Ginny Sims: “Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine” (1945)
Lie back, daughter, let your head /be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread /your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead- /man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater /ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash /to your island, look up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you /and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you: /lie gently back and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
(Phillip Booth: “First Lesson”)
When I was a child, music was all around me. I heard it all the time in our house, which is funny because neither my mother nor father nor stepdad played an instrument, nor did I later on, and the one time I asked to study an instrument (the string bass, and if not the bass, then drums), I got an emphatic ‘no’ as answer, not on our budget and certainly not in our small house. Nor did I sing in any kind of organized chorus or ensemble until junior high, though after that I sang all the time, and often in public.
But my mother sang. That’s my memory: her singing in the house as she did work. I still remember what her voice sounded like, the songs she sang, the way her face lit up and became expressive as she sang, and how much pleasure she seemed to get singing to me.
My mother was married three years out of high school, in 1935, the middle of the Great Depression. A year later she gave birth to me, and from then on, she had not only me, a young child, to deal with but my father as well, a man with a drinking problem who grew progressively uncommunicative as the marriage continued. When I was eight, she shed him for good and soon after, married my stepfather John.
John, my Dad, was a lovely man and always a good husband and father. But he was tone deaf. He couldn’t sing a note to save his life. He listened to music mostly because of the excitement it generated. Indeed, one of the ways he courted my mother through their forty-odd years of marriage was by stepping onto the dance floor with her, staring at her across from him as though she were one of a kind. Then the two of them would do a quick step in time to the music that was playing. My Dad couldn’t tell one note from another, but on the dance floor, he was an instant winner. When I was older, in college, they joined a dance club –that’s how much they liked dancing. We even double dated once.
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Until I was six or seven, old enough for school, the music I heard in our house came from either my mother’s voice or the radio. We purchased our first record player when I was in grade school but it was always a sometime sensation in the house. We never had more than a few records and –Mom, not Dad– played them one at a time, the same song over and over until she grew tired of it and moved on to the next hit she wanted to learn by heart. My mother loved to tell of how when she was single, she’d been lead singer for a local swing band. I don’t know the band’s name nor how long she sang for it or when and where, but once having been vocalist for a swing band, she had an accomplishment that didn’t vanish when she moved on to being simply a stay-at-home wife and mother instead.
She favored mostly pop tunes, peppered with a few older favorites –songs heavy with sentiment to the point of kitsch like “Cuddle Up a Little Closer (Lovey Mine),” vintage 1908, “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It, I Didn’t Want to Do It),” 1913, and “Peg of My Heart,” same year..
She liked novelty songs too. I remember her singing the Andrews Sisters’ 1943 hit, “Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby”, which was named after a World War II bomber plane. She liked Slim and Slam’s “Flat Foot Floogie (With a Floy Floy)” (1938) and 1941’s “The Hut-Sut Song” (“Hut-sut Rawlson on the rillerah / and a brawla brawla sooit”). One of the songs I remember is “Mairzy Doats” (1943). I’m eighty-one now and I can still sing it from memory. I was seven when I first heard it.
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I must have sung along with my mother back then but I have no memory of it. Memory is selective and I selected not to remember a lot of things about those early years because it wasn’t a happy time for me. The point is, though, that even before I embarked on my own path of singing, I grew up listening to songs and surrounded by music. It was around me all the time. Because of it, I felt happy at times when for other reasons I often felt out of place.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
The Pied Pipers, “Mairzy Doats” (1944)
MUSIC & ME 