Musical Meanderings

There is a wonderful website that I discovered not long ago. It is called Pandora and is billed as a "music genome project". They provide streaming music that the listener can tailor to their tastes by selecting their favorite artists and songs and building radio stations around the style of those performers. I have started listening to it as I work and find myself taking little journeys back in time during my day.

The first station I created was Ella Fitzgerald. She is an absolute favorite, a singer whose voice reaches my ears and immediately I feel a wave of calm pass through me. Whenever the kids are spending the night here (which has been frequently) I put on Ella's "30 by Ella" (in my opinion, one of her best recordings) and as soon as the opening notes of the first song play the 2 year old starts to settle down.

 
Another early station was Iris Dement. She is a folk singer with a most unique voice, one that seems to embody rural living. I was introduced to Iris by a dear friend who has since died. His name was Scott and we met in college. He was brilliant, troubled and fought a lifelong battle with diabetes that first took his sight and not too many years later, his life. After college he lived in Chicago and worked for an organization that advocated for the rights of the disabled. They often traveled to different areas of the country in order to protest various inequities. On one trip to Texas he attended an Iris Dement performance and fell in love with her music. On my next trip to Chicago to visit him we listened to her CD "Infamous Angel" over and again. When Scott died, I inherited that CD as well as Nanci Griffith's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and that music carried me through and beyond the grief of losing someone so dear to me.

One day I decided that I wanted to hear a little Neil Diamond and so added that station. I found myself transported back to my childhood in Australia. He was my mother's favorite singer and so that music infuses my memories of that time. A clear and kind moment from those days really has nothing to do with listening to music yet I found myself once again crouched down in the driveway of one of the parade of houses in which we lived, watching a praying mantis go about his business. I believe I spent hours following that little creature, completely absorbed in a world that was so foreign to my own.

Much of the music I've been listening to takes me back to my early years of living in Boston. I was 19 when I arrived there to embark upon my tour of duty in the US Coast Guard. I found a room to rent that was off base and picked up a parttime job as a landscaper working with a woman who had just started her own business. Way led on to way and I decided not to make a career out of the military and so eventually went to work as a fulltime landscaper. Any extra money I had in those days went to purchase items discovered during the hours spent haunting used book and used music stores. I discovered so many artists during that time - Toni Price, Alison Krauss, Indigo Girls, Lucinda William to name just a few. Also I started to explore different genres, immersing myself in a world of jazz, blues, opera, gospel, and folk music.

It is interesting to me the ways in which music can root us in the times and places of our lives. Through this past winter which has presented so many challenges I find myself frequently travelling back to simpler and sunnier times. The days of working outdoors in nature during my landscaping career in Boston come back most frequently. Some songs allow me to once again smell the heat warmed earth as it crumbles beneath my fingers and feel the breeze cooling my sweat soaked face. Or they transport me back to moments of youthful ardor, or angst, or illumination.

No doubt someday I will have the same experience with the music that has become prominent in the present. Introducing the young ones to some of the greats (Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald) will cause me to travel back to their childhoods when those songs reach my ears, and no doubt will bring a wistful smile to my lips. It really is all about the journey, isn't it?