“Your tune is a ter’ble ‘boice’.”

Notwithstanding that pronouncement I made at four years old beside the piano where my mother sang in her whiskey (or more likely scotch) tenor, I loved my mother’s singing. She sang the songs of her own childhood – not the Yiddish lullabies she learned at her mother’s breast but the popular tunes from the 78s of the twenties and thirties her older sisters brought home and played on their Victrola. The phonograph was a precious treasure – considering that it probably cost $15 and their yearly income was probably somewhere around $1000 - with the three oldest sisters working to support their family of six, including their mother and their younger sister (my mother) and baby brother (the “prince”).  

No matter what else, whatever emotional or financial trauma was happening in my family in the 40s and 50s, we sang and we danced and we laughed. This was primarily a female domain and my father did not participate. But when my brother came along in 1953, a surprise bonus – a new prince for our family, we continued the tradition. My baby brother was indoctrinated into the songs of long ago and the dancing and the laughter.  The radio was on all day long – and popular music was the mainstay. We never even got a TV until I went away to college and even then it was the music and dancing and comedy that caught our attention.

In the 50s, I had my own little portable radio that I used to take to bed with me and listen to under the covers so my parents wouldn’t hear – and late at night, I could get FM jazz stations from Chicago and St. Louis. 

But the best were my mother’s songs she sang from her youth – Bye Bye Blackbird - Baby Face - (I’ll Be Lovin’ You) Always - I'll See You In My Dreams - Tip Toe Through The Tulips - I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover - I Wanna Be Loved By You - Ida, Sweet As Apple Cider - Side By Side - Somebody Stole My Gal - Carolina In The Morning - Blue Skies - If You Knew Susie - Ain't We Got Fun - Me And My Shadow - When The Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along - Margie - Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers - Sleepy Time Gal - All Alone (By the Telephone) - Five Foot Two, Eyes Of Blue - Yes Sir, That's My Baby.

These were just a few of the tunes my mother sang to us and that we knew all the words to – and so did everyone else. I taught my children Ballin’ the Jack when they were small – all three in matching outfits (that the youngest hated as she wore the hand-me-downs for years before they were outgrown) doing the dance and hand gestures that went along with it and amusing the barbers (and none of us the least cognizant of the meaning of these lyrics except perhaps the owner of the hair salon).  

And all those old favorites were played on the radio too, along with the more contemporary songs of the 40s:

The love songs - Green Eyes - Till The End Of Time - (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons - You'll Never Know - To Each His Own - I Don't Want to Set The World on Fire - Paper Doll - Sentimental Journey - I'll Be Seeing You - As Time Goes By - Don't Get Around Much Anymore - Some Enchanted Evening - I'll Walk Alone

The novelty songs - (I've Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo - Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree - Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive – Mairzy Doats - Pennsylvania 6-5000 - Swinging On A Star - Open The Door, Richard - Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby)

The bouncy good time songs- Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy - Chattanooga Choo Choo - I'm Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover - On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe

The cowboy songs - Don't Fence Me In (I’ve Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle - Pistol Packin' Mama - Cool Water - Mule Train (these I sang to my daughters to put them to sleep – why cowboy songs? Don’t know for sure, maybe they were composed to a horse's slow rocking walk, but they did lull my babies to sleep).

The Latin flavored songs (all the rage in the 40s)- Brazil - Frenesi - Manana (Is Soon Enough For Me) Amapola - Rum and Coca-Cola – so we learned to rhumba and to samba and later on, the cha cha.

Favorites to dance to -Tuxedo Junction - Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy - Rag Mop – swing dancin’ in the kitchen!

Sentimental tunes - Peg O' My Heart - The Old Lamp-Lighter - When You Wish Upon a Star - You Are My Sunshine

Some that can’t be categorized - Nature Boy (which was the theme song of the 1948 movie “The Boy with Green Hair” that starred my much loved movie star, Dean Stockwell) - How Are Things in Glocca Morra? (on the jukebox in our preferred upstairs Chinese restaurant in Peoria and that I begged nickels to play as many times as I could get away with it.) 

One of our favorites we sang for years and years as a family on every road trip and that I taught my children and they’re teaching theirs - Cuanto La Gusta,  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rY4d5MlinA%20 

sung with much gusto and over and over again until someone shouted "No more" and started another favorite that we couldn't help singing along with - You Are My Sunshine - or one of our extensive repertory of cowboy songs. 

And then there were the show tunes – into the 50s, when Broadway show albums became available, the old windup phonograph was relegated to the attic and mother bought a tabletop player with a record changer (allowing several records to be played in succession). Though albums were fairly expensive in those days, she had half a dozen that we played over and over, South Pacific, Show Boat, Oklahoma among them. 

In the last year of her life, when Alzheimer’s had all but taken her whole personality away – our mother was still able to sing along with the piano player who came to entertain with the old songs at the nursing home, the older the song, the more words she was able to sing - including some that we had never heard before, obscure tunes from the 20s she must have forgotten when she was singing to us. My sister and I were called to her room (my brother living too far away in San Diego to come in time) by the hospice nurses because they predicted it was going to be my mother’s last day. It took some hours – and we whiled away some of the time by singing as we had done all our lives even though she was unconscious and seemingly unaware that we were there. So we sang to her – and as the time passed, we noticed that she grew somewhat agitated if the songs were too bouncy or too new.

If we’d thought of it, we might have sung the Yiddish lullaby our mama sang to us – “Yah yah bubeleh, shlafee, shlafee bubeleh” (yah yah little grandmother, sleep, sleep, little grandmother). But older and softer songs quieted her, so that’s what we sang. She was still the essence of herself and teaching us how to please her to the last hours of her life.

Mother left this life with songs in the room. I hope I go the same way.