Musical Memories 1939-1965
Personal life journeys over the years defy the use of any simple prescription or format. We are all unique creatures with unique family backgrounds, attitudes, preconceptions, likes and dislikes. However, a national, cultural history marked by shared events such as celebrations, tragedies and scientific triumphs paint the tapestry of our lives together. Jazz, folk songs, symphonies, romantic heart breaks, and even, Gregorian chants from the Cluny Abbey serve as musical guideposts to blend together today’s technological/medical discoveries with the deeply folksy spirit that is brought to us by our modern, traveling troubadours of song.
Songs and melodies highlighting the lives of the butcher, baker, candlestick maker and textile operatives plus those of the movers and shakers within Spindle City. i.e. the mill owners or the middle managers abounded happily because of live theater presentations at the Strand and Keith theaters and, of course, because of the remarkably successful advent of commercial radio stations for individual home owners.
Certain, ethnic-based radio stations carried Polish, French-Canadian and other language-intense programing to appeal to diverse immigrant groups operating with the city. Polka and waltz music was very popular and so were the sounds of the big bands spread across the country. The Lakeview Ballroom sitting by the glistening lake in Dracut was a favorite gathering spot for local dance enthusiasts of the fox-trot, the polka, the waltz and the Charleston. Apparently, the real aficionados of the dance floor could also find some solo time on the floor following the beat of the Lindy Hop. There was something for every musical taste during the 1930s through the 1950s.
Personal Musical Tastes
Having been exposed to the music of the big bands on the radio through my mother’s influence, – she proudly had shown me her winner’s medals for doing the Charleston in a contest – I quickly began to appreciate the sounds of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and the voice of Frank Sinatra. There usually was a musical background to all kitchen conversations in our home, which tempered the generally stressful tenor of our financial lives. A home-made ragout served once again during the week is easier on the stomach when it is served with pleasant tones emanating from that xx radio sitting on the Singer sewing machine next to that ugly large, white icebox.
I had several favorite songs or melodies – poetry in music – over the years covering 1939 to around 1965. The following selection represents a few that had a particular meaning for me when they first appeared on the scene. They are presented here without any particular order of importance.
Each had, at least, a momentary impact on my personal views at the time. But, like an Impressionist tableau, beauty is in the eyes and heart of the beholder.
Janis Joplin – Me & Bobby McGee
After decades of scientific studies both in the States and in Germany and after my divorce in ~ 1974, the thought of making an impulsive, musical and romantic voyage across the American landscape became a reality. My Bobby McGee came in the form of a beautiful, singing/dancing creature born and bred in Albuquerque’s folk- and square-dancing traditions.
Heartbreak often calls the final tune for the foolishly entranced, romantic and melodic player on life’s wide open dance- floor.
Bobbie Gentry, 1967: Ode to Billie Joe
There was a mysterious flavor and appeal to this haunting 1967 tune. What did really happen to Billie Joe? Like in real life, what happened at Chappaquiddick?
Mary Hopkin Those were the days lyrics
A State College (town location of Pennsylvania State University) tavern or two had mitigated my long, graduate study nights that were shared with equally-tired, fellow Ph.D. hopefuls, who were all facing another review committee in the morning, which possibly might decide their entire professional future. There was a lot in the balance.
Pete Seeger – This Land is Your Land
After spending a few years working quite assiduously, I might interject, with many other physicists, engineers, mathematicians, chemists and technicians – they really do a lot of the work – I was hanging around with several co-workers, who also enjoyed the spirit of making community dances possible through their able footwork and by playing their instruments such as guitar, fiddle, banjo and harp. Pete Seeger’s many folk melodies were the natural components of this type of group activity and fun.
Marlene Dietrich UNICEF GALA 1962 ” sag mir wo die Blumen sind “
Several folk songs that were popular in Germany during WWII were either simultaneously popular in the USA or, later, become popular here after that conflict. Marlene Dietrich was celebrated at a UNICEF GALA in 1962 for her rendition of this anti-war tune, which in English is called: “Where have all the flowers gone?” The haunting message is the same in English, French and German
My aunt Florence might come visiting us with her hubby, Gerard, by first intoning at the door the first few lines of La Vie en Rose. A musical mantra became embedded in my subconscious. This melody was our family’s personal and direct link to all the Poor People of Paris that Mademoiselle Piaff represented both during and after La Seconde Guerre Mondiale!
La Goualante du Pauvre Jean – Poor People of Paris
There is a certain advantage of having been raised in two distinct cultures, which share many similarities, but which also present the beholder often two different sets of attitudes, beliefs and responses. In this simple way, life becomes more open to other possibilities. Simple daily boredom can be replaced by confusing and opposite responses. In this painful expose, Miss Piaff highlights the the daily plights of a love-broken man facing life alone.
Les Feuilles Mortes_Yves Montand à l´Olympia Autumn Leaves
Dead leaves litter the gardens, paths and alleys of our past passions and remind us – oh, I hope that they also remind you – of our hopes and fears, tears and uncertainties that reverberated in our joint, fractured belief of an eternal happiness together.
