1960s my parents married at age 21 and were both going to the University of Tennessee. They married in June and I was born the next March. In a tuberculosis sanatorium, because my mother started coughing blood at 8 months pregnant. She thought she was going to die. She didn’t die, but after I was born she did not hold me again until I was nine months old. I was suspicious of adults by then, because they kept giving me away.
My parents had music parties, where my father played guitar. My mother had a prodigious memory and would remember every verse, so she was the last one singing. My mother said, “At one party you wanted your father to play Humpty Dumpty. He wouldn’t. You were the only child there. You kept asking. Finally he made up the Humpty Dumpty Blues. You were so angry at him that you stomped your feet at him and everyone laughed.”
And the second story: “One morning after a party, your father picked up his guitar. It RATTLED. It had 17 beer bottle caps in it. We checked and not one person had seen you pick up a beer bottle cap or put it through the strings. It took your father hours to slide the bottle caps out from under the strings with a butter knife.”
Well, that will teach him to not sing a song for the two year old. At any rate, he sang the Humpty Dumpty Blues my whole life. I don’t remember the original party or sliding bottle caps through the strings. I must have done it after the party was over, right? Did I go during the party and pick up every cap I could find, or did I already have a hidden stash? Two year olds can be sneaky, apparently.
At any rate, I am very happy to have the recording now, even though the original made me stomp my feet.
The photograph is of me, in about 1963 or 64. I don’t know who took it, but it was taken at Lake Matinenda, in Ontario, Canada.
The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is memorize, and oh, what I have memorized! I saw a t-shirt at the Nowhereelse Festival in Ohio that said, “My memory is 80% lyrics.” Yes, me too, a mix of songs, poetry and books that I have read. My sister Chris and I were busily memorizing songs as soon as we could. Here are three very educational songs for young girls. The last one we learned from our cousin, who was a girl scout and a girl scout leader. She was in the calendar one year, making cookies. I was very very impressed and a little jealous.
I bought a four hour recording session at a silent auction and the recordings are me and my sister and my father. We did them in two sessions. We made a list of songs and lost it immediately so we all took turns suggesting songs. My mother had already died of cancer. My sister died in 2012 and my father in 2013. I am so glad to have these recordings. We called it Mocoko for Malcolm Ottaway, Chris Ottaway and Katherine Ottaway. We sang most of them just once and so they are not polished, but I still am happy to have them.
Bridget O’Flynn
I sang Bridget O’Flynn to my daughter when she called me about dancing. “Mom! I love to twirl!” Um, well, yes, your parents met at a contra dance at Glenn Echo Park in Maryland. We love to twirl too.
Late in the evening
A cautionary song, an old barbershop quartet song, that we sang.
Fascinating Lady
I wonder if the girl scouts still sing this.
The photograph is my son scaring me. Ok, that boulder is sitting there balanced BUT! GET OUT OF THERE! Taken in Palm Springs in 2011 up on the mesa. Beautiful.
While I organize, I find things. Most of the barbies apparently got blown up with firecrackers one time when I was not home. Both of my children were involved with this. “Not the babies,” says my daughter. “Also not the Get Real Girl, since she is yours.”
Well, the Get Real Girl is the camping one, with backpack, GPS, camping stove, frying pan and fried eggs. Apparently she is not a vegan. She acquired the diving equipment from a barbie set and was all ready to go in the water (no wet suit though) when one of the barbie babies landed in her lap. Gosh, now what! As you can see, they seem to be bonding even though Get Real is not going diving today. I will have to see if there is another Action Figure around the house that could hold the baby while Get Real dives….
We had another Get Real Girl, one who plays basketball. I have found a lower leg and foot. I suspect that she met her fate with the barbies, poor thing. Maybe my kids will give me another Get Real Girl for Christmas…..
A friend and I are talking about Mother’s Day yesterday.
Somehow having a song about Mother’s Day came up. “Bet I can think of one.” I say.
“Humph.” says the friend. Or some skeptical comment.
I start singing.
“That’s NOT a mother’s day song.” says my friend.
“Well, it is if your mother is dead.”
“It’s not cheerful.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
So here is a recording. I haven’t learned the guitar part yet so I thought… well heck, why not sing along with Dave Van Ronk?* This is the third take. Might replace it with a later take later today.
Trigger warning: I miss my mom. This is about missing our moms. Hugs, all.
sing along with Dave Van Ronk
Happy Mother’s Day and hugs if you miss your mother.
*Is this a copyright violation? It probably is. Someone yell at me if it is. My brain is muttering something about sampling. Let’s see, from circa 1959 to 1961… does that make a difference?
I love the orange sky and peach and lemon and tangerine, just as the sun rises! This has been a difficult week with the time change and with a concert or concert rehearsal four out of the last 5 evenings after a full day of clinic. Concert today and tomorrow, and I love the pieces we are doing. Here: Rainshadow Chorale.
I am in RainShadow Chorale. My father was one of the people who started it in 1997.Β I moved to Port Townsend in 2000, because my mother had cancer. She died in May of 2000. My father died in 2013. I had the joy of singing with him in this group for 13 years.
Our concert is weekend after next and I really love this one. We are doing a wild mix of pieces and moods with the theme from a Walt Whitman poem. In this time of so many people being afraid and angry and stirred up, going to chorus is healing. All of these people, unpaid, coming together to create these two concerts of beauty and unity and joy. A gift to each other and a gift to the community.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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