Our collection of 78 rpm discs ranged from Rudy Vallee crooning “Mmmm, Would You Like to Take a Walk” to Frank Crummit’s “Frankie and Johnny” to the jazz collected by Peter from age ten, all dominated by Dad’s ever expanding collection of classics.
Relatives who could sing and play piano and banjo often brought live music into our living room. Many an evening when I was very small, I lay awake after bedtime, listening to cousin Mary’s charming mezzo soprano, with our Aunt Jessie accompanying her at the piano downstairs. Mary let a song sing itself, its cadences falling and rising as it moved her voice along - moving listeners and accompanist as well. A Highland lullaby, “Husha-ba, Birdie, Croon, Croon”, soaked itself into my bones.
Uncle Jack’s magnificent baritone voice could handle Handel, then switch as effectively to a rollicking sea chantey or a music hall gem garnered in London on leave during in the first World War. We often clamoured for the calm beauty of “Where’ere You Walk”, the nostalgia of “Road to the Isles” and “Trade Winds”, or “Oh, Mr. Brown”, where Jack imitated a simpering, but forward, young lady, impatient of her much too gentlemanly caller.
Our ornately carved piano had a moveable keyboard that allowed us to adjust pitch, but also tended to slow down slightly the action of the keys. This dear old upright never had one day of rest. I still have a photo of Peter's spaniel, Honey, lying in the crook of the left-hand support and the back of the piano, looking up at me with melting eyes as I stumble through a favourite Bach piece or a new folk song discovery.
My two brothers and I each took a year or so of lessons, then continued on our own. My younger brother had the nimblest fingers, and a quick ear. Within a couple of months of finding his way around a guitar, clarinet or flute, he could play with any tune that struck his fancy, in any style, even on our sluggish piano.
Some children bring home stray animals. I collected stray songs, beginning in kindergarten with "The Friendly Beasts", a carol about a donkey, a cow, a camel, a sheep and two doves. When I brought them home, my parents had all the advantage of a menagerie with none of the attendant barnyard noises or smells. They didn't have to walk or feed anything. All they had to listen to was my piping voice, and be glad it was not caroling the cumulative joys of "Old MacDonald's Farm."
I became a tireless collector of traditional folk music from all over the world and across Canada. I was as absorbed in learning new tunes with words in their original tongue as the lads who tinker with cars in their driveways are intrigued by engines. A song from Mongolia about a horse fascinated me with its giant leaps between notes. I learned how to pronounce Hungarian well enough to sing, although the exact meaning of all the words was beyond me. At least I understood the French and German songs in my collection.
The bulk of my folk repertoire was in English, however - from all over the British Isles and North America. Irish songs like “My Love’s an Arbutus” were among my mother’s favourites when I sang in the evenings to the accompaniment of Dad’s home-crafted authoharp.
My ingenious father had created his own autoharp, enhanced with a much wider range of harmonies than available on commercial models. We could perform classics with all the original chords, as well as simple folk music. Dad’s gifted fingers wove a variety of rhythmic patterns.
I mentioned the sublime and the ridiculous. “Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer” was not one of the Friendly Beasts who played their part in a story two thousand years old. The imaginary reindeer with a nose that glowed bright in the dark sprang into fame, and to the top of the Hit Parade “one foggy Christmas Eve” in the 1940s. The tinny little tune to the tango rhythm didn’t catch on with one snobby teenager - me, already on the Bach beat.
My Saturday job at Christmas took me to the middle of Simpson’s Toyland, where the popular Rudolph counter reverberated with several versions of the Rudolph song in different keys, all at once, while we sold Rudolph pencil boxes, music boxes, cuckoo clocks. The tune that I cringed at came back to taunt me years later, in India, of all places.
