A Gift That's Lasted My Entire Life- Music and Mom

 “Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.”        -Aretha Franklin
                        

I am unashamedly, unabashedly a music nerd.  Ask me my favorite song or artist, and you will either get a simple, "I can't do that, there is too much," OR you'll get a long, geeky diatribe about different music for different things, or different musicians for different seasons of life, or really important musicians and their affect on...  

Well, you get the point.   

I have said for years that my musical tastes began with my parent's record and 8 track tape collections.  There wasn't a lot of music, but it was all pretty good.  I still have their LPs, mixed in with ones I've collected over the last few years.  

I also really thought my tastes more reflected my Dad. I still love Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams.  Love them.  Dearly, in fact. But, in the last year or so, and with a big realization in the last week or so, I am learning that it was Mom who really gave me music.  Both literally, and figuratively.  

Dad was an old school country music guy.  I think Dad would have been pretty happy if music had stopped being made about 1970.  Mom was more adventurous- at least a little.  She loved Elvis, and Chuck Berry, and Chubby Checker, and the Platters, and, and, and...   

She had more than a little old-school rock and roll in her heart.

I don't think it's a huge surprise that she was more accepting of the country/rock fusion and roots rock which draws me in almost every time.  Dad wouldn't listen to it at all, but Mom, she let me play most anything in the vehicle with her after I started driving. 

In the aftermath of Mom's passing, I'm doing what I do, and overthinking things, and that is bringing memories I'd either forgotten or buried in the passage of time.  One of those memories showed up last week.  For Christmas in my freshman year of college, Mom gave me three albums (all on cassette, of course, it was 1986):  

 Randy Travis- The Storms of Life

Steve Earle- Guitar Town

Guitars, Cadillacs, etc.- Dwight Yoakam

I still listen to Yoakam and Earle all the time.  I'm on a constant hunt to get that twangy guitar thing happening in the Dwight album.  Aside:  a Telecaster into a Fender tube amp with a LOT of spring reverb is the answer.  It's pretty close. 

At that point in life, I was listening to a lot of 80's country and 80's hard rock.  My Mom KNEW I would like those 3 albums.  For two of the three, she was so right that I still listen to those artists.  There is an argument to be made that all three of those artists were pretty important to the development of music in that moment.  Yoakam hearkened back to Bakersfield in a way even Dad loved, Earle was my first connection to Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, and Travis made Nashville remember what it could sound like from the late 60's.   

How did she know?  I have no idea.  But she did.  

In addition to literally giving me music albums, she also gave me music by showing me it was possible to make music on your own. 

Mom was always singing.  Always.  I loved her voice.  I absolutely play guitar because I listened to her play and sing.  I listened even though she would shut the bedroom door and hope nobody was listening."Cindy", "Love Me Tender," "Blue Tail Fly," "Old Log Cabin For Sale", and every traditional hymn from the Baptist Hymnal.  They are all part of my musical soul. She even wrote a song or two, beautiful, hopeful, longing Gospel songs.  

Debbie and I played on of them at her funeral. 

It was amazing to listen to her sing in church.  I had my first real understanding of harmony from those moments.  She would sing "specials" at church, and everyone was excited when she would sing. 

There were a few men at church who played guitar, and we would spend evenings together in each other's homes, and there would just be music- people playing and singing, with Mom right in the middle of it as one of the vocalists.  In her prime, before she thought it started to sound old, she had a great voice.  It was always, always better than she thought it was.  

She encouraged me to play.  She loved to hear Debbie and I play and sing together.  

I guess I'm saying, sure, I got musical tastes from both of my parents, but my Mom gave me music.  She built it into me like it was a purposeful, planned choice.  Maybe it was.  Maybe it was just her living life in front of her sons. 

As an adult, we shared music.  I turned her onto music she didn't know, and she really enjoyed that process.  I worked a local festival for many years, and Mom seemed to revel in meeting musicians in the same way I did.  She knew Debbie and I had become friends with some of the performers, and she was, by proxy, their friends, too.  

We used a song from one of those performers as the background music for her funeral's picture slideshow.

At the house, after she passed, we found evidence of all of this music.  CDs signed by artists she met at the festival, cassette tape tracks for church specials, old piano/guitar lyric and chord books, and music I'd given her.  A burned copy of  The Eagles, "Hell Freezes Over" CD (Don Henley hopefully won't sue me), along with a "real" copy of the Eagles Greatest Hits, vol 1&2. 

I introduced her to the Eagles, so it was full circle.    

She did, in fact, have more than a little rock and roll in her.  

I am thankful about so much from my Mom.  

But in this moment, I am just saying, "Mom, thanks for the music."

It was an amazing, lifetime gift.   

 

The song Mom wrote when I was a child, that we sang at her funeral was titled "Come On Home To the Master"   These are the lyrics:

 

In the noon of the day, I heard a voice calling me

One I'd not heard in awhile

You've tarried too long, and time's almost gone, 

so come on home to the Master

Come on home.  Come on home

Hear the voice of the Master

Come on home.  Come on home

It's almost time for the reaping

Have you gone astray from Jesus?

Do you long to come home, again?  

His arms are open wide, so give your life to Him

And come on home to the Master

 

Come on home.  Come on home

Hear the voice of the Master

Come on home.  Come on home

It's almost time for the reaping

Come on home.  Come on home

It's almost time for the reaping

                *Music and lyrics by Connie A. Tidwell- sometime in the 1970's