A Charm to Sadness: Aunt Lilah’s Piano

Thoughts on Music and Memories

According to family lore, my great Aunt Lilah used to sell pianos from the back of a horse-drawn wagon in Snyder County, Pennsylvania. She didn’t own the horses, the wagon, or the pianos. Instead, she had this job because of her prowess on the piano, something I saw in action at my childhood home in the 1970s and 1980s.

I learned from Aunt Lilah that one strategy of any piano salesperson is to guess her potential customer’s age, do some math, and then play a song that was a hit the year the customer graduated from high school. The listener would be filled with such nostalgia and affection for the song that he might want to buy the piano right then, if only more easily to revisit that era when he was young, hopeful, and surrounded by friends who shared his musical tastes.

I don’t think Aunt Lilah graduated high school, but I bet you did. You might take a few minutes to review Wikipedia for the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of the relevant year to you. Having just looked over the top singles of 1983, for example, I now gratefully have David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” stuck in my head. Later I plan to listen to “Back on the Chain Gang” by The Pretenders.

Some of my wealthier friends from high school spent a lot of time and a lot of their parents’ money at concerts watching their favorite artists performing their top radio hits live. They had gripping stories to tell – about the majesty of arenas, about the impressive choreography. By contrast, I would see musical performances at small venues such as The 9:30 Club (because the drinking age in Washington, D.C. was 18 when I turned 18, which meant that I could start enjoying live music in clubs, even though I didn’t drink alcohol back then). That’s where I learned “What is Hip?” from Tower of Power.

In the summer of 1986, a bunch of my best friends and I saw Bob Dylan perform with The Grateful Dead and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a memorable show. And to think that we thought Bob Dylan was old back then! My good friend Bob the Deadhead joined me for that show, so I got to learn the cultural and historical context of each song.

Because I was so enjoying the company of my fellow music-lovers, even though she was sitting in our nosebleed section of RFK Stadium, I did not approach my friend Margaret whom I had worked with three years previously at the Tenley Circle Movie Theatre. I figure I would have other opportunities to catch up. That was almost 40 years ago, and I haven’t seen Margaret since. Such fleeting moments flicker by us, sometimes sticking with us, and sometimes immediately freeing themselves of any future importance. As Eudora Welty said, “The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit.”

Fast forward to Davis, California, and this past Friday night I enjoyed a backyard concert by my favorite local musical duo, Misner and Smith. We had so enjoyed a similar concert about three years ago, but this time the songs were more artful, more tightly orchestrated, and with even more haunting and resonant melodies. The Davis musicians – Sam Misner on guitar and Megan Smith on stand-up bass – shared some favorites from their previous backyard performance, some songs from their new album, titled All is Song, and some recognizable covers, such as “America” by Simon and Garfunkel, a song that opens with the itinerant absurdist lyrics: "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together / I've got some real estate here in my bag."

As someone who has hosted almost 500 poetry readings, I especially appreciated the original tunes. Songs such as “Sadie’s Song,” “Anthem,” and “Silence of the Sun” featured simultaneously precise and complex melodies as well as well-crafted lyrics that alluded to or echoed some of my favorite poets, such as Dylan Thomas. What’s more, the sound quality was perfect, almost studio quality. We are lucky to have such soulful consummate professional musicians in our hometown (and they have some local shows coming up).

Although I heard no covers of my favorite songs from the early 1980s, Misner and Smith made me feel as if I were haunted by the salesman spirit of my Great Aunt Lilah. Rather than a piano, I immediately wanted to buy a guitar and start learning a few tunes. I felt joyful and grateful to have been present for such a performance.

Although Plato wanted to bar poets from his ideal republic, I do agree with him regarding the power of live music: “Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”

May live music also be so for you this spring!

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Best,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Three lamb questions from last week:

1. With regard to Passover, in what book of the Old Testament does God instruct the Israelites to sacrifice a spotless lamb and mark their doorposts with its blood?

2. When people eat young sheep meat, the meat is called lamb. What is old sheep meat called?

3. The 1915 film The Lamb marked the screen debut of which actor, later called “The King of Hollywood,” who also co-founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and others and first played the vigilante Zorro?