My spouse was busy making Christmas crockpot candy, which involves melting a lot of almond bark and chocolate together with some nuts, and then spooning it out into balls and letting it cool.
Christmas music was on, but this was a Christmas blues album. We have it on a CD that we picked up for a dollar about twenty years ago. The album was probably recorded in the sixties. It hasn’t been remastered.
Anyway, that CD ended, and a Motown Christmas album was launched. A CD of Motown hits from 1971 followed. A twelve minute version of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” by the the Temptations stayed in my stream overnight.
What can I say? It’s great music, cool music, telling a story through voice, lyrics, and instruments.
Sly and the Family Stone gave us a lot of awesome music when I was young. Today’s theme song, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a favorite. This song’s deliberate mondegreen in its title delighted me. I always knew it as just “Thank You.” When I bought the greatest hits album (actually, on an eight-track tape that the machine ate within a year, but not before torturing the sound into a strange warbling), the full title baffled me. I’d always heard the lyrics correctly, not something that always happened with songs, but did happen at the time. That’s when I was first introduced to mondegreens.
That greatest hits album deserved that title, and that’s why it was worn out. That was common for that time, to wear music out because of its medium, whether it was tape or vinyl. Digital has made a huge difference.
Aretha Franklin’s death and the service held to honor her reminded me that I grew up in a privileged time and place. Pop, rock, soul, R&B, punk, psychedelic, rockabilly…these were just a few of the emerging sub-genres of music developing. Reaching audiences like me were aided by advances in the recording, duplicating, and broadcasting media. As people, we were forced in earlier eras to travel to bars, clubs, and other venues to enjoy performers’ offerings. Radio and television changed that, and the Internet has expanded that ability.
I was lucky. I had radios and television, food, a roof, decent schools, and relatively stable home life. I was lucky, too, because great producers, musicians, and entrepreneurs were bringing us the sounds. And I was lucky because there were people and groups like the Stones, the Who, the Supremes, CCR, Led, Santana, Aretha, Elvis, Stevie Wonder, the Jacksons and Osmonds, Eric Clapton, John Mayall…what a list could be made. But that’s what wikipedia is about.
I have my favorites. Guitar heroes and keyboard masters remain my weakness, but great voices and song-writers always turn my head, too. Or, give me a beat…yeah, you know.
Thinking of all that, and the riotous eternal summer that was my youth, I remembered Diana Ross & The Supremes. The catalog of their songs is stupendous, and their hits are cherished as classics of an era and the Motown Sound. Was it the end of the innocence, the beginning of the awakening, or the age of Aquarius?
Here is “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, written by Ashford and Simpson, and recorded by many, but the cover streaming to me today is the one by “Diana Ross and the Supremes”. It’s powerful stuff to stream.
“I was in my Mom’s room with my sister when Mom died. Mom and Dad lived in a remote area, surrounded by cedars. It was quiet. Mom had been ready to die. She’d actually done checklists. She’d written pages of very precise notes that she wanted done before she died. My sister and I had to do these things, and check them off, and show them to her, to show her that they’d been done.
“When they were all done, Mom said, “Okay, I’m ready to go now.” And she died that day.
“And I remember sitting in the room, and watching this soft blue glow rise from her body and drift out the window, and up into the trees, and on into the sky. It was like watching a puff of smoke, but I’m sure it was her soul.
“When it was gone, I turned to my sister and said, “Did you see that?” She said, “No, but I wish I did, because I could see you watching it.””
It’s that time, again, and he was not feeling it. Registering his soul never felt right, but it was required, so that others could bid on it. He feared that this time, someone might name the right price.
Michael Seidel, writer 