To know many songs by heart

From What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics by Adrienne Rich

"The passing on of living history is an essential ingredient of individual and communal self-knowledge . . . The loss can be a leak in history or a shrinking in the vitality of everyday life. Fewer and fewer people in this country entertain each other with verbal games, recitations, charades, singing, playing on instruments, doing anything as amateurs - people who are good at something because they enjoy it. To be good at talk, not pompously eloquent or didactic, but having a vivid tongue savoring turns of phrase  to sing on key and know many songs by heart - to play fiddle, banjo, mandolin, flute, accordion, harmonica - to write long letters - to draw pictures or whittle wood with some amount of skill - to do moderately and pleasingly well, in short, a variety of things without solemn investment or disenabling awe - these were common talents till recently, crossing class and racial lines. People used their human equipment - memory, image making, narrative, voice, hand, eye - unself-consciously, to engage with other people, and not as specialists or "artistes."

For ordinary people to sing or whistle used to be as common as breathing. I remember men whistling, briskly or hauntingly, women humming with deep-enclosed chest tones. Where did it go? A technology of "canned" music available through car radios, portable "boom boxes," and cassette players, programmed music piped into the workplace, has left people born in the 1950s and later largely alien to the experience of hearing or joining in casual mucsic making. . .

Part of the experience of casual singing was the undeliberate soaking up of many songs, many verses. Ballads, hymns, work songs, opera arias, folk songs, popular songs, labor songs, school-children's playground songs. And, of course, with the older songs words changed over time, new generations of singers mis-remembering or modifying. Tunes changed, too, as songs traveled: from England or Wales to Appalachia, from Africa to the Sea Islands, France to Quebec, and across the continent.

To ears accustomed to high-technology amplification and recording processes, the unamplified human voice, the voice not professionally trained, may sound accoustically lacking, even perhaps embarrassing. And so we're severed from a physical release and pleasure, whether in solitude or community - the use of breath to produce song. But breath is also Ruach, spirit, the human connection to the universe."

Comments

[Suna]

I am very glad to have so much music in my home. Kids come and jam on guitars often, and I do a lot of singing. I love it that my oldest son keeps his plastic recorder beside him and makes up melodies off and on all day. When not doing that, he whistles, really well. I will miss that when he goes off to college!