A Soundtrack for My Life
I’m not a musician, not musical in any meaningful sense. I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, as they say. I’ve been accused of being tone deaf, which is not true, strictly defined. I hear tones perfectly well; I just can’t reproduce what I hear. When I do attempt to sing, what comes out of my mouth bears only a coincidental relationship with the sound I tell myself I’m trying to make. Moreover, I have no sense of rhythm. None. I can’t even take a pencil and tap along with the rhythm of a song I’m listening to. Hence, in addition to not being able to sing, I can’t dance, don’t ask me.
Considering my complete and utter musical ineptitude, what makes me think I’m qualified to, or even have a right to, attempt an essay on music? But this brings us to the very heart of the matter. No one needs to be convinced of the importance of music in the life of Beethoven or Billy Joel. But the place of music in our lives—all of us, man- and womankind—might be seen by implication in examining its importance, its pervasiveness, in the life of one startlingly unmusical fellow: me.
I have a feeling that music was born in the shhhhh of a mother attempting to comfort a fussy child. The shhhh begins in imitation of a soothing breeze, perhaps, but then develops a rhythm: SHH sh sh SHH sh sh SHH sh sh SHH. Add to the vocalization a gentle bouncing of the baby in its mother’s arms. Then maybe the mother rises and sways to the rhythm of the bouncing, the rhythm of the shhs. The swaying becomes a rhythmic step or two. Thus, dance is born with music and is forever inextricable.
The first song, then, was a cave woman’s lullaby but comes just as naturally to the twenty-first-century mother. I doubt, in fact, that it’s changed much. So too, my first song was a lullaby, and my first dance in my mother’s arms.
I don’t remember that song or dance, but I can clearly hear a ditty my father sang when I was two or three, I suppose. I couldn’t have been much older than that because it occurred during a game when I would sit on my father’s closed knees holding on to his thumbs as if they were the reins of a horse. “YIP yip yip yip YIP yip yip yip YIP yip yip yip,” he would sing out, then suddenly on a YIP would throw open his knees, and I’d plunge floorward, holding on to those thumbs for dear life. But was that truly music? Indeed it was. Music is for soothing, music is for sleeping, music is for fun. It’s not something merely accompanying or appended to a life experience; it’s part of our life experience from the very beginning of our awareness of life. Indeed, it predates memory.
I suppose the first formal song that I do remember is “Jesus Loves Me.” I can hear myself singing it loudly, happily:
Jesus Loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak but He is strong.
Baptists in little Missouri prairie towns like my Appleton City were brought up in a world of music. Our religion helped define who we were, and music helped define our religion. I’d argue, in fact, that Baptists are closer to God while singing hymns than while listening to a sermon or reading the Good Book. I haven’t been in a Baptist church in forty years, but even today if by chance I happen to hear a few bars from one of the old hymns in some movie or television program, I’ll be galvanized by powerful emotions, and I’ll break into song, much to my Catholic wife’s amusement or (more likely) annoyance.
Music-memories from my early years are rare and random, but then any memories from my early years are rare, hazy, and random. I remember sitting on our kitchen floor, playing, as my mother cooked or cleaned somewhere above me while listening to Eddy Arnold on the radio. I’ve never been a country music fan—except for Eddy Arnold. Eddy and I go back a long way.
One of my very few memories of actually performing music publicly occurred when I was in the first grade. It must have been during one of those interminable evenings for adoring relatives where each grade sings a song or two. Our song was “Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin’ Bread.” I don’t remember actually singing the song, but I do recall crouching down and staring through the barred back of a chair (perhaps supposed to be a bedstead?) and then suddenly crossing my eyes and making a face at the audience. Everyone laughed and applauded. How could they possible not have? I was so cute! That was it, though: my one brush with musical-comedy stardom.
My one other, even more vivid music-memory from my early childhood is decidedly darker. I’m not sure when or why I became shy, but I battled shyness into my adult years. Among its many manifestations was an abhorrence of being the center of attention. Cue the birthday party. A half-dozen little friends, plus probably a half-dozen little friends’ moms, all staring at birthday boy: me. Then they all begin to sing, “Happy Birthday.” I flee the room, crying, and cannot be lured back to hear “Happy Birthday” sung to me for another twenty years.
*
Somehow, sometime, early childhood became simply childhood with the music-memories more plentiful and vivid.
