Of Music and Poetry and "Searchin' in the sun for another overload ..."

Usually, I don't care much for lyrics to a lot of songs I like.  I listen to the overall effect, and if the lyrics aren't too offensive, maudlin or repetitious, and I like the actual music, then I'll probably like the song itself.

The lyrics to this song also happen to be a beautiful poem about love and separation and day-to-day work: Jimmy Webb's Wichita Lineman. Instead of typing them out, I have a treat for you today.  This 2008 recording is one of my all-time favorite music videos: Glen Campbell performing it with The Stone Temple Pilots. Even though I loved Wichita Lineman back in the late '60s (I was thirteen when it came out,) the somewhat overproduced commercial version of it cannot compare to this one. This was recorded less than three years before Campbell revealed that he has Alzheimer's:

 Thank you, Holly Turkington, for hippin' me to this video last year!

Small, homely things—the most prosaic of jobs or circumstances, the most ordinary people, and the most mundane desires (a small vacation, in the case of the Wichita Lineman ...) are a thin veneer for what we all really want—to love and to be loved—for all time.

What are your favorite song lyrics?

Largo

(We had to do an exercise for the Granby Library Thursday Morning Writer's Group on music, and the one I wrote brought back such a powerful memory, I decided to post it.)

I disliked my third grade teacher, Mrs. Wolfe.  She didn’t like me, either.  I spent a good deal of time shut in the cloakroom or with my head on my desk during recess or held after school, all of which were standard punishments for an unruly eight-year-old in the school year of 1963-64.

But it wasn’t all bad.

We had Music every day. Mrs. Wolfe had a series of 45’s, each with samples of well-known themes from some important work of classical music.  Every week we heard five selections, and on Friday, there would be a quiz.  The quiz was simple; she played that week’s music selections and we would write down the name of the piece and its composer.  By age eight, I could spell “Mussorgsky” and “Tchaikovsky.”

I loved Music. I loved it even more than Reading, Writing, Vocabulary and Penmanship, which, until third grade, had been my favorite subjects. Mrs. Wolfe would close her eyes when the first notes of a sonata or an aria or a movement from a symphony would lift up to the high ceiling and swirl around against the walls and windows to finally swoop and skim along the boards of the old wood floor. When the listening part was over, she’d have us write out the name of the piece and the composer.  We did this every day.

Tuesday through Thursday, she would carefully raise and lower the needle on the record player, thereby changing the order of the music.  In this manner, we learned themes from the work of Bizet, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Bach, Haydn, Verdi, Copeland … and so many more.

One winter Monday, Mrs. Wolfe put the needle on the 45.  It crackled for a few seconds and then reality, as I knew it, was suspended; time and chalk dust and Presidents Washington and Lincoln and the Palmer handwriting strip and the blackboard and the American flag and the other children and Mrs. Wolfe … all of it folded in upon itself and in my line of sight the bare trees and the house-crowded horizon beyond the chain link fence beckoned— “Come away … this is not your true home ...” and my heart tightened with yearning and an unearthly feeling of loneliness.

But it was the beauty, the unutterable beauty, of Antonin Dvorak’s Largo from Symphony No. 9 that made me cry.

And when the last strains of the three minute sample faded and the feel of the tears on my cheek and the salt in the corner of my mouth brought me back—embarrassed, Mrs. Wolfe was just opening her eyes.

Eyes that were filled with tears.

Dvorak