Excerpt from Uncle Bob’s Big Book of Happy: 

The Songs We Sing

      With mumbled groan, we sing along with the songs blaring from earbud headphones and drive nuts the excluded audience of the rest of the world within earshot of our slurring glee. Sometimes it’s even worse with me.  I not only mumble/join the melodies spilling forth from the tiny electronic library in my shirt pocket, I often am inclined to leap into impromptu dance.  I can’t help myself.  It’s the music.

We love to sing, we love to join in, we love the motion and emotion of the tune, the rhythm, the expression of music.  It’s as natural as words themselves.  Some say song may have been the first touch of communal messaging in early humanoids.  First the inarticulate murmurings of song; later the Oxford English Dictionary.

Once, it was at the funeral of my buddy Russell Hummel’s mother, Carol and I were standing with the congregated mourners at a really holy, fundamentalist church where they were sending her off to Jesus and about to commence singing a wonderful old hymn.  That day I had a terrible case of some kind of throat misery that gave me the voice of a bass ogre in a choir from hell.  Carol jabbed me in the ribs and whispered that she would give me twenty dollars if I wouldn’t sing.  Twenty buckeroos, man, that was a lot of wealth for a me to consider–and just for a few minute’s silence.  “Okay,” I thought to myself.  “I can do this.  I can avoid further injury to my voice, avoid embarrassment to my dear wife, and make twenty bucks to boot.  I can do this,” I thought as the verse flowed dangerously close to the chorus.  And then, in an uncontrollable growl of rasping fervor, I could stand it no longer, and cut loose, full throttle with a voice that nearly rattled the lead right out of the stained glass windows.  “Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee....”

I couldn’t help myself.

 

Another old hymn says it best, “How can I keep from singing.”

In our modern world, music is everywhere.  Gooey tunes spread from the elevators like mold and hum incessantly in the background of our ambience.  Miniature electro-marvels broadcast from our pockets to tiny speakers in our ears.  The radio plays on forever and the songs never stop.

On and on and, regardless of intensity or sophistication, we spend our whole lives in a little box where elevator music is forever. “Hey, dude” you say.  “My tunes ain’t no elevator music.  It’s gansta rap, hip hop mean, Pink Floyd funky, Vivaldi vibrant, country true, and heavy, man, heavy.  Do you dig?”

Well okay.  Sorry if I offended your delicate artistic sensitivities, but my point is, whatever the character of the tunes you play, they are everywhere.  And, as such, though by familiarity seemingly innocuous, they are deeply significant in the enactment of your days..

Years ago, back in the early seventies, I did a little experiment with my 9th grade English students at Grand Junction Junior High.  I challenged them to tell me the meaning of the words to the songs they were playing on their home stereos and demanding of the DJ’s at after-school dances.  This was at the tumultuous time when hippy love music was being supplanted in the nation’s psyche with ‘heavy metal’ ditties. I read the lyrics to a particularly odious work by a popular group and asked my students what they meant.  “It’s the beat, Mr. Nichols.  We just love the beat.”

“Well, yes, there is plenty of beat here but do you realize this song is encouraging a suicidal dive into the black waters of the wells of Hell?”
“It’s the beat, Mr. Nichols.  We just love the beat.”

 

 

I love the beat, too.  With me, it’s not so much the machine-gun rhythms predominant in most of the recordings produced for the past half century as it is the primal beat of an Indian or Himalayan chant, the heartbeat driving power of deep drums, the truth of an Irish jig.  Whatever it takes to stir the basis of human emotion deep within the fibers of the collective memory of our tissues.  I mean, sometimes you’ve just got to dance.

But, I’ll tell you what.  It’s not just the beat.  Our amazing complex of sense and mind absorbs all manner of emanation within range.  If you think that some screaming fool, howling misery and discontent to the toe-tapping thunder of a three-story stack of speakers is just a matter of rhythmic thump and garbled verbiage, think again. The question must be:  Does the ubiquitous mumble of music that infests the span of your day give lift the mortal burdens you bear, or does it just pile the sorrows and aggravations heavier and heavier upon your being?

Is there the allure of a black well of Hell before you, or is there a blue bird on your shoulder?

So, what’s on your iPod?

Zippity doo dah, Zippity aye, My oh my, what a wonderful day . . .