Just Sing
When I was 11, I had a lovely boy soprano and a kick-ass baseball card collection. These were almost always uniquely unrelated assets, but on one memorable occasion they collided, and my life took the hit.
I grew up on the eastern edge of Rock Creek Park, and walked each weekday to an excellent and well-integrated public elementary school in a neighborhood that was, in the 1960s, home to many of DC’s black doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. The junior high—seventh through ninth grade—I was zoned to attend was less well integrated. Had I gone there I would have been one of only a couple dozen white kids in a class of about 400, in a racially turbulent time. My mother had heard—erroneously, as it turned out—that members of the National Cathedral boys’ choir had an enhanced chance of acceptance at St. Albans School, a prestigious boys school adjacent to the Cathedral and the alma mater of such distinguished Americans as Ted Kennedy, Al Gore and Gore Vidal, among others.
One day she asked me if I’d like to try out for said choir, and I think I replied by saying I’d rather wear a dress. I hope she had the presence of mind to chuckle at the upcoming irony, but she quickly pivoted to bribery: a full box of baseball cards—24 packs of five cards each, with 24 planks of crackling hard, virtually tasteless bubble gum—in exchange for me trying out. Being 11 and having no impulse control, I jumped at the deal before she had a chance to come to her senses. If I’d given it even a few seconds thought, I’d have realized that at five cents a pack, she was dropping a whopping $1.20 on the deal, and would have held out for something bigger, like a baby brother. But I took pity on the old girl, and left the transaction feeling not a whit of guilt. In hindsight, this was likely her revenge for years of family trips when we’d all stop singing when she added her airtight knowledge of lyrics but tone-deaf voice to our car chorus.
I offered a stirring rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner for my audition, was offered a spot, and spent the next 16 months—Thursday and Friday afternoons and weekend mornings—singing hymns in Latin while wearing a long purple robe and clown collar, the only Jewish member of the most strait-laced, jammed-up band of pre-teen boys in human history. I got one thing out of it as, since I couldn’t read music, I had to listen intently and learn the hymns after two or three rehearsal versions, which left me with an excellent ear for chord and melody progressions. Still, the worst deal I ever brokered. Fortunately, steadfastly Episcopalian St. Albans wanted no part of Jewish me, despite my lovely boy soprano.
It's fun having a nice singing voice, but I’ve never considered it a talent, as mine, and pretty everyone else’s, is largely an accident of birth. (Pause to allow some readers to screen scream in dissent.) It’s why I don’t get the whole Barbara Streisand/Josh Groban thing, as I’ve heard singing I’d put at least vaguely in their league at a high school musical or three. I admire fabulous vocals—there’s a note Wicked star Idina Menzel hits in “Defying Gravity” that always gives me chills—but never thought I deserved praise for my minimally fabulous voice. It was just always there. It did earn me my first paying gig:, the role of Winthrop in the American Light Opera Company’s production of The Music Man at the Trinity Theater in Georgetown when I was in third grade. I sang the shit out of “Gary, Indiana” and “Wells Fargo Wagon.” I could still, but don’t.
About a year after I was paroled from the choir, I took three guitar lessons from a kind but painfully boring older woman whose name I can’t remember but to whom I owe a great debt. The first song I learned was “Skip to My Lou,” the companion tune to a partner-stealing dance popular with a young Abraham Lincoln and his ilk. The second was “House of the Rising Sun,” an old, gloomy folk song of uncertain authorship that Eric Burden and the Animals turned into a #1 hit in 1964, three years before I started butchering it. But those songs launched more than half a century of almost exclusively happy strumming and singing.
The best thing to emanate from my bar mitzvah experience was the electric guitar I asked for and received from my grandparents. I have hazy memories of starting a garage band with friends shortly thereafter, but it took only about as long to gather the necessary players as to realize we were all terrible musicians and disband. But I kept playing and singing on my own, and soon, quite literally, hit upon the best audience for what meager chops I had developed: college women. The late 1970s was kind to sensitive singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Jesse Colin Young, and I could throw in clever tunes by John Prine, Steve Goodman, and Jimmy Buffett to show I was well-rounded and had a sense of humor. This all worked to my romantic benefit, which was important, as I didn’t have much else going for me, unless you count the biggest Jewfro on campus, which you shouldn’t.
Singing and playing went the way of all things after graduation, as apparently I thought it important to establish myself in a grown-up career, which led me to bop around the small-town Midwest newspaper industry, and while my guitar came with me on all of my moves, it rarely left its case. I suppose singing must not have been such a critical part of my life and self-image for it to be so easily shelved.
Then along came parenting, which changes everything, and so naturally self-made music was happily returned to my life. Our eldest has always had a fine, super-sized singing voice, and I count among my many rear-view regrets any and all efforts I made to modulate her volume, which I think emanated from having grown up in an uncomfortably loud nuclear family. My reaction to that was at times to become so soft-spoken as to go largely unheard, and unfortunately I carried that noise sensitivity into my next gen. But sing she—and we—did, and our eventually four-person chorus added rudimentary songwriting to our collective resume. As a child, some of Alison’s best work came on the can, the most memorable session taking place at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, where, for about 10 minutes, women fortunate enough to have well-timed potty visits were treated to several original compositions in the always-fabulous acoustical environment that is an airport bathroom stall. One of our many visits to the National Zoo yielded the anti-melodic offering I Like Seals, the lyrics of which were: “I like seals, seals like me, going to the zoo, to see some seals.” There was the ever-popular getting-dressed ditty If You’re Able To See The Label, Then You Know Which Way Your Underpants Go. And one too many mornings spent at a frigid hockey rink spurred my wife to pen the pithy It’s Cold Like I Thought It Would Be.
