Down A Musical Memory Lane

Down A Musical Memory Lane

Right up to the end of her life, Mum could - and did - sing. She could reach the high notes better than I could, and recently snatches of melodies and refrains of old songs I remember her singing when I was little, have been coming back to me. Sometimes she mixed up the words a bit, but the basics were all there!  

A couple of songs have been especially insistent in my mind and I can still hear her voice in my head: 

It’s a Grand Night for Singing

It's a grand night for singing,
The moon is flying high,
And somewhere a bird
Who is bound he'll be heard
Is throwing his heart at the sky! 

It's a grand night for singing,
The stars are bright above.
The earth is a-glow
And to add to the show,
I think I am falling in love!
Falling, falling in love. 

It's a grand night for singing,
The moon is flying high,
And somewhere a bird
Who is bound he'll be heard,
Is throwing his heart at the sky!

Maybe it's more than the moon,
Maybe it's more than the birds,
Maybe it's more than sight of the night,
In a light too lovely for words. 

Maybe it's more than the earth
Shiny in silvery blue.
Maybe the reason I'm feeling this way
Has something to do with you! 

It's a grand night for singing,
The moon is flying high,
And somewhere a bird... 

This is from the Film State Fair, that came out in 1945, so perhaps Mum saw it in England before I was born. The song certainly stayed with her ever afterwards.

This next song was recorded by Vera Lynn in 1936, when she was 19 years old; my Mum would have been 16 years old, possibly 17, and it was one of the earliest songs I remember her singing to me when I was a baby:

Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire

Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire
Heading for the land of dreams
When I look back to those happy childhood days
Like yesterday it seems
It was grand my mother held my hand
Daddy was the old gee gee
The old wooden hill was the old wooden stairs
And Bedfordshire a cot where I knelt to say my prayers
Climbing up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire
They were happy, happy days for me.

Last night I dreamt about the place where I was born
The village school, the winding lane, the fields of waving corn
Seems that dream brought memories to me
My childhood days in fanciness I could see
When the sun had gone to rest and I was tired of play
Dad would put me on his back and then to me he'd say:

Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire... (repeat)

Mum sang this to me so often in East Africa when I was little, and she had to explain how the line about going "up the wooden hill" actually meant climbing the stairs up to the bedroom. I didn’t know about stairs then, as all the houses in Dar-es-Salaam were bungalows, but she gave me the idea of how lovely and cosy such a routine could be. 

When you hear the flowing melodies and reassuring lyrics, I think it is unsurprising they stay in our memories so easily, and I do wonder sometimes what children who have born in more recent years will remember of the songs sung to them. Will disco, rap and heavy metal endure, or will the gentle ballads remain somewhere in the background, ready for a renaissance? Will romance in music return for young couples? Or, in years to come, will they be saying, "Oh, listen, darling, they're playing our tune!" when some deeply repetitive hit (that you could  never sing along to) from their own "way back when" time, is played on some future edition of Top of the Pops?