LETTERS FROM MY DAD: MUSICAL ECHOES

A week ago one of my former students posted on Facebook a video of the choir he now directs singing, “How Can I Keep From Singing?” (Robert Lowery, 1860) It was utterly lovely. I glimpsed my student as a studious fifth grader of at least twenty years ago, now with a choir of his own. But an even stronger memory transposed me to the Old North Church in Boston where my granddaughter sang that same song with the show choir she toured with a few summers ago. The words ricocheted off the antique walls of the historic church with such resonating clarity, I shiver with the memory today: “Through all the tumult and the strife/I hear the music ringing; It finds an echo in my soul/How can I keep from singing?”

I’ve always marveled how music can instantly conjure a memory we didn’t even know we still held onto. We often drove straight through to Florida over Spring Break. In the early Eighties, our then teenagers brought tapes which blared constantly as we traveled the darkened I-75. Whenever I hear Journey’s “Open Arms” I am instantly in the packed van once again.

During World War II, my lovesick dad used music to connect him to home, to his wife, to family.  In the March, 1943, letter shown above he listed all the songs they would listen to together, “on the davenport, with the lights down low.” I can only imagine how quickly my mother drew a little closer to her sweetheart so many miles from home.

Each Christmas it happens to me, too, when the Christmas carols from everywhere (malls, radios, television, parties…) begin and I hear Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” I am immediately with my Dad. Continuing the March letter after the list, my dad says, “Then to top it all to have Bing Crosby sing, ‘White Christmas.’ I think that will stand out as our own favorite song…” In another letter from March, 1943, he writes, “Do you remember Bing singing? Well, that record was just played and I could see our little tree in our wonderful apartment, you and I and the couple of kids we acted like.”  How can I not keep from singing with my dad each Christmas?

There is another song, however, where I don’t need to hear the song, I just need to be in that place. My husband David was an incredible singer. His music did not stop when he died. It reverberates still with the choir he loved, with the granddaughter who inherited his voice. It echoes also in the Meadow at our home on Old Mission. Shortly after he died I stumbled to the Meadow in despair and I heard David’s voice as clear and distinct as it had always been, singing the song as he had so often with his church choir:

“Now Lord, I feel you near me,
I feel Your guiding pow’r.
And know You’re standing by me
Through ev’ry passing hour.
And Thy will be done, Lord,
They will be done.”
       (Joyce Eilers)

Indeed.

Thank you to David Bassin for posting the video and

Sharon Thomas, for finding needed lyrics