Songs My Mother Sang

My mother had a pretty fair soprano and as a young adult performed in amateur musicals. She sang in that high, quavering style that I associate with artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Ruth Etting ("America's Radio Sweetheart"). I remember that sometimes, when she wasn't busy putting the laundry through the wringer or scrubbing the sink or dusting under the beds, she'd sit at the old Hardman piano and sing the songs of her youth. She sang tin pan alley songs, Gilbert and Sullivan ballads, so-called "Negro spirituals," and also what I now know to be Victorian parlor songs. Her taste was formed in the earlier part of the century (she was born in 1905) and had as far as I can tell ceased to change after about 1935 with the arrival of my older brother and diapers. My mother sang, for example, 1919's "Look for the Silver Lining": "A heart, full of joy and gladness,/ Will always banish sadness and strife./So always look for the silver lining,/ And try to find the sunny side of life." She sang "I've been Working on the Railroad" (first published in 1894) with the refrain "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/ Someone's in the kitchen I know/ Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/Strummin' on the old banjo."  Neither she nor I knew that "Dinah" was a generic name for a female slave, nor did we speculate about what the heck was going on in that kitchen. She sang "Oh, the old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be,/Many long years ago."  She sang a version of what I can now identify as Ed Haley's 1894 hit, "The Fountain in the Park", with the familiar lyric "While strolling in the park one day,/ In the merry, merry month of May,/ I was taken by surprise/ by a pair of roguish eyes..."  Sorry, but I can't remember the rest. She sang, "Shine on harvest moon/ Up in the sky."  And also "Aint She Sweet." And "Home Sweet Home" ("Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,/ Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home").

But the song that stands most vividly in my memory was "Bill" from Showboat. It's a lovely song, but I took it wrong. When my mother sang "I used to think that I would discover/ The perfect lover some day," I  decided that she was finding fault with my father, to whom I was most loyal. In my mind, my father was noble and manly and intelligent, and I resented her singing about "Bill, who's not the type at all/ You'd meet him on the street and never notice him." The refrain was particularly painful to my seven-year-old self: "And I can't explain,/ It's surely not his brain that makes me thrill./ I love him because he's I don't know,/Because he's just my Bill."

I've since learned about fiction, and make-believe.  I can forgive her. 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Now is it "Mairzy Doats" or "Mares Eat Oats"?

[Jim Hermanson]

Lovely post!

It is so true, and so interesting, how the songs that our mothers (and fathers?) sang take us back to an older world, since their sensibilities were formed at a young age.

This is all tied in, also, with the history of recorded music. How much that our parents or grandparents remember comes down from a world of sheet music and parlor pianos and performers instead of one with wax cylinder and later Victrola recordings?

I definitely remember my mother singing most of the songs you mention, but add that a variety of novelty songs from the WWII era: "Three Little Fishies," and "Mairzy Doats" and "The Hut Sut Song."

So, my mom, born in 1918, had taken in a number of songs from HER mom, but also sang the ones more of her generation.

It is so interesting how each person is a living palimpsest of historical detritus!

Herm.