Childhood Melodies, Grown-Up Memories

I was trying to remember a song the other day--a stirring ballad called “A Scottish Soldier” that I last heard when I was about 8. It told the story of a mortally wounded warrior yearning to die among his native “highland hills.”

Every time the vocalist’s noble Scottish burr rattled the tinny speaker of my record player, I got goose bumps. The Soldier never made it home.

I was thinking about “A Scottish Soldier” because of a CD I bought for my 7-year-old nephew. It’s called “Not for Kids Only,” a collection of 12 classic Southeastern U.S. folk tunes once popular with children--neglected things like “Jenny Jenkins,” “Arkansas Traveler,” “Freight Train,” “There Ain’t No Bugs on Me,” “Shenandoah.” The songs have been revived and endearingly recorded on acoustic instruments by Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and mandolin virtuoso David Grisman.

The CD, as the title suggests, reminded me that kids’ songs needn’t be restricted to the sort of well-intentioned but rather sanitized ditties that spring from the purple lips of Barney the Dinosaur. You know: “I love you / You love me / We’re a happy fam-i-ly. . . .” (Pardon me while I wipe away a politically correct tear.) It struck me, particularly while listening to Garcia and Grisman play the poignant “Shenandoah,” that whatever amuses a fledgling fancy qualifies as a kids’ song--”A Scottish Soldier,” “Vaya Con Dios,” “Twist and Shout.”

I doubt, for example, that Van Morrison thinks of “Gloria,” which he recorded with Them, as a children’s song. Yet my nephew enjoys it immensely. He thinks Morrison sounds as if he’s throwing up when he howls, “Glooooooria.” My nephew acts as if he’s throwing up, too and laughs like crazy. My niece, at age 5, was extremely fond of Mario Lanza singing “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” (No kidding.) As Grisman puts it: “A certain element of simplicity has to be there, but a kids’ song can be sophisticated--and certainly can be good. “

I got to wondering about other “not-for-kids-only”-type songs and conducted a random survey to collect a few. Unfortunately, in the cases of the children I phoned--from Leon Redbone to rhythm-and-blues legend Johnny Guitar Watson, Shelley Duvall, Beverly D’Angelo and the great musical lexicographer-composer-conductor Nicholas Slonmsky--I missed their childhoods by many decades.

For the record, Jerry Garcia’s first melodic love is reportedly the eternally lovely “Red River Valley.” Grisman’s earliest indelibly imprinted song is another not specifically intended for tots.

It is, he told me, “Music Music Music” (you know, “Put another nickel in / in the Nickelodeon . . . “), which he heard in 1948 in a New Rochelle, N.Y., beauty parlor where he waited for his mom. “But I don’t think it inspired me,” Grisman said. “Music was probably in my genes.”

Actress D’Angelo’s first melodic memories, however, turned out to be nothing less than pivotal life events.

“One of them my mother would sing to me, and the other my father taught me,” D’Angelo said. “My father was a big band musician until I was 8. My mother was a classical violinist. The one my mother taught me was when I was 4 or 5 years old. (She sings in a girlish soprano) ‘White choral bells, upon a slender stalk, lilies of the valley grace my garden walk / oh don’t you wish that you could hear them ring / That will happen only when the angels sing.’

“So in my mother’s world of music, it was the magic of the words. I instantly had these visual images of the angels singing and making all the flowers move, and the heavenly nature of the magic of muse, inspiration, music. Everything was beautiful.”

Pop D’Angelo had less poetic musical priorities.:

“My father spend many days teaching me and my older brother Jeff this one: ‘Never send your laundry out in Tuscaloosa / Till the manager’s seen your act / Never run back till the curtain comes down / and you get held over or get thrown out of town. . . .’

“I have no idea what that’s from.”

The actress maintains that the two songs did nothing less than allow her to glimpse the possibilities of life beyond Columbus, Ohio. “I was,” she said, “given the clue at a very early age that there was a lot more to life than just waking up and having a regular job. If you did it right, the angels would sing and you’d get to stay in Tuscaloosa, and it would have nothing to do with anything mundane.”

A memory equally redolent with implication comes from singer-songwriter-author-pop musicologist Ian Whitcomb, who hosts the eclectic “Ian Whitcomb Show” on KPCC-FM.

“I was sitting on the chamber pot, in 1944, at age 3, on the east coast of England,” Whitcomb said. “And the war was on, of course. The song was called ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside,’ which is a British music hall song. When I was in my 20s, I realized the irony of all this, because the seaside, which was in fact about 100 yards from our house, was an incredibly grim place. It was full of mines, and it had pillboxes with machine guns facing the ocean where they expected the Nazis to come and invade. That was the first song that I learned.

“I didn’t see its significance at the time, but it got me to love popular songs because popular songs remove you from real life, and that’s what I’ve always liked about them. (He bursts into song) ‘I do like to be beside the seaside / Yes I do like to be beside the sea / I do like to stroll along the prom prom prom / hear the brass bands play tiddly um pum pum / so just put me down beside the seaside / I’ll be beside myself with glee / There are lots of girls beside, I should like to be beside / beside the seaside, beside the sea.’ I still sing the song, actually.”

I phoned Forrest Ackerman, editor and founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, for no reason other than I read his magazine about the time I listened to “A Scottish Soldier.” Ackerman is 77 now and just finished the 201st issue of FM, dedicated to the late Vincent Price. His memory was monstrously . . . sweet.

“Well, I have to think back 70 years. There was something my mother sang, ‘Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown,’ kind of stuck in my memory--(he sings) ‘In her sweet little Alice blue gown / when she first wandered down into town / she caught every eye as she went passing by . . . da da da . . . till it wilted, she wore it / she’ll always adore it / her sweet little Alice blue gown.’

