“What would you give to remember everything? I have this power. I absorb your memories; when you hear me, you relive them. A first dance. A wedding. The song that played when you got the big news. No other talent gives your life a soundtrack. I am Music. I mark the time” (A quote from page 371 of Mitch Albom’s book The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto).
As a precursor to next week’s book review in “Book Beat – Impact” on The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, if you are like me, you may not have realized the importance of music in your life. To me one of the things important about music is that it brings back memories in different periods of my life. Sometimes, the impact has to do with music in general. Other times, it may be a particular song.
In fourth grade, with a very high pitched voice, I was anxious to sing in the school choir. All the kids in my classroom participated except two boys and me. I do remember one of the boys named Leslie sounded like a bullfrog on its deathbed. Maybe if they could have used today’s modern sound techniques and mixed Leslie’s voice and mine, we could have sounded good enough to make the choir. The three of us ended up having study hall while the rest of the class made melodic tones. This seemed like a death knell to me and scarred me for years!
The year was 1958. I bought my first portable radio (chartreuse) with money earned from mowing lawns (a hand mower, not one with an engine), so I could listen to Harry Belafonte’s recording of “The Banana Boat Song,” also known as “Day-O.”
Sometime around 1960, The Jackie Gleason Show was one of my favorites. I particularly liked the skits staring Jackie and Frank Fontaine, who played Crazy Guggenheim. Frank was always pretty nutty in the skits until it came to the end, when he sang a song in his deep rich voice. I was way ahead of my time because I loved how he sang “When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver,” which I tried to impersonate, albeit very poorly!
My music life did have a creative side too around this time. My near hit (it didn’t quite make the top 1,000 hits list) was “The Hot Dog Song” that went like this: “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Winner, oh that is truly what I’d like to be. Whether boiled or fried or frozen in the freezer, I am better far than Armor Star could ever be.”
If a duet was in order, my friend and I would sing the Burry Cookie song: “Heavens to Betsy Burry’s are good. Best darn cookies in the neighborhood. S-L-O-W baking is why they’re good. For freshness and taste, you mustn’t bake in haste. Get S-L-O-W baked Burry’s!”
Before I knew it, the 70s had arrived, and I found myself at Advanced Training in the Army at Fort Knox lying on my bed (as Beetle Bailey would do), listening to the Everly Brothers sing one of my favorites, “All I Have to do is Dream.”
In the 1980s, even though I liked them before, I became more interested in church hymns. Having young kids and not known as vacationers, we rented a house in Ocean City for an exhausting week because we invited many family and friends to visit us there. Before we left for vacation, we had a friend record many old-time hymns for us using her piano, and we had a songfest while in Ocean City.
The 1990s are remembered by happy times and sad times. Two widowed sisters lived next door to us, and I remember taking Thanksgiving dinner to them with my brother and singing a duet of “How Great Thou Art” to them (thankfully, my brother’s voice was, and still is, better than mine). In the second half of the decade, our lives changed greatly. Our oldest son was attending Grove City College, and our other two sons were still in high school and middle school. After spending all of their years in Delaware County, my job was transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah. We lived 20 miles south of the city for two years; during that time none of us adapted real well. However, I can remember those sweet times driving around the foot of the mountains on a sunny day listening to Steve Green’s CD entitled “The Letter,” especially the song entitled “Love One Another.” That song seemed to revitalize me.
After returning east, in 1999, we had the shock of our lives when Greg died suddenly. I have commented on this in a previous column, so I’ll only say how beautiful the hymn “Does Jesus Care,” the melody of which was written by my grandfather, sounded during his memorial service.
The end of the 1990s decade into the 21st century started with great apprehension and went downhill from there. At the stroke of midnight would the world be “shut down” because of Y2K? What would happen after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks? Especially after the latter event, it seemed that America was much more unified and headed more toward God. “The Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” were heard much more often than before. Unfortunately, this didn’t last too long.
And finally, in the second half of the decade of 2010, we were blessed by our first two grandsons. In teaching the pre-kindergarten kids in Sunday school, we used to sing “God Made Me.”
Next week we will see how music impacted Frankie Presto, the main character of The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto.
Jeff Hall, of Honey Brook, contributes columns to Berks-Mont Newspapers.