Not all of them do I welcome. I recall, with a little amusement but even more anger, standing nose to nose with my grade school music teacher as she tries to force me to reach a higher note than I’m capable of. “Higher!” she demands, stabbing me in the tender well between clavicle and trapezius with her pointy index finger. “Higher!” (stab) “Higher!” (stab) “Higher!” (stab).
At about the same time, I decided that being in the grade school band might be fun. Lured by its glittering, many-valved beauty, I chose the e-flat alto sax. Mistake. As it turns out, to make music one must open and close those valves in a certain order, each for a certain duration, while expelling oxygen into the horn, oxygen that, in my opinion, was better diverted into one’s own lungs. I hated playing the damn thing. I refused to practice. After three years, I could, if requested by our band director, Mr. Cummins, solo on either “Old McDonald Had a Farm” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” After a time or two, Mr. Cummins made no such requests. In reference to young Dennis, he just looked away.
Most of my music-memories from those years, however, are warm and glowing, even if those were not necessarily the emotions evoked at the time. I would, for instance, along with the rest of my family watch Your Hit Parade on our black and white RCA TV, accompanied by snow-static and a wonky vertical hold. Today, I think what a charming Norman Rockwell scene it was, nestled amongst my parents and siblings. Back then, though, I writhed in rage and disgust as some execrable pablum like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” was proclaimed #1 while the rock ‘n roll I was just beginning to discover was completely ignored in the rankings. (Speaking of rock ‘n roll, did you hear that Elvis was arrested for unzipping and zipping his fly onstage to the tune of “Hound Dog?”—as I overheard my father say to my mother, who frowned as only a Baptist can frown.)
Eventually, of course, rock ‘n roll won out.
Ironically, it was relatively late coming to that new, utterly dominating medium: television. Your Hit Parade ignored it, and most of the many variety shows then so popular rarely acknowledged rock’s existence. Still, young people had their ways of finding it. For me, rock ‘n roll meant the jukebox-of-many-shifting-colors in the Blue Inn, the one café in my tiny hometown. One play for a nickel or six for a quarter. Better-equipped cafés and diners had miniature jukebox-like apparatuses right on the tables, and you could make your choice nickel in one hand and cheeseburger in the other.
Cheeseburgers and curly fries; malts so thick they’d flatten a paper straw in two sucks; cherry Cokes; poodle skirts and pony tails; ducks-ass haircuts and black leather jackets—these were the teenage culture, and at the heart of that culture was rock ‘n roll.
By then we’d moved to the big city of Sedalia where my sister and her friends danced the stroll in our basement. I wasn’t allowed near them, but I listened and today can still sing “The Stroll” and could stroll across the floor if it weren’t for my bursitis.
Powerful and pervasive as rock ‘n roll was, it wasn’t the entirety of my music-world. My mother still dragged me to church Sundays, and I still enjoyed the hymns if nothing else. My father was superintendent of a small rural school district, and I’d ride along to basketball games on the team bus and sing “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall” until those bottles dwindled to zero. I still had music class in grade school and still couldn’t sing a lick, but I did enjoy learning to dance the waltz, minuet, and square dance—or do I only enjoy the memory of those dances?
Rock ‘n roll, though, was the straw that stirred the teenage drink.
I may not have made it to the basement for “The Stroll,” but Bill Killion and I taught each other to dance the twist, the mashed potatoes, and other rock ‘n roll iterations in my living room just in case we ever worked up the courage to ask a girl to dance.
Our models were the mythically cool kids on American Bandstand. For a time, Sedalia had its own version of American Bandstand on the local TV station, and Bill and I would watch seething with envy and self-loathing as some of our braver and vastly cooler classmates appeared right before our eyes on live television.
Then came high school, and to American Bandstand was added Hootenanny and, especially cool, Shindig. One night we had a hootenanny of our very own in our high school gymnasium, and, for a reason that escaped me even then, we all just had to buy a new pair of white Keds to wear. The hootenanny, alas, was hardly a hoot. We weren’t allowed to wear our new Keds onto the gym floor but instead shoved them up against the wall. My back ached and my butt hurt from sitting cross-legged on the hardwood. We were chastised by the folk group “entertaining” us for singing along sans invitation.
Although TV was indeed making inroads into the world of rock music, radio still ruled. On weekend nights we listened to it cruising the drag in our daddies’ cars (one of my friends even had a car of his own!), and we listened to it on clock radios in our bedrooms and on the new little transistor radios that were beginning to invade the market.
