Keep the Music Playing

If we are lucky, we learn music first from our parents. We become aware, slowly or suddenly, of the music they love or the songs they sing. In my case, I was smitten early by the classical music my parents loved. Though their tastes were different (Mother loved opera more, my father orchestral music), the end result was the same for me.

But the first sounds I remember are the popular songs is my mother sang to me. Her name was Ruth, and she had a strong, wonderful voice and loved to sing to her babies. She sang to me and my older brother Mark, and when Laura Jane came along nine years after me, she sang to her, too. Mother was a soprano and was in the church choir for years. All of us grew up to be musicians--Mark as a fine guitarist who actually played in bands, Laura Jane as far and away the best pianist among us, and me as as composer.

I daresay that all of us, though, still carry the sound of our mother's voice with us. That's why the death of Patty Andrews yesterday (on my birthday) makes me so wistful.

Patty Andrews

Our father never like popular music--he is serious (but joyful) about music, still, at the age of 90. He especially loves Classic and Early Romantic composers. Mother, on the other hand, loved many kinds of music, especially popular music on the radio. She died in 2008, but she has never left us, and when I saw early this morning about the last surviving Andrews sister's death at 94, I immediately heard my mother's voice.

She sang many Andrews sisters songs to me when I was little, but I especially remember "A Bushel and a Peck," which came out the year I was born. I can imagine her listening to the radio as she did her chores with two small children, learning a song's lyrics almost on a single hearing. She also sang "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" to us (obviously she sang to Mark, too), as well as standards from many other singers of that era.

I think Mother probably sang to (and with) Laura Jane more than either of her sons, but the bond of a mother and daughter is a special and perhaps sacred thing.

Our parents were both World War II veterans, too, and in my growing years I began to get a sense of what the Andrews sisters meant to all the heroes who offered themselves to serve our country during that terrible time. In the online guest book for Patty Andrews this morning, a man named Joseph Pegler from San Diego spoke for an entire generation when he wrote, "The three of you got a lot of us through the South Pacific during WW2. God bless you for ever."

My blessings for Patty Andrews and her sisters are just as heartfelt but from a very different place inside. I would want to thank her for giving my mother songs that my mother then gave me. They live, and they go on, and their rhythm is a heartbeat that will be with me until my own song has ended.