Old songs that I have sung
Like most of us the first music I listened to was my parents'. I'm the oldest so I didn't even have the influence of an elder sibling. I didn't really listen to anything that might be in the charts until I got to secondary school.
The impact of Bob Dylan on my life deserves its own post. My dad was a big fan. And I mean Big Fan. My sister is named after the song Visions of Johanna. Guess who my brother is named after?
Both my parents were into The Beatles. My mum saw them in concert in 1964 when she was fourteen. Pretty cool.
The song that got me thinking about this post is The Actor by the Moody Blues. I don't know anything at all about music but I do like a weird album and In Search of the Lost Chord is a weird album. The Actor is my favourite mostly just because I find the line "The sound I have heard in your hello" unbearably romantic.
Hotel California by The Eagles was a favourite of my dad's to play on guitar. That and House of the Rising Sun. He was in a rock against racism band that included people playing sitar and tabla. I wrote a chapter about a time-travelling hotel based on the song. Last year my nephew started singing it at the dinner table, apropos of absolutely nothing, and we ended up putting it on and starting a dance party in the kitchen.
Both my parents were into the folk music of the seventies. Lindisfarne, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, that sort of thing. My sister and I could sing the whole of Matty Groves as a sort of slightly horrifying party piece.
My mum is very into Motown, especially Diana Ross. There was a tape she'd recorded off an LP of a Diana Ross album and on the other side, in an attempt to be contemporary, she recorded some Madonna songs. Consequently I thought all those Madonna songs were Diana Ross, that there was no such person as Madonna. Just the one great All Powerful Diva.
Joan Armatrading is also one of my mum's favourites. She was at a Joan Armatrading concert, pregnant with me, when she first felt me kick. So I narrowly avoided being named Joan. The album Me Myself I was invariably playing every car journey. My favourite song is Feeling In My Heart (For You).
The Weight by The Band has the chorus "Take a load off, Fanny" which my dad used to sing to me as Franny. Now we do the same for my nephew whose nickname also rhymes. We also sing "Annie are you okay?" from Smooth Criminal at him.
Of course there was also Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, The Kinks, Beach Boys, mixed in. We listened to a fair amount of classical - my grandad was very into classical music. And bhangra and Bollywood soundtracks. I asked my mum once why she wasn't really into any eighties music, she objected she had been busy having children. My wife's parents are a chunk younger than mine and it's really interesting how completely different their music and hence our experiences growing up were.
The title of this post is taken from a column by Robert Winslow Gordon 'Old Songs That Men Have Sung', 1925. Found on the House of the Rising Sun Wikipedia page. I have notes about my listening.
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