Sedalia had two radio stations, but KSIS played country music, so it didn’t count, and KDRO, our rock station, went off the air every day promptly at sundown. That left the nights when, really needing our rock fix, we’d turn that knob with the concentration of a safe cracker, trying to bring forth KCMO in Kansas City, WLS in Chicago, and, best of all, KAAY in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Many years later, fresh out of grad school, I moved with my family to Little Rock to teach at the University of Arkansas. I was devastated to find that KAAY had changed to a country music format.)
My most vivid rock-memory from those days won’t surprise anyone who was a teen then: that cold February night, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. As it happened, that weekend we’d been visiting my sister Kay in Chicago. Could we possibly make it back home in time for the Beatles? I remember sitting in the back seat willing the car forward with a burning intensity that perhaps helps account for my chronic stomach problems today. Did we make it in time? Yes. It’s a scene built for anticlimax, right? Wrong. I was hooked. After the program was over I ran down to our local supermarket and bought the first of many Beatles albums. I still have every single one.
*
Not all my music-memories from my teenage years involve rock ‘n roll.
No rock song hits me with the emotional force of one song we sang as we marched through the halls of Smith-Cotton High School the first day of the new school year, 1963.
We are the seniors, seniors are we!
We’ll never lose our [something or other].
We stick together, in all kinds of weather.
We are the senior class!
We were so young, and so many who marched with me, sang with me, are gone now. It was so long ago. It was yesterday.
An event more important even than the Beatles invasion—important at least to me and my musical experience—occurred at about the same time. I suppose I was just bored one day, scanning through our three TV channels to find something, anything, to occupy a half-hour, and there he was: Leonard Bernstein. And there were all those young people, about my age, being taught and cajoled and sometimes chastised, and I was instantly one of them, enthralled.
Nothing in my life experience could have led one to predict that I’d fall head over heels in love with classical music. I still listened to more rock ‘n roll, but that was because rock ‘n roll was all around me, instantly accessible on my dad’s car radio, my Toshiba transistor radio, and occasionally on television. Classical music, in the early 1960s in Sedalia, Missouri, was nowhere except for Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.
I did have a phonograph, though, and I began to spend more money on classical LPs than on rock 45s and albums. It wasn’t easy to do. Where to find them? Sedalia did have one tiny record store. When I went in one day and asked where I’d find the classical albums, the owner seemed perplexed. Then he caught on. “Oh, you mean sacred music.” He did have a small stash of “sacred” albums. Over the years, I bought most of them. I also joined the Columbia Record Club, raiding them for eight albums for the price of one (or whatever the entry offer was), then letting my membership lapse, then, a few years later when the coast was clear, joining again.
Alone in my room at night, I listened to the Beatles and Mary Wells, I listened to Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Just me and my fifty-dollar phonograph. There were times when it was almost enough.
*
My first, joyously hopeful days of college arrived to the tune of “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” Something was coming down the street for me, Manfred Mann promised, a new mode of living in which I’d be not just a shy observer of life but a by God participant with a diddy-bopping girl on my arm.
It didn’t happen. My father died, and I commuted to college while living at home and working nearly forty hours a week on top of a full load of course work. Certainly I would have continued to listen to music, but, other than “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” there’s not a single song that evokes my undergraduate years. They were bleak years, almost a half-decade without, in effect, music.
Well, technically, music did return, with more powerful emotional effect than ever, in my last semester of college. I don’t consider it “college music,” though, because something far more important than British Lit surveys was coming down the street for me, and it wasn’t singing “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” It was Vietnam. It was the draft.
I swear that until that semester I’d hardly paid attention to what was going on over there, half a world away. While my friends were plotting ways to fail their draft physicals, or trying to get into the National Guard, or as a last resort keeping their precious selves clear of the rice paddies by going into the Navy or Air Force, I wasn’t worried at all. Hadn’t I always been lucky? Indeed, weren’t peace talks starting in Paris, just in time to save lucky me? But then the bastards spent weeks arguing over the shape of the freaking table! And two little words suddenly occurred to me: uh oh.
