A Musical Conversation with my Dad

May 8^th was choir appreciation Sunday at our church.  Our pastor was out of town at her son’s college graduation and choir members were asked in her absence to deliver responses to one of three questions: Why Church?  Why Music?  Why Worship?  When I saw that simple question: Why Music? in connection with church, I immediately remembered a talk I once had with my Dad on that very subject.  Here’s that talk, along with some background on my Dad and our family.

My Dad turned 42 the year I was born. And though math is not my strong suit when I was ten he was 52 and he was 62 when I was twenty.  So as a kid I thought of him as old.  I never knew him with hair.  He was a farmer.  He milked cows, sowed oats, made hay, shucked corn and did all the things farmers did back then and that was how I knew him.  He hardly ever went to town.  He lit Camel unfiltered cigarettes with a Zippo lighter and snored.  He laughed easily and was very kind.  As I got older I came to realize he was soft hearted.

It took a while for me to imagine my Dad having a life other than the one I saw him living.  I’m not sure kids, at least kids when I was growing up, grasp that life can change or that your parents had choices and that things happened to them, both good and bad.  I don’t know when I started to put the narrative of my Dad’s life together but when I did I was astounded at what I found.

We had an upright piano in the living room that no one could play.  If you opened the lid on the bench there was sheet music no one could read.  I take that back.  My brother played the trombone and my sister played the coronet in fleeting stints with the school band.  So they might have been capable of reading that music but they didn’t.  Mom and Dad gave the piano away, to cousins I think.  Iowa cousins?  I’m not sure anyone knows now.

In the attic there was a bass drum, a wood block, a cymbal and a snare drum.  They had always been there way off in a corner.  At some point at the dinner table, which from the time I was nine was made up of only Mom and Dad and I, I asked whose drums those were.

“They were mine,” my Dad said, in the past tense.

“When did you play them?”

“When I was in high school.  I was in a combo.”

“What songs did you play?”

“None you would know.”

And that was that.  My Dad played the drums?

My Dad went back to church at some point, maybe when I was in Junior High.  We would sit in the same pew every Sunday, Dad on the left and Mom on the right.  When we stood and sang hymns I sometimes held the hymnal together with Mom and sometimes with Dad.  My Dad’s voice was smooth and strong, and he sang on key.  When the notes got too high he would drop an octave.  Sometimes he saw it coming and started an octave lower at the beginning of a phrase but sometimes it was just one note to the next.  I learned to do the same thing.  I thought that was improvisation.

My grandfather, my Dad’s dad and also a farmer, died in an auto accident when my father was eighteen.  His mother tried to hang on to their tenant farm but it became too difficult so she moved her family of four to Oak Park and they all got jobs in the city.  My Dad worked downtown.  I couldn’t picture my Dad, who always wore big overalls on the farm, in downtown Chicago.  It seemed unreal.  He told me once that the office building where he worked was near Symphony Hall and that sometimes after work he would go there to see if they had leftover single tickets.  When he could buy one cheap he would go in by himself. 

“I never knew music that beautiful existed,” he said.  “I would sit in that big hall with all those people, more people than live in Danvers, and the music from the instruments would fill up the place and sort of wrap itself around me.  The sound was amazing.  And I didn’t know a soul there.”  When you’re a farm kid from a small town it’s hard to get used to being anonymous.  My Dad and his first wife, also a farm girl, left Chicago and came back to her Dad’s farm to raise their family.

My Dad sang on the tractor.  I could hear him singing sometimes when I took him lunch in the field.  He made up new lyrics to old songs.  He didn’t whistle, at least when I knew him.  He hated doctors and that extended to dentists.  Dental care and my Dad were not acquainted.  When his teeth went bad I think he lost the ability to whistle.  Or maybe he never had it. There are some things we never know about one another.

When my Mom sang in church she belted out the hymns.  She was off key, scratchy, sometimes not even close to the melody.  She didn’t seem to care.  When I looked up at her as we sang in church she smiled back broadly.  I don’t know if she realized how bad she sang but if she did she didn’t care.

When my Dad was thirty six his first wife, Irene, died in childbirth.  He brought a new baby boy back to the farm to join two brothers and a sister but his wife never came home again.  And the next morning, and every morning and evening after that for thirty two years, he had to milk the cows, who looked at him dumbly that next morning, unaware his life had caved in.  Dad, his motherless children, the cows sheep and chickens all lived together on his father in law’s farm, where my Mom and I would also later live.

When I was old enough to imagine and appreciate that experience, probably after I became a father, I asked my Dad how he got through that part of his life.

“I’m not sure how I did it.  But a lot of people helped me.”

“Were you going to church then?”  Dad had a big gap in church attendance.  That’s another story.

“Yeah.”

“Did going to church help after Irene died?”

“Yes it did.”  He was quiet for a moment.

“I would go to church and the women there would help me with the kids.  It seemed like the only time I could sit still and be with other people comfortably.  I was in a fog for quite a while.” He kept thinking.

“It wasn’t the sermons.  I could barely concentrate on anything, let alone words in a sermon.  My mind would wander back to Irene and my troubles.  It was the music.  It was that good organ music they play before church starts when everyone is quiet.  It calmed me down.  And the hymns. Oh God the hymns felt so good.”  He became animated as he talked.

“It felt so wonderful to sing after I had been so sad.  It helped just to hear my voice blend in with the other people in church.  I couldn’t talk to them about what happened to me but I knew they cared for me and singing with them, all of us on the same beat with the same words, I think sometimes it was the best I felt all week.”

He paused.

“Yeah church helped me a lot.  But it wasn’t the talking.  When I needed it most it was the music.  It lifted me up.”