A kayaking excursion during which a weird leaf attached itself to our son’s vessel and was promptly and confusingly misidentified as a parsnip, earned him his first songwriting credit, the one-lined, ever-repetitive Paddling the Parsnip Home. A list of Max’s greatest hits would include a pair of physically intrusive ditties: 1) Poke You In The Neck, Yeah, which was sung primarily on long car trips and directed at his mother in the seat in front of him, and 2) the classic and lilting Fingers In Your Hair, whose eponymous lyrics progressed to “fingers in your eyes, fingers in your nose and mouth.” This was primarily sung, also in the car, to his sister who, when she could, blocked the song’s progression before her nose and mouth were violated with an impassioned “Absolutely not!”
Alison followed my footsteps into musical theater, with memorable turns as the devil in Damn Yankees when she was 10, thanks to a sainted neighbor’s conception and operation of the Woodside Kids Chorale, for which she directed mini-versions of Broadway shows each summer with any kid who wanted one getting a part. For us, it was one of the hood’s main selling points. In high school, Alison stole the show as Mme. Thenardier in Les Misérables.
My guitar was the launchpad for dozens of Adirondack vacation “concerts,” which took the form of post-dinner, extended family singalongs, and whose early iterations focused on such kid-friendly favorites as The Wheels On The Bus, Wagon Wheel, and the oddly wheel-free Down By The Bay. As the kids grew in size and musical sophistication, tunes from JT, Prine, Buffett, Bonnie Raitt and more filled our evenings. In my father-in-law’s final years, when dementia robbed him of his exceptional mental acuity, the two things that would still perk him up were pets and music, and I vividly recall him singing all the words to You Are My Sunshine, a fitting last tune, as lying with his face turned toward the sun was one of his favorite hobbies. At his wife’s memorial service, I played and the crowd sang one of her favorites, This Land Is Your Land.
About five years ago, dear friends gave me a copy of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s book, How To Write One Song. A year ago I finally read it—well, half of it—and promptly sat down and went Tweedy’s title one better. My first composition started out as a song about personal preference, a topic that’s always fascinated me, and ended up as a love song, a process that answered the lifelong question “Why are there soooooo many love songs?” I could have also cited a 2018 study of 1960-2010 top 40 tunes that revealed 67.3% fell into the love line. The lyrics to my first toe dip into the singer-songwriter pool were easy; I knew the story I wanted to tell and have a passing familiarity with rhyming couplets, having written dozens of song parodies for birthdays of family and friends. But devising an original melody was an entirely different animal, for I still clung limply to my childhood belief that eventually we’d run out of new combinations of musical notes and there would be no new melodies left. Still, I persevered, and eventually plucked out a pleasant if uninspired melody, put the words and music together, and remembering thinking: “Wow. That doesn’t suck.”
Buoyed by this epiphany, I trudged tunefully onward, and penned a musical version of my March 2023 essay entitled Why Children Are Objectively Better Than Adults. A bit of its melody is strongly reminiscent of John Prine’s brilliant Jesus: The Missing Years, but it was a small enough bit that I wasn’t worried his heirs would come after me, and besides, my hunch is they aren’t the litigious type. My second song didn’t suck either, and because I’m a zealous believer in the rule of threes, I tried my hand at comic blues, and fashioned the retro-topical Well-Off Close-In Suburban Liberal White Folks’ Covid Blues. And now, armed with a three-song set, I’m thinking about an open mic, though the mere thought of it sinks my stomach and speeds my pulse.
A quick and unscientific survey of nearby folks as I wrote this revealed a sad but not unexpected truth: people who don’t think they have nice voices don’t sing much, at least when they aren’t alone in the car or shower. One of my son’s friends clearly would like to sing more often, and fills the void by rap-narrating his girlfriend’s morning routine. Singing, like dancing, is among the more life-affirming things we do, and as such should never be discouraged, no matter how tone deaf the singer. I hadn’t torn up a dance floor in years until my nephew’s wedding last fall, and those 90 minutes of unselfconscious flailing about is now a Hall of Fame memory.
This is all a long way of saying, if you like to sing, you should sing, and not give a shit if you aren’t Streisand or Groban or even Tom Waits. If you like to dance, you should dance, and if you need to be better than at least one other person, watch the Seinfeld episode where Elaine dances at a work party. It’s all easier said than done, but that’s annoyingly true of virtually anything worth doing. By the time you read this I will either have played at the Monday night hootenanny at the Garagery in Saranac Lake, New York, or I will have chickened out. I’m okay with either, because performing in public is one of my top two fears, and I’m trying to beat myself up less these days. But even if never sing for strangers, I will forever sing for those close to me, and those are the truest love songs.