2007 June « Curmudgeousness’s Weblog

This morning on my drive to work, the local public radio station that I tune into was featuring renderings of “Shenandoah River”. All of the versions I heard on the 40 minute drive, from the hokey to the sublime, were beautiful to me. I need to add this to my chapter on musical influences. You see, when I was in grade school – maybe fourth or fifth grade - a music teacher sang this to us, and taught us to sing it. My impression of him was that of a lanky and goofy looking guy with high-water pants and a bow-tie who sang with an annoying warbled vibrato. However, even at that young age, when he sang the song, accompanying himself on the little studio piano in the room, I was moved by it. I don’t imagine we sang all the verses, and I’m certain their meaning was lost on me anyway. Regardless of my obliviousness to the lyrics, I recognized and identified with something in the plaintive and melancholy nature of the melody and harmony, even at that young age. During that class I was transported as he coached us on what was for a grade school class the big leap in intervals of the melody and with virtually no knowledge of what I was doing began to apply all the expressiveness I could muster in my attempts to sing it. At some point I remember he had stopped the class from singing but my eyes were closed as I was lost in rapture and I belted out a few notes in an unintended and now humiliating solo. I was immediately and rudely returned to the mundane and awkward real world. I remember once a few years after this I acquired a cheap harmonica and drove my parents crazy playing that melody on it and as I learned a little guitar and then a little music theory in much later years it was a melody I often employed in self-teaching. To this day I am easily transported by strains of that melody. So the ride to work was one of those where I was lifted above the concrete and I can’t recall a turn or a lane change I might have made. Rather I think I navigated the ethereal nature of music to make my way here. Somewhere just before I got to work I lightly touched back down on the concrete with goose-bumps. In some ways, and at some times, I wish I could construct for myself an ark and live on those ethereal waterways all the time. But if I did, I imagine I would not have whatever it is that would make the melancholy nature of that tune resonate the way it does.