Jill and I have been watching some "American Masters" documentaries on PBS lately. They're informative, entertaining, thought-provoking, and so far there hasn't been a single car chase nor anyone getting shot. Just my kind of TV.
Last night we watched one about Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger songs played heavily into my growing-up playlist. The folk revival that he was so much a part of, was going strong when I was in my teens, along with the protest songs he introduced and spread far and wide. I hadn't realized, until I saw the film, that his roots were in classical music and it was in North Carolina that he discovered bluegrass and the wealth of mountain music. I also had missed his involvement with the labor movement and communism, which got him blacklisted for so long.
What struck me as I watched this doc, was how sincerely he wanted to incorporate singing into everyday life, harking back to a time before electronic media, when people made their own music and songs accompanied many of the daily rituals of life. This rang a bell with me.
Growing up with a musician and music teacher who was born in the 1920s, singing was a way of life in our family. Not like the von Trapp singers, more like what Seeger was talking about. We sang, often with harmonies, in the car, around the house, around the piano. The games we played as children were often sing-song. We started singing as soon as we could talk, so it never felt strange or out of place. Conversations often devolved into show tunes when someone said a triggering word or phrase. That still happens when my siblings and I get together. Jill thought it was weird when she first joined the family, but now she's right there with us.
Because we had a piano bar in the living room, and lots of parties, all four of us kids grew up singing and listening to the old standards. They are still lodged in my head and when I'm home with the dogs during the daytime, I sometimes sing to them or to myself or to the Goddess ---- who knows? What I do know is that singing, once a part of the daily weave of my life, has fallen away to a large degree as the years go by. My voice has suffered from age and it never fully recovered after surgery a few years ago. I no longer sing in choirs, as I did up until a decade ago. I often rely on streaming music to fill my house with tunes when I feel the need, though I do still like to sing along.
Right now, we're planning a graveside service to inter my mother's ashes in the family plot back in Iowa. As I plan a simple ritual, I automatically think of how to bring music to the cemetery --- a couple of her favorite songs ---- and get quite tangled up in my own ignorance about how to do that, what device to use, what app, whether it will work out in the middle of nowhere, etc. Of course, we could sing. Singing? But . . . but . . . what would we sing? We need recorded music, don't we?
This morning I sang "Dona nobis pacem" to Nanalu, who thumped her tail all through, in appreciation. Huh. If the dog likes it, maybe we're onto something. And maybe it's time to bring back singing to daily life and the rituals by which we mark the passage of time.
