Silently now I come to thee

Tunes, of many types, are irretrevably lodged in my mind…..or are they in my heart?

Patsy Cline has a whole album filled with songs, which I can identify after hearing maybe only 4 notes, sometimes 2.  Where are they stored?  When did I first hear the song?  Why is it inside my head?  What is the thing which saves it there?  O.K. Patsy Cline was on my early car radio.

DEAN MARTIN TOO::  His song “MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS”….better explains it.

For example “Silently now I come to thee”…..a “big church” version belonging to the batch of Sunday School or maybe “Vacation Bible School” songs: Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, a sun beam…….Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. All these church sobngs rattling around in my head.

All memories and rhymes in time.  Complete with internal or more often end rhyme.

There’s a 1966 Buffalo Springfield, song:  “Stop children, what’s that sound,  everybody look what’s goin down”…..

Buffalo Springfield was a band, composed of Canadien & N.Y. Musicians….very short lived, but produced additional clear chords lodged in my brain.  My memories do exist aside from church, in my car radio of 1966, the year of my high school graduation.

Maybe nothing is lost, but everything exists in something of a clutter….…such exquisite fun to remember….and the pace of calling it up is astonishing.

Lyric and music seem fond companions in my mind.

There’s a song by Buffalo Springfield called “For What It’s Worth” and I know the beginning of the lyrics written by Neil Young were: “Something’s happening here.”  Now I’d—-I.D.’d that song when I heard the first two notes played on the electric guitar with tremolo, instantly.  But I had to look up the rest of the lyric, and was more than surprised to find that Buffalo Spingfield was the name of a band.  I just found out that the “group name”  came from an actual steam-roller the guys in the band had seen.  All these years, though ashamed to admit, I thought Buffalo Springfield was the name of a girl singer with an American Indian background. 

So, there’s  a short distance between stuff I can look up, stuff I never knew, and stuff I can identify in a blinding instant.  Where is  the knowledge located in my brain for this song?  I don’t have to run a MRI to know those opening words.    They are part of my stored memory from 1967, and the trembling notes propell me  instantly to the song, it’s melody, and it’s haunting opening. But my point is based in amazement about the art of all songs themselves, their wings of melody, and I’m beyond awe struck about where this has all been all these years in my brain.  

I know I am possibly describing  things others have wondered about and maybe dismissed.  I identify songs, within hearing two or three chords, I often remember who sang them, and sometimes the arrangement.  Without the “prompt” though, I would suspect that I don’t know the song at all.  Certainly I often don’t know them by title, or first line, and then I surprise myself if I hear either one.  This file of songs, melodies, lyrics, and including the original voices which sang them is part of my curious musical or lyrical knowledge.   Part of what I remember is based on my early years in church, as I’ve heard many African American singers say. There are songs in my “file” as rooted in gospel music as well as European protestant hymnals.  Certainly protestant versions of gospel spirituals  remain as some of the strongest memories I have of “church music”.  

I don’t think of myself as any better at remembering songs, tunes, or voices than anyone else really, only that I am astonished by them “appearing” or “existing” in my brain at all.  I’ve not seen scientific versions of M.R.I. experiments pinning down where such memories are located.  I am not sure it matters to me, but what astounds me is that suddenly the memory of a song will be strong after maybe 50 years have passed.  The songs I know I hold especially clearly are the ones that I’ve looked up from those 50 or so years ago.  The years I first drove cars, and was played along by popular A.M. radio?  Oh, I also around the same time, started buying 45 and album length records, so the songs I’d loved from my car radio reappeared in my home record player.  (Mine had a pop-on adjustment so it could play 45’s as well as albums).  I certainly now tend to look up what the hit songs or singers were doing in 1964 – 1970, and I can’t avoid also adding late-50’s popular music as being equally important in my memory. 

These days, such collected songs and musical artists are called “play-lists,” and mine is fond and belongs to the songs I hear played on the local “oldie-station” on my current car radio. My public radio station plays them, by decade and exact date on Friday afternoons.  The “oldie” station says they play music from when we heard the best.  

I realize that I am trying to write about music, songs, eras, genres of lyrics, but in fact I am writing about the wonders of memory.  I remember how the lyric goes after hearing the first few notes.  I remember the rhyme upon hearing the end of a line.  Where in my mind are such things lodged?  Or are they in fact learned through a connection to tunes, which are held forever.  I think it indeed must be those notes that make our heart leap that save us from a monochromatic world.  We love life, as it brings us to song.  The songs themselves remind us of the joy we find as well as the joy we have searched to find.  I know there is a God, because of these pieces of music lodged forever in my mind.  Maybe that’s a leap, and what I am knowing is the importance of music as a part of my life. I can only think that the “soundtrack of my life” is diverse, and wanders through a marvelous forest filled with trees, leaves, sky, and mountains.  Easily a world in which we all of us are forever wandering.