I will leave behind an odd collection of musical instruments. One strange metal alloy 40′s era Rickenbacker lap steel guitar. A sticker-ized Yamaha acoustic guitar. Two cheap Tele’s bionically rebuilt to be loud and phat. A four string Irish Tenor banjar. A ukulele. A simple Gretsch kit. Timbales. Many other things…and a humanatone. There is nobody that I know of on either side of my family that will or has left any musical instruments other than a piano, one flute and a nice collection of Jew’s harps. It’s really an almost utterly music-less family on the surface.
As musically vacuous as my family might seem, I actually had a tremendously musical upbringing. On my Irish paternal side everybody sings (not well but all the time). On my German maternal side nobody sings very often but at Christmas a big production was always made about singing the German Christmas songs. One year my mother and her sisters made all the cousins practice these songs on several different occasions, militantly making sure we got the phonetics just right –until it was quite unenjoyable for the kids. We then showed up on our grandparents’ doorstep unannounced and sang for them. It’s sappy to say I know, but the joyous tears in my grandmother’s eyes was worth it in retrospect.
As I posted last week, my mother’s father was perhaps the most music-less creature of the bunch. My father’s father on the other hand sang so frequently that it was inevitable that at his funeral, the crowd joined together graveside for the saddest version of Toora Loora I ever heard.
It’s funny to find that I am preparing to describe my grandfather as a joyous man because in some ways he wasn’t. He was fairly reserved. He was a banker. While his love was seemingly unconditional (at least for his grandkids), his disapprovals were vocal. But I think he thought of himself as a lucky lucky man and that carried him through for almost 92 years.
He hardly ever traveled. But why would you have to if you grew up in Manhattan during its most fascinating century yet? He didn’t even have to leave NYC when he joined the army during WWII. He could speak Italian (though I don’t really understand why) so he was put in charge of overseeing Italian POW’s on Governor’s Island which sits in the New York Harbor just minutes from Manhattan by ferry. Those were merry years for him and from the sound of it, I don’t think the Italians were all that bummed either. He continued to receive Christmas cards from some of the Italian prisoners for years.
His father was a fireman and this gave him access to all the movie houses and the vaudeville theaters. My grandfather knew all the old movie stars and singers. Most of them he had seen in person. I remember being floored watching the Wizard of Oz with him and he would go off about the careers of the people behind the Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man.
If the weather was good out at Rocky Point, Long Island where my grandfather spent his long retired life, you would find him and my grandmother out on the patio drinking Rob Roys, eating Cheese Nips and Wise potato chips with the Glen Miller Orchestra or some comparable big band music blaring over their outdoor speakers. Between breaks in the conversation they would sing along, even if the version of the song coming through the speakers didn’t have vocals.
Perhaps most of all, GP (as we called him) loved to sing the Irish tunes most of which actually became famous this side of the Atlantic from the likes of Bing Crosby, Perry Como et al. GP was good at it. When us grandkids stayed out at Rocky, he always tucked us in with Toora Loora. And a visit wasn’t complete without a round of If You’re Irish Come Into the Parlor. It was his passion for heritage and my own early love of the Clancy Brothers that led me to start the Texas Guinness Lovers down in Houston.
I’m grateful to have these songs under my belt from our time doing TGL because otherwise I do not have the brain power to remember lyrics the way my grandfather and many on that side of the family remember tunes. I can’t even remember my own lyrics. I find that power of memory fascinating and completely out of reach.
My mom still recites long poems from memory that she learned back in her youth. Of course, in the age before writing, people had to memorize epic poems or they would’ve vanished.
I’d be interested to know which poems.
Kéramos was one, although she usually would just recite a few lines, such as these:
Turn, turn, my wheel! All life is brief;
What now is bud will soon be leaf,
What now is leaf will soon decay;
The wind blows east, the wind blows west;
The blue eggs in the robin’s nest
Will soon have wings and beak and breast,
And flutter and fly away.