Music and lyrics mean a lot

I’m involved in a project that caused me to interview a number of people who ranged in age from 85 to 99. While some are better able to express themselves than others, each has a lifetime of experience and memories, which usually add up to wisdom.

In a care center a few days ago I visited with a lady named Esther. She is 97. We covered the matter that took me there, then reminisced about her youth.

Pleased to have a visitor, Esther displayed a scrapbook filled with photographs, cards, newspaper clippings.

She browsed, turning pages slowly until, near the center of the book, she stopped. On the left page was her wedding picture, on the right the hand-printed lyrics of a song.

The song, “Always,” was written by Irving Berlin in 1925. This was before my time. I’d heard it, but was not impressed. I asked if it had been sung at her wedding. It had not. She and Alfred were married in her parent’s home, she said, a small ceremony without music.

Esther put a trembling finger on the page, touched the photograph, then the words.

She spoke softly of an evening 85 years ago. She was thirteen years old and had gone to a band concert in the park.

That night there was a vocalist, a lady named Madge who clerked in a downtown grocery store. Madge sang in church, at funerals. That night, with a band behind her, she sang “Always.”

This was the first time Esther had heard Madge sing outside church, the first time she’d heard “Always.”  

The lyrics, she said, the melody, Madge’s rich voice drifting through the night, touched and moved her in a way she could not explain.

She sat on a bench and cried, she told me, cried long after the song had ended.

Now, leaning forward in her wheel chair, she whispered: “Not for just an hour/Not for just a day/Not for just a year/But always.”

Memories swept over her and she wept again. It was difficult for me not to.

That evening I was flipping through channels and encountered the smiling face of a liberal commentator and television personality named Alan Colmes.

Colmes was arguing with two radical conservatives who took the position that rampant sex, raw profanity and adulation of drugs and violence in today’s popular music is not a good thing to heap on impressionable children. Colmes laughed this off as absurd.

Youngsters, he insisted, are not influenced by song lyrics and besides, there is freedom of speech.

One of his antagonists persisted, suggesting that the views expressed should not be legitimized and celebrated by inviting offensive performers to sing at nationally televised sporting events, or by asking them to appear at the White House.

Colmes, of course, disagreed. I failed to grasp his point, but it had to do with bigotry and the mistreatment certain classes experience at the hands of our unenlightened society.

I turned the TV off wondering if the life of Esther, and others of her generation, might have been different if, instead of being emotionally moved by “Always,” she had—at the age of thirteen—been treated to a concert extolling the glories of cocaine and group sex.

Colmes may know what he’s talking about, but I doubt it.         

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com