Softie! That’s what I said to myself as my eyes filled with tears and my tired old baritone became emotionally constricted. This afternoon I was at the piano singing and playing some of my favorite pop tunes of a half century or more ago. I was alone in the house as usual. This wasn’t a performance—those days are past. Making simple music for my own soul, I could let myself go. And I did.
I learned something today. About these old favorites. About myself.
Usually I just do my best to play the music alone without the words. As a non-pianist, a mere novice at the keyboard, I have all I can do to follow the sheet music script or rely on memorized and self-harmonized tunes. When Elaine—we were married 56 years—played any of these songs for me in any key, I would vocally emote respectably. Now that she is gone, I often amuse myself at the piano just for the pure joy of it.
Today I spoke the lyrics of some of these and tried to sing them, and managed to provide myself a no-frills accompaniment.
Working through the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II with Richard Rodgers’ music for No Other Love, my musical memory synapses snapped into action and linked me to the favorite early television series “Victory at Sea.” I loved that program, as it brought me back to my Navy days flying during World War II in the Pacific. And I suddenly knew why: the title music was the very same tune as No Other Love. I had forgotten that the themes for those programs were composed by Richard Rodgers! Later he used this same theme as a love song and had Hammerstein set words to it (I believe it was scored for a forgettable production “Me and Juliet”) soon after the series had been aired in the 1952-53 season on NBC-TV.
Nothing particularly emotional in that bit of history. But then when I considered what the lyrics were about, I got the connection and the relevance to our own story. Elaine and I were married in 1944 between my two tours of Pacific duty and I could imagine her singing this to that melody:
No other love have I/only my love for you/Only the dream we knew/No other Love/Watching the night go by/Wishing that you could be/Watching the night with me/Into the night I cry/hurry home, come home to me/Set me free, free from doubt/and free from longing./Into your arms I’ll fly/locked in your arms I’ll stay/Waiting to hear you say/No Other Love have I/No Other Love.
Wow! For me it’s no longer the same song. So much of our appreciation for art comes from the personal context, doesn’t it?
I can easily melt under the text and music of Cole Porter’s 1942 song from “Something to Shout About,” You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To. After our wedding I sang it to Elaine while we were on our way to our brief war-time honeymoon.
Of course I know, and could remind myself if needed, that most of these lyrics are schmaltzy, if not corny. Yet, given that, I also appreciate that we can be helped by some emotional infusions from this musical genre and the often-soupy verses that go with it. The rhythm and rhymes can be mysteriously attached to musical memory archives in our brains and when we hear those sounds again, a scene or situation of years ago might pop up on our present awareness screen. Again, it’s the context that allows the appreciation. One of those yesteryear songs from “The Fantasticks” sings it so well:
Try to remember when life was so tender that no one wept except the willow/
Try to remember the life was so tender that dreams were kept beside the pillow/Try to remember when life was so tender that love was an ember about to billow./Try to remember and if you remember, then follow….
That gifted team of Rodgers and Hammerstein were prolific in those mid-century years. What magic they produced to touch so many of us then and now! Not a few of these old pop tunes return to me in my retirement and widower years to evoke memory and flood my feelings with sweet, and sometimes bittersweet, recall:
Hello, Young Lovers, whoever you are/I hope your troubles are few./All my good wishes go with you tonight/I’ve been in love like you…Don’t cry, young lovers, whatever you do./Don’t cry because I’m alone./All of my mem’ries are happy tonight/I’ve had a love of my own./I’ve had a love of my own like yours,/I’ve had a love of my own.
I need to be forthright and say that these love songs and pop tunes, for all of my attention to them at the moment, are very peripheral to my overall music appreciation. I can also get memory flashes from hearing a symphony or opera or choral theme embedded in my mental archives, but usually the context is less personal, and therefore less emotionally potent, than the tunes of childhood, adolescence and adult maturity that we all listened to then. But I cannot and do not want now to disown the contemporary folk ballads I have snatched from life over these many years. They tell me a lot about myself, where I have been, and what remains precious and dear in my seasoned situation today.
…In only a moment we both will be old; we won’t even notice the world turning cold. And so in this moment with sunlight above:My Cup Runneth Over With Love!
Some months before Elaine died, one night as I was playing some oldies for her, I was interrupted while playing Someone to Watch Over Me, by her crying out from the hospital bed that kept her captive. I hurried in to her and she blurted out “I want you to watch over me!”
Indeed, until the end, I tried to do just that.
(10-21-06)
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Page last modified by Richard Lee on 12 August 2007 |
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