John Jacob Niles, “I Wonder As I Wander”
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that beauty lives though lilies die… (James Elroy Flecker)
My heart wants to sing ev’ry song it hears. (Oscar Hammerstein, II)
I made my song a coat… / Out of old mythologies / From heel to throat… (W. B. Yeats)
I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song. (Louis Armstrong)
Ah, the story of my teens! Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, two things happened that changed the nature and quality of my love affair with music.
The first occurred when I entered the eighth grade. The vocal music teacher in my high school, Mabledean Shook, recruited me to sing in the senior high chorus. Then, not long after, 45 rpm EP (extended play) and 33 rpm LP (long play) records surfaced in the record stores. They played longer and were easier to handle and stack than 78s: listening to them, I could listen longer, repeatedly and more intensely than previously had been possible.
All this happened when for the first time I had extra cash to spend. I’d taken on a paper route when I was fourteen and I was raking in the dough, six or seven dollars a week, which was big money for someone my age ca. 1950. Until I discovered girls a few years later, I spent most of my money on records, books and magazines. Even after girls came along, I still bought records when I had cash because being current on music hits made me seem cool to girls and I needed all the help I could get in that respect.
I joined senior high chorus in the eighth grade. Technically I wasn’t eligible to join for another year: it was a senior high chorus and I was a junior high student. But Mabledean was short on male voices so she recruited a few of us –my memory is Dave Kratovil, Chuck Mustain, Irv Hodson and me — to fill the gap.the
Mabledean had more effect on me than any other teacher in high school. She was rail thin, with frizzy black hair and thick black eyebrows, and filled with, I mean radiating, energy. She saw things differently than other teachers. She seemed to walk through life wearing a different set of lenses. It wasn’t off putting to me at all. It was exhilarating. She came across as ironic (though I doubt I knew what the word meant then), not loopy. We acted out in her class but we all respected her and we all thought it a big deal to be in chorus. But we were young and callow, and spending an hour every other day cooped up in a class room with no release for our energy except screwing around was too much to endure. And Mabledean, regardless of her estimable qualities in most respects, was a piss poor disciplinarian.
I responded to Mabledean first simply because I loved to sing but over time I responded also to the attitude she projected. She was the first free spirit I knew –indeed, one of the few I’d meet in those conservative days in that conservative town, where everyone around me looked like me and acted like me, a white middle-class teen with almost no experience of racial, religious or any other kind of difference or dissonance. I never figured out exactly where Mabledean stood on any subject other than music but her lack of decorum –rather, her willingness to shed decorum at times– appealed to me. She wasn’t automatically reverent toward authority. I responded to that.
I was far from a liberal in those days but I was on my way to becoming one, and she helped me a lot.
Much later, my classmate Chuck Mustain told me that the first years we were in chorus, Mabledean was boffing one of our chorus mates. Until I came along, he’d been the biggest male soloist in the chorus and he was chorus president the year before I was. (I was president for two years.)
My junior year, it fell to me as chorus president to drive to Berea, one town over, to deliver the chorus’s Christmas present to Mabledean. My classmate Chuck Mustain had a car so he went with me. We pulled up in front of her apartment in mid-morning top find that she already had a visitor, another teacher from the school. Mike was his name: he would become a friend of mine when I taught there a few years later. Mike was in the kitchen with Mabledean wearing a pair of pajamas and her bathrobe. I didn’t make the connection then but Chuck reminded me of it later, by which time I realized what Mabledean and Mike had probably been doing the night before.
Chorus played to my strengths and didn’t punish me for my weaknesses. I never really learned how to read music –only half-learned it. But I memorized lightning quick, which meant that I had my part down in a reading or two, earlier than anyone else, so nobody noticed my deficiency. I also had strong lungs and my voice was clear without a wobble. I had, or could use, a vibrato but always had it under control. I could stand out or blend in as needed. I also had an ear for pitch and still do: ask me the note a melody starts on and nine times out of ten, I will get it right on the first try. As a consequence, other singers honed in on me for pitch, and boy, did that feel good when you’re fourteen or fifteen and there’s not much of anything else you feel sure about.