Le bon chansonnier et poète, Brel, nous encouragent de cracher dans les étoiles en dégoût manifeste du monde d’aujourd’hui comme le font les marins de ce port. “La vie ne fait pas de cadeaux.” Here, he looks at our lives with those crushing disappointments, which are the brilliant adornments and dismal defeats that highlight our human existence. It’s all a sham, my friends! Jacques Brel does not disguise his impressions on being a human being in that jungle that we call our world.
Gordon Lightfoot Sundown
The Canadian songster, Gordon Lightfoot, got my attention again after my divorce from my first wife, Beryl, and at a time when being immersed every day and night in the fascinating challenges of pulsed power technology was beginning to wear thin. Personal commitments to music, dance (International and ballroom) and poetry were then sadly lacking in my life. Professional progress was, naturally, a mark of success and, yet, where was the “ joie de vivre et l’élan vital” in my world? Maybe, after decades of concentrated studies in science and mathematics, my neocortical connections were simply tired and frayed? But, what to do?
Gordon Lightfoot – Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Gordon Lightfoot first caught my listening attention right after I moved into the University Club on the PSU campus in the fall of 1961 when I eagerly looked forward to expand my world academically but also in a broad area of literary, philosophical, political and socioeconomic disciplines. Up to that time, I saw the world around me through Lowell lenses, i.e., stories in the Lowell Sun newspaper, my Franco-American, 18th century, Catholic upbringing and the general attitudes and ethos of Lowellites from the 1900 through the early 1960s. Was there more to know about our seemingly quite complicated world? Maybe, and I was eager to find out at the Pennsylvania State University in central Pennsylvania.
City of New Orleans, Arlo Guthrie
As someone else so aptly called it: A Norman Rockwell naustalgic treat!
Joan Baez – Blowing in the Wind
When I accepted my first R&D position at the Lawrence Liverore Laboratory in the fall of 1963, I quickly became aware about the brazzaro situation in California’s rich agricultural valleys, mostly through the unionizing efforts of the farm workers’ organizer, Cesar Chavez. My home location in Lowell, Massachusetts placed me diametrically on the other side of the American continent. Farm labor issues around a decent salary and good working conditions were hardly part of my work-a-day schedule while attending the Lowell Technological Institute, LTI, from 1957 to 1961. However, because of the fervor that Joan Baez had brought to this issue, I suddenly became aware that everything was not exactly fair in the treatment of the Mexican farm laborers at the hands of Californian land owners. Slowly, I started to think that exploitation might be the underlying economic exchange at work. My own father’s years of servitude as a “mill rat” in Spindle City (1942 – 1953) had left me with the anxious question: Is our whole economy built on a vast pool of undereducated, desperate immigrants too frightened stand up for themselves?
Tennessee Waltz (1950) – Patti Page
In the autumn of 1950, I was a 6th grade student at l’Ecole Saint-Louis de France elementary school located on Boisvert Street next to the parish church with the same name. Generally, I felt okay about the strict discipline that the black-clad nuns imposed on us although some of the other boys in my classroom were showing signs of stirring resentment and some disrespect for the no-nonsense regiment in place. I was aware of romantic stirrings taking place inside me and the embarrassing discomfort that I felt while I stood near some of my favorites. Love lost melodies sold well at the time and Patti Page soon became, for me, a tender model of that genre. Curiously enough, many years later when I was dating Pamela McKeever in Albuquerque, NM, around 1975, she, too, had a special vivid response to that same love -tragic melody. We seem to encounter again and again poignant connections to yesterday’s highlights.
Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pastenak‘s novel is the closest that I have ever come to understanding, even imperfectly, the world of revolutionary Russia marked by treachery, dismay, murderous moments, Tsarists’ calamities and, yet, blended into a moving romantic undertone of “love will conquer all”. My previous efforts with Dostoevsky’s “Crime “and Punishment”, “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov” had left me confused with the ubiquitous machinations of quilt-ridden demons hiding within the skulls of the characters. In contrast, a modest effort on my part permitted me to appreciate somewhat the style of Turgenev (Fathers and Sons) and also of Tolstoy ( War and Peace) but, the truth be told, my shockingly paltry level of effort betrays my lack of education/erudition in the classics and, in particular, in the Russian classics.
Edelweiss – Julie Andrews – The Sound Of Music, HD with Lyrics
White blooms emerging from a snowy tapestry in the Austrian Alps remind us, yet again, that Mother Nature easily bedazzles us with her dual nature of fused beauty and cavernous danger.
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Some of these next melodies go back to the Depression years, but they were often still heard on the radio years after WWII. Indirectly, they also became items for my list of favorite songs. There are several French songs also. Remember that at home, we usually spoke French, especially, my Mom and other relatives. Also, I got to enjoy several German ballads when I studied that language at LTI – now, U-Mass-Lowell.
