what music remembers

I am the daughter of a musician. I am a child of the 60’s. I am the mother of musicians. I sing, I dance, I think in lyrics. When I hear certain music my body remembers what my head and heart may have forgotten. Music is probably the truest language of my heart And prayers the language of my soul. Maybe it’s the reverse, but that’s just a head trip.

My earliest memories are these.

Before i was even old enough to go to school, I would be lifted up and placed on a table beside the record player and given the supreme responsibility of changing the records while my teenage sisters and their friends danced sock-hop style across the living room floor. I memorized the songs by the labels on the 45’s (perhaps a foreign term, but what we called single records). This is the stuff of Happy Days…and they were.

Another memory so vivid it could have been yesterday…I sat on the piano while my Dad’s band rehearsed. Occasionally I would get to tag along when the band played at the Hanes High School prom or a dinner club. I thought the view from the top of the piano must be the best seat in the whole wide world.

Good and important memories.

Things change. My Dad died suddenly when I was nine-years-old. He actually died as his music was being replayed following a gig at a jazz festival in Charleston. I think he liked that. But I feel that at the tender age of nine I lost more than a father, I lost the musical advocate for a girl growing up in the post- 50’s South. i wanted to play organ and skip the piano lessons. No was the answer…that’s not how it’s done. Okay, I want to play drums in the junior high school band. No was the answer. That’s not the way it’s done. Girls don’t play drums. I caved. I played clarinet and later guitar. But I do wonder what it would have been like to have a father who advocated for the choices I wanted to make.

So here’s what I mean about what music remembers. Many years later I am a single mom with three teenage boys. They play guitar and flute and drums and banjo and a little bit of whatever is around. They have friends and girlfriends who play trumpet and cello and bass and harmonica and spoons. Our house is often an open jam and a place where passers-by feel comfortable walking through the front door and joining the music-making.

It’s not lost on me that I missed out on having a musician father yet received three musician sons and a whole herd of musical teenagers along the way. Life has a way of filling in the holes if we’re patient and willing to accept the gifts of the moment. Like this:

One night I dragged myself into the kitchen after a long day at work. I heard the beautiful sound of a saxophone. The instrument I most loved to hear my Dad play. I knew immediately, somehow that it was my Dad’s saxophone I was hearing. I walked into the living room and saw my son’s hands before I saw his face. What I saw were my Dad’s long, beautiful fingers. I remembered my Dad’s hands…Adam’s hands. I didn’t even know that my body had stored the memory of my Dad’s hands. The smell of the saxophone case…the sounds of the instrument…the beauty of the hand-scored music sheets worked together to unleash amazing memory.

Those hand-scored sheets of music magically survived many moves and changes and came to rest in our living room along with all of the instruments and other more contemporary music books. So check this out.

Same living room where I remembered my Dad’s hands, but a few weeks later. We were hosting several members of a German acapella boys choir. After the performance we all made our way home…a few friends in tow. I went to the kitchen to make some snacks for the assembled group of hungry kids. I began to hear incredible big band style music. I thought they had decided to play one of the tapes of my Dad’s band. I wandered into the living room to find the kids, who did not share a common language, communicating beautifully through my Dad’s sheet music. They were playing together, then changing off who would play which instrument, laughing at their mistakes, improvising improvements. I know with everything within me that the music remembered for them what their language barrier couldn’t produce. Music is a powerful language and carries the memory of all history.

I sometimes forget who I am and where I come from.

Music restores my memory and reminds my soul.

For this I am grateful.