At the same time, music returned to me. “The Age of Aquarius.” “Eve of Destruction.” “For what It’s Worth.” On and on they came, evoking emotions I’d never imagined were the province of music: foreboding, fear, anger, indignation, defiance. Many of my generation listening to that same music, stung by those same emotions, hit the streets in protest or occupied classrooms and administration buildings or just said the hell with it and fled to Canada or Sweden. What did I do? In short, I got drafted.
On each of my last three nights as a civilian before riding the train to the induction station in Kansas City, I went to our local movie theater and watched Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Assuming my role as an English Professor Emeritus, I could point to significant parallels between Shakespeare’s Verona and that ghastly world I was about to enter, where teenagers shed their blood in conflicts created by their elders. But I assure you that nothing could have been farther from my thoughts at the time. For me, Romeo and Juliet was an oasis where I could distance myself from what was almost upon me, and at the heart of that oasis was the movie’s love theme: “A Time for Us.” Two months later, lying on the sunbaked dirt of the firing range at Ft. Leonard Wood, I tried to beguile into silence the reports of the M-14s to my right and left, and the M-14 in my hands, by conjuring up the lovely strains of that love theme.
“A Time for Us” couldn’t stand up to more powerful songs in basic training, though. “I Left My Home” and its many (frequently obscene) variations had been a marching staple for generations, of course, but Vietnam added its own special songs.
I’m going down to Cam Rahn Bay,
Gonna kill me a Charlie Cong today.
And, to the tune of the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy,”
Vietnan, Vietnam,
Nights while you’re sleepin’
Charlie Cong comes a creepin’ around, around.
Once out of basic training, rock ‘n roll reasserted itself on the jukeboxes in the bars that we frequented and on the boomboxes in the barracks we called home. West Point where I was an MP briefly, revisits me whenever I hear Janis Joplin’s “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart.” Fishbach, Germany, where I later spent my days and often nights in a security tower guarding pine trees, bequeathed me any number of time- and place-specific songs. The Beatles “Long and Winding Road” somehow captured the sense of dislocation I felt: how far from home, how long it’d be before I’d see it again. Led Zeppelin, though, Led Zeppelin! I’d first encountered Led Zep at West Point, but Robert Plant’s strident wailings and Jimmy Page’s other-worldly riffs seemed incongruous in the barracks-full of MP elite, law students from Georgetown, pre-meds from Johns Hopkins, rich men’s sons from Syracuse and Amhurst. But in that shabby MP barracks snuggled into the Black Forest of southwest Germany, we were not elite but juicers (me), hash-heads, and acid freaks. I wasn’t a doper, but I had good friends among them. Those dopers were gentle folk, and they loved their Led Zep, and so, eventually, did I. Led Zep III reigned then. “The Immigrant Song” captured dislocation as ably as “The Long and Winding Road,” except instead of the Beatles’ syrupy wistfulness, it hit with a cold shudder. And “Hangman” offered a violence as cruel and irrational as that transpiring across the globe in Vietnam.
My last memory of Germany before boarding the airliner for home was packing up the treasure-trove of rock albums I’d purchased in the PX. Need I say I still have them?
*
When I returned to the States, a different world awaited me. In fact, a different me awaited me. I was more experienced, more mature, less shy.
Also awaiting me, although it would take some weeks for our paths to cross, was a tall blond young woman from Queens, New York. To be more precise, our paths did not cross so much as merge. They’re still together, a single path, to this day.
We met and began dating at the University of Missouri to the strains of Carol King’s Tapestry. Our passion flared to the pulsing rhythms of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. All one semester we and a group of similarly cash-strapped friends would end our Saturday nights drinking cheap beer and watching Star Trek reruns, and even today hearing the opening bars of the Star Trek theme song stirs me with a vision of adventure and hope.
Saturday afternoons were for football.
Fight, Tiger fight for old Mizzou!
Right behind you everyone is with you!
we sang; and fifty years later, when I opened a birthday present from my son and found a Missouri Tigers ballcap, I stood and sang again, “Fight, Tiger fight for old Mizzou!” and it all came back as surely as the past came back with Proust’s petit madeleine.
*
We were married when I was just entering the PhD program at Mizzou, and three years later I became a father, and everything changed. Including music.
I could still sing “Fight Tiger” but rarely felt the urge to. I still listened to rock ‘n roll, but it was all oldies now, something resurrected from my past. I didn’t know the new groups, the new hits; didn’t care. I still listened to classical, but it was background music now to more important, more vital things.
