Family Music

In the long ago days of my childhood music was often made in the home at the piano. This, of course, was a commonplace of family life back then in the very infancy of commercial entertainments from radio, and television had not been invented. My brother was an accomplished amateur pianist whose specialty was Chopin, and many is the night we children and our mother drew chairs into a semi circle around the grand piano to form an audience for his concerts.  On other occasions he would accompany my oldest sister who fancied that she could sing Sgimund Romburg tunes."Softly As In A Morning Sunrise" was something she would offer again and again in her affected musical comedy voice, (and I never knew until many years when I heard Chet Baker on trumpet solo with xylophone doing that song how very great it could be.)  The evening changed tenor completely when mother took it into her head to sit at the piano and play.  Her selection was so maudlin that even we stern hearted and happy youngsters were reduced to sniffles.  She sang in a beautiful soprano in no particular order  "There's A  Long, Long Road A-Winding,"  "It's A Long Road To Tipperary," "Keep The Home Fires Burning," all of which celebrated or rather lamented the emotional privations of couples separated by The Great War, as the First World War was commonly known in her day before the ruinous events of 1939 made clear that it was only the first of a series.  We children knew that the death toll was exceedingly high, that a whole generation of young men had perished in England, and we knew this because she often told us so, when reminding us as well that she had lost a husband in that war, and that indeed our very own father had been gassed at the front in France.  It was all so sad and once in that vein her mourning streak went on to her rendering in a quavering voice close to tears Daddy's supposed favorite song (not too long before he died) "You Are My Lucky Star" from the film Broadway Melody of 1936 which came out in 1935 a year before he died in an automobile accident.  Those were grim songfests, and I thought of them last night when I was looking at Youtube which offered for my delectation Gloria Gaynor well along in years at the Mandela Celebration at Lincoln Center, and Ms Gaynor quite well padded by this time and in a flowing evening robe belted out her signature "I Will Survive."  The camera panned the audience of middle aged people there to hear an icon of their youth, black and whites all standing, swaying and clapping to the disco beat, everyone mouthing the words as she delivered the goods. My mother was about forty five going on for fifty those evenings of our family musicales.  Oh, disco, where were you then?  It would have been such a tonic for that poor woman!