“Then there was one my grandfather was very fond of, ‘Let the Rest of the World Go By’: ‘We’ll build a little nest / somewhere out in the West / and let the rest of the world go by.’ I don’t think it influenced me--it would have had to be about science fiction.”

*

Had Elizabeth Baker’s first memorable song profoundly influenced her, she might be picking a banjo instead of plucking pizzicato passages as a violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (She might also have developed a peculiar diet).

“I come from a musical family,” said Baker, caught after a rehearsal. “My mother was a professional violinist, my father played trumpet. The first thing that comes to mind is the music of Pete Seeger. We just wore out his records. They were all either generally songs that are stories, or songs about funny things--like that one about the old woman who swallowed a fly. I guess that’s the one I remember.”

Can’t quite imagine Barney singing the macabre verse, “There was an old woman who swallowed a horse / she died, of course”--or any part of the first song to sting the vast consciousness of Nicholas Slonmisky. At nearly 100 years old (in March), the pianist, composer, pioneering conductor who introduced and championed works of Charles Ives, Edgard Varese, Henry Cowell--and author of such invaluable works as the “Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns” and the “Lexicon of Musical Invective”--had to remember 92 years back to his boyhood in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“It was during the 1905 Russo-Japanese war,” he said from his humble West Hollywood home. “Actually, when I was about 9, this song was popular among small boys who tried to persuade the Mikado to stop fighting the Russians. Oh, I have it (he sings in Russian): ‘Hey, Mikado, buget hudo / rozeyem tvoy posudu / razorim do tia. . . . ‘ Which means, ‘Hey, Mikado, it will be bad / We will wreck your kitchenware / We will wreck it to the limit.’

“Of course, as you know,” the maestro added, “the Russians lost the Japanese war.”

Slonmisky said the song “apparently made quite an impression on me,” as did the first songs to enter the ears of a young Minnesota lad named Barry Hansen--better known as radio’s nationally syndicated indefatigable defender of the obscure tune, Dr. Demento.

“ ‘Jenny Jenkins’ might have been the first,” he said. “We subscribed to a mail-order record company called Young People’s Records. And they used a lot of folk songs. My folks were mainly into classical music, so most of the music I was exposed to at a real early age was like that. Johann Strauss’ ‘Perpetual Mobile,’ which is not a children’s piece, but it’s very lively and bright.

“But there’s no piece of music that I can tie to a specific year in my life before ‘Cocktails for Two,’ by Spike Jones, which my dad brought home when I was probably 4. That certainly made a profound impact on me. I like the song on the other side just as much too, though it’s not as well known, ‘Leave the Dishes in the Sink.’ ”

*

The first tune to sweep Shelley Duvall off her feet is hardly a surprise, given that the actress has devoted her career to producing and directing fairy tales for TV and recording songs aimed at youngsters.

“I think it was ‘Young at Heart,’ ” she chirped, reached at her Think Entertainment office in North Hollywood. “The Frank Sinatra ‘Young at Heart.’ I liked that when I was a kid. I heard it on the radio, and I think my parents had a Sinatra record with it on it. I probably liked the melody and simplicity of it, the ‘singalongability.’ Oh, yes, I think I understood it. I think kids are a whole lot smarter than we give them credit for.”

“Singalongability” did not figure into Dweezil Zappa’s earliest song recollection. It was an instrumental.

“It was ‘Peaches en Regalia,’ (his father) Frank’s tune,” he said. “Because that was the song I heard the most in his concerts and rehearsals and stuff. It came toward the end of the shows; it was like a lullaby thing. It was like, ‘Hey, I could groove on this and go to sleep.’ It’s maintained that sort of quality when I listen to it now. I can always remember being young and hearing that song.

“Music is perfect for that time-machine effect, the microencapsulated moment when you first hear something. It’s forever ingrained in your mind that way.”

Forever ingrained in the mind of Johnny Guitar Watson is one joyous microencapsulated moment from his childhood in Houston.

“My grandfather used to sing while he’d play guitar in church, man,” he said. “It’s kind of hung with me for a long time. It was an old spiritual called ‘When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.’ He used to do that, and people would stand all outside the church, and everybody would be just shouting and what-have-you. He was a spiritualist minister.

“I must have been about 7 or 8. It was a little church, maybe it would hold 50 or 60 people. And he had some deacons who played the tambourines and the rub board. And they would do this holy dance. Everything would always groove so heavy--they would draw people around the neighborhood. They’d be standing outside just to hear the music. And they way they did that song, oh man, I can’t really explain it to you.”

Leon Redbone, reached in New Hope, Pa., sounded as if he were wearing an ice cream suit and skimmer as he smoked a cigar and sipped a mint julep. And rested one hand on a walking stick. Only Redbone, I think, can project that kind of image with his voice.

“I think most of what I listened to was a little too bizarre, I think, for you to print it,” he said in a characteristic courtly drawl. “I had really strange taste at an early age. The earliest pieces of music that I ever recall were operatic numbers. One of them is a short aria from ‘Cavelleria Rusticana,’ by Pietro Mascagni--a fine-looking gentleman, by the way, with hair swept back, a modern look for the times. I don’t know if it was because of hearing that I developed my taste in music, or my taste in music was already there, and hearing it somehow sparked something.”

Incidentally, neither Redbone nor the others had heard of “A Scottish Soldier.” Sometimes I think I’d like to hear it again. But then, it probably wouldn’t be the same. My ears aren’t so little any more.