***
By the ninth grade, I was soloing regularly and for the next four years, I was a featured soloist at Christmas and Easter, in the school assemblies we regularly gave and at our twice a year public recitals. If you sang in chorus, you sang in glee club and whenever Mabledean needed a mixed or men’s quartet, I was part of that too, so I sang a lot and in different combinations of singers.
***
I sang in the all-county chorus four years running. That sounds impressive but it wasn’t, at least not much, because each school sent one singer per part to the all-county chorus and we were a small school and didn’t have a lot of duplicates in our sections. With two first tenors and three second tenors, Mabledean didn’t have much choice whom to send.
***
My sophomore year, we needed new choir robes. We put on a minstrel show to raise money to purchase them. It worked so well that we did it the following year as well. Both years, I was the interlocutor, the only white face on stage. At the time, I didn’t think what that said about race attitudes. Both years, the men’s quartet was featured, plus I soloed. My senior year, I sang in chorus and glee club and soloed in both, formed my own quartet which got paying (though not that many) jobs and I sang at my first wedding. It was a heady time!
***
One period during school day was designated as Activity Period, when student organizations met to conduct their business. My senior year, I was elected vice president of the Honor Society but the men’s glee club met the same day as Honor Society so I never showed up for Honor Society meetings. My nemesis among teachers, Miss Harding, was the Honor Society advisor. She told me that if I didn’t attend meetings, I’d be dropped from the membership. With the great tact I always showed around her, I said: Go ahead. I don’t care. We do things in glee club and you don’t do anything in Honor Society except sit around being honored. So if you want to get rid of me, go ahead, fine!
That went over well. I didn’t get dropped from Honor Society but never learned why.
***
Chorus rehearsed twice a week and glee club a third day. The other singing groups practiced around the edges, but that far back, I don’t remember when. We performed at school assemblies, where the audience was our classmates, but also put on two concerts a year that were open to the town –our parents and siblings, teachers and school board members attended.
The composition of the programs didn’t vary much. They were usually a mixture of religious songs, show tunes and novelty songs. They leaned heavily on the arrangements of John Jacob Niles or the stable of arrangers working for Fred Waring. The biggest element of any program was the chorus but there’d be a song each by the boys’ and girls’ glee clubs and maybe something by a boys’ quartet or a mixed quartet. At Christmas, we always sang “The Carol of the Bells,” which is a chorister’s wet dream, parts rushing one after the other, the sharp ringing chords imitating the sound of church bells. I remember that two years running, we sang John Jacob Niles’s “I Wonder as I Wander,” which was basically a solo piece for me backed by choral oohs and aahs. We sang “Dem Dry Bones” at both minstrel shows.
“Always, Always on key.” (French teacher Ann Goodall, writing in my yearbook)
***
I performed on stage for the first time in the eighth grade. It was a chorus concert, the fall of 1949. I was thirteen. I had my first solo in 1950 or 1951, again with the chorus. That was also the year I formed my first quartet. (Well, Mabledean formed it but I led it.) I think I soloed in every chorus concert from the ninth grade on. My sophomore and junior years, 1952 and 1953, I narrated the Dance Club concert and was interlocutor for the minstrel shows. In 1953 and 1954, I started acting in high school plays. I acted badly but I acted.
And once I started, I never stopped.
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Was I any good at all of this? My efforts were of varying quality. I wasn’t very good as an actor back then but as a singer, I had talent. To be charitable, I was raw but talented. But I was talented. The difference between my singing and my acting was that I improved as a singer but I plateaued as an actor. I did better and better voice-wise but never learned what to do with with my body. And unfortunately on stage, body comes with voice. It’s a package deal. My hands were a particular problem: I never knew where to put them.
I have never suffered from stage fright then or since and I learned early how to project my voice and that you had to cheat face and body toward the audience if you wanted them to know what you were saying and feeling and I learned early how to engage the audience’s attention, though not very subtly at first.
But my body was a constant problem on stage.
Maybe that’s why when I sang in in quartets back then, I screwed around so much. Playing the goof took attention away from my awkwardness. Plus the audience liked what I was doing and early on, I knew that pleasing the audience was what it was all about.
And hey, cheap laughs are better than no laughs at all!
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
MUSIC & ME 