"... we have an emotional connection to music from when our parents were young --
songs that were popular before we were even born ..."
-- Shaunacy Ferro,
"Why You Love Your Parents' Music," Popular Science
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| Record needle, 4-4-14 |
"Young adults have strong positive memories of the music
their parents loved when they were the same age, a study finds.
That flies in the face of the cultural stereotype that
children reject their parents' taste in music."
-- Nancy Shute,
"Turns Out Your Kids Really Did
Love That Music You Played," NPR.org
In a box on a shelf in my basement is my parents' old record collection. It's an eclectic mix of R&B and Motown, Broadway, folk, pop, jazz and crooners.
The Rat Pack is well-represented by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin. There are two Sound of Music soundtracks -- one from the movie starring Julie Andrews, one from the 1959 Broadway show with Mary Martin as Maria. They had lots of Ray Charles, five or six albums. They liked Peter, Paul & Mary. The Lettermen. The Beach Boys. Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Nat King Cole. Benny Goodman. They bought the Beatles' first two albums. There is Harry Belafonte, Carly and Lucy Simon, The Supremes' 1964 "Where Did Our Love Go" LP, when Diana Ross was still practically a baby. They owned three different West Side Story soundtrack albums -- two from the movie, along with the original Broadway cast album from 1957 when the show was billed as a "new musical," and my parents were both 17, in high school, young and in love.
Since CDs, iTunes and Pandora have changed the way we listen to music, records and record players have become forgotten relics. We replaced our turntable with a CD player 25 years ago.
Of course, I could easily find all of these songs online and download them to my iPod. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to hear the music the way my parents heard the music -- on the hi fi, reading the backs of the album jackets that they held in their hands, while the platters spun on their turntable.
So my handy husband unearthed our dusty old turntable from another basement shelf and hooked it up to the stereo for me. Yay, handy husband!
There is something deeply satisfying about the sound a record needle makes when it first touches down and settles into a groove. I love the scratchy static, the pops and snaps that you just can't get from an mp3 file.
I've been listening to my parents' records for a couple of days. Nobody seems to mind. I think they might actually like it. I caught Leo singing The Supremes' "Long Gone Lover" in the car on the way to the gym yesterday.
Music is an intensely intimate thing. What we choose to put into our ears is as personal as what we choose to put into our mouths. I believe that you can learn a lot about someone by listening to the music that they listen to. Borrow someone else's iPod for a day and see what you find out about them.
Listening to the same songs as my parents is one thing. Listening to those songs from the very same pieces of flat, black, circular melted wax that they held in their hands and listened to with their ears almost 60 years ago -- well, that's altogether different. I keep imagining my mom at 17, belly down on her bed with her feet kicked up, thinking dreamy thoughts about my dad as she listened to Tony and Maria sing "A Boy Like That."
These records are the soundtrack from a time in my parents' lives that I can never know, that I was never a part of, and that belonged to them and them alone. But somehow, listening to their music gives me a tiny fraction of a peek at who they were then. It makes me feel strangely close to them in a uniquely powerful way. And I'm grateful for it.
I have no idea how I ended up with their records in my basement, but it's a good thing I did.
It's also a good thing my mother didn't give her box of albums to my brother in law to convert to CDs like I did with a box of my old records, which he "forgot about" and then "accidentally" threw away during a basement clean out.
Sorry kids. If you ever want an intimate musical peek into my younger self, thanks to your Uncle Tom it is probably decaying in a steaming landfill somewhere near Detroit.