Indeed, over the following decades, the two great genres that had been so important to me, rock and classical—and even adding a third, jazz, which I’d come to appreciate—became curiously “fixed,” no longer dynamic but dusty props in the stage setting of my life.
This means that music was no longer important to me? Hardly. Rock, classical, and jazz might have been less vital, but there was once again “A Time for Us” from Romeo and Juliet, which my wife and I danced to at our wedding (“Come on, Dennis. Use the other step,” Dr. Saltpeter smirked as I lumbered past), a more powerful memory than anything from The Stones or Led Zep. And no rock song from my youth could make the tears stand in my eyes as they do now recalling my baby girl in her onesie, “dancing” in my hands before the full-length mirror as I sang a song of my own invention:
Christine, Christine,
She’s so pristine,
Always drinks Ovaltine!
My baby girl who is a year away from fifty.
Six years later at a Brownie father-daughter dance, she left her brand-new Mary Janes among a row of identical Mary Janes against the gymnasium wall (just as thirteen years earlier I’d left my brand-new Keds up against the gym wall at our disappointing hootenanny), and then we danced, her tiny white-stockinged feet atop my size 13s. I don’t remember what specific songs we danced to, but I remember dancing with my little girl. Fifty, almost fifty now.
My son bequeathed me a Beatles song to deposit in my memory bank, that vault of emotions. It was the song his senior class chose to have played at their high school graduation. Afterward, the Class of 2000 went out into the world. You try to raise them so that they can leave you. We raised Matthew well; he left us to the tune of “In My Life.”
They played Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” at Matthew and Carolyn’s wedding, accompanied by thunder and lightning and four inches of rain before the reception was over. Their marriage, though, has been one of storm-free blue skies—unless you count the occasional full-throated explosion from a baby boy, teething or otherwise enraged. Three baby boys, in fact, Andrew, William, and James.
William, when babysitting Grandma and Grandpa put him down for his nap, would hear of no lullaby other than the one his mother sang: “You Are My Sunshine.” I’m sure Andrew and James had their special songs, too, but they kept that secret between themselves and their mother. I could make all three of them laugh until the tears came, though, with my PG-rated variations on the public library song:
The place to go when you need to pee,
Is your local public li-brar-y.
Andrew, entering his teenage years and too old for toys but too young to want clothes, is hard to shop for for birthdays and Christmas. What music does he like? Even if we knew, how does one buy music these days? No 45s, no albums, no 8-tracks, no cassettes, even CDs almost a thing of the past. Kids listen on their cellphones, I take it, but how does that music get there? No, don’t bother explaining to me. I really don’t care. This world is not my world, its music not my music.
I don’t have the energy or the interest to attempt to keep up with newer music. Is rap really music? If it is, it’s not for me. I wouldn’t know a Taylor Swift song if I tripped over one. I’m hopeless on Jeopardy when a pop music category comes up. Do they still compose classical music? Couldn’t prove it by me. Of course, there’s contemporary jazz, but I can’t be bothered with it. The old stuff, that’s my music. Decades, centuries old. Old, old music for an old, old man.
Can you name one song written for an old man? Well, there is Chopin’s “Funeral March.” The funereal and the elegiac, that’s what we old men are left with.
I used to think half-seriously of compiling a playlist as background music for those hardy few who’ll gather, in lieu of a formal funeral, in some tavern party-room to toast my passing. No longer. I don’t care what music they play; I don’t care if they play music at all. I won’t be there to hear it, will I?
Now, I ponder more than half-seriously what music will be the last I’ll hear as I lay dying, in the very last moments of my life. For I would like some music to accompany, if not drown out, the death rattle.
If I could choose, I’ve thought of Bach’s The Goldbery Variations, my favorite of all classical pieces. I’ve thought of Davis’s Kind of Blue, drifting on out with Miles and Coltraine and Cannonball and those other divinely cool cats. I’ve thought of my favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” which always brings me comfort even in my most agnostic moods. I think of “St. Louis Blues,” which I hereby declare to be my favorite song of all time. I’d go strutting on out with Bessie Smirth, Satchmo on the trumpet.
But probably I won’t get to choose. I’ll hear whatever my weary, frightened self conjures up for me. I bet it will be a lullaby, the one my mother sang to her baby boy, in need of comfort. I don’t remember what song she sang, but I know that she sang to me, and I’m sure that when the time comes, I’ll say, Oh yes, that song.
Then, the silence.
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.