Blowin’ in the Wind – Peter Paul & Mary
Bob Dylan in 1962 and, also, Peter Paul and Mary (1963) brought to our attention the “rolling stone” economic, rich/poor disunity and corporate well-being, which highlighted our Cuban Crisis days of national fear and anxiety. General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command, SAC, had previously suggested to Washington hawks that our neighboring island nation needed to be bombed back to the stone age, a solution, which the new American administration had put onto the back burner, at least temporarily. However, we, Americans, seemed resolute to back 100% JFK in his strong military, naval stance against Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev’s warships. Unknown to the public, however, there were back-channel communications buzzing between Moscow and Washington on an acceptable diplomatic solution. Apparently, our Russian foes felt highly threatened by the batteries of American, nuclear and thermonuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in Turkey, which were all capable of incinerating key Soviet cities and military sites in the old USSR.
Safely tucked away with my fellow graduate student friends at PSU’s University Club, we gawked in amazement when President Kennedy announced on TV (Monday, October 22, 1962) that we were on the brink of a potential nuclear holocaust. The dead on both sides would be measured in the tens of millions. As we learned much later, the Russian vessels in the waters outside that Cuban island were equipped with 92 tactical devices loaded with A-bombs of the period, which the naval authorities on the Russian ships wished to launch as a first strike on American cities located on our East Coast such as Boston, New York, Washington, Miami and extending to the mid-west to include Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, etc.
Clearly, more rational and diplomatic minds needed to be assembled to avert a most unfortunate set of negative results that would rattle all the world’s populations and economies at once. It was under these tense circumstances that heard uttered, a few days later, by two of my graduate colleagues the apocryphal comments: “See you next Thursday.” followed by “If there is a next Thursday!”
June, 1957 marked the end of my high-school years. For four years, my friends, George Bourbeau and Roger St-Armand had enchantingly enhanced my appreciation of Dracut’s bucolic beauty and rustic farmland charm through many weekend expeditions as modern-day “courreurs de bois” (Franco-Canadian woodsmen) through the woods, marshes, meadows and rocky promontories that were often covered with xx and New England birch trees galore. Sure, there were times when the munching cows on a farmer’s pasture interrupted our idyllic fantasies about being on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803 – 1806) and, possibly, becoming unrecognized, American heroes in our own special way. These were adventurous times before beautiful , young girls in Lowell’s environs captured our attention and major focus.
Each one of us, riding our bicycles from my house on Ludlam Street in Centralville, up the road to Bridge St. and proceeding to the left to Willard St. (where a right turn was needed) managed, so many times, to escape Lowell’s busy, retail/residential neighborhoods to our chosen destination located about one mile short of the sand/gravel station on Willard.
And, how were we prepared to face the raw elements on our journey? Every participant was expected to be equipped with a knapsack, a canteen, a Bowie knife or the equivalent, WWII Army boots, double layers of old, corduroy trousers and jackets for winter challenges, and a roll of toilet tissue plus the essential cooking paraphernalia like a mess kit, a spoon, a knife and a fork.
farmland beauty and
For years already, we had experienced the visceral political attacks of Senator McCarthy’s warnings regarding the suspected presence of Communists in and
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The Seekers: I’ll never find another you 1965
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Lili Marleen – Lyrics in German
Mr. Henry Myers, our German instructor at U-Mass-Lowell in the late 1950s had a brilliant idea to teach us German culture, attitudes, music, philosophy plus, of course, the grammar of that Teutonic tongue through a varied exposure to the works of Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich von Kleist, Rainer Maria Rilke, and, of course, Franz Kafka. This academic introduction to the moving essence of literary German was then augmented by a broad exposure to the world of Volkslider, which had been collected over the past three centuries.
Mein Vater war ein Wandersmann and many more examples brightened our hard hours of study. During some evenings, these musical gems were nicely coupled to platefuls of hardy appetizers such as cheese, sausage, beer and, occasionally,“weiss Wein”, which later, developed into wonderful evenings of camaraderie and song. Sure, it was hard work, of course, but somebody had to do it!
Hundert Mann und ein Befehl – 100 Men and One Order
Work in Progress – Although this tune is set to a strident military march tempo, it surely represents the strongest anti-war message emanating from remaining, WWII Wehrmacht veterans to reach American ears. A stream of reflective thoughts come pouring out on taking orders, following orders, a comrade possibly being killed today or this soldier-poet killed tomorrow.
Then, there is the year-long separation from a wife/sweetheart back home. Why are we trudging through sand and gravel? Nobody wants to obey that order, but personal choice places no part in this soldier’s fate that follows. There is a certain methodology in this political ideology called National Socialism.
Heidi Brühl (1965) renders a poignant interpretation of these war scenes from the viewpoint of the wife/girlfriend left behind on the home-front. In contrast, Freddy Quinn’s rendition of this drama places the listener side-by-side in step with the constant anxieties of this soldier-songwriter, who deeply questions the meaning of such mechanized, killing madness. Why must all this be happening? Appropriately, this second version renders a tribute to the many Wehrmacht soldiers, who answered their country’s call under Hitler to defend the Vaterland against foes, both internal and external.
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collection is part #1 of that group.
