The weekend before last, Peter and I headed up to the Adirondacks to do some hiking before picking Sarah up from camp. The places we hiked, ate and slept were not places we had been with Emma, yet she seemed to be everywhere. We sat down at a restaurant one evening and a song came over the PA system that I hadn't heard since Emma and Sarah were toddlers.
It was a song from the 40's that we sang in the Music for Children class I did with each of the girls when they were toddlers. The instructors had re-worked the lyrics of the original song so that the words now took you through all different ways of exploring the song's rhythm as you sang it. It would start out, "Well, it's a good day for clapping a song, well it's a good day for clapping along." Then you would stomp along, march along, run along, hop along, dance along, until it would end with, "Well, it's a good day, what could go wrong? Well, it's a good day from morning 'til night, rock the moon, rock the moon in your sweet little room."
I loved doing that class with Emma and she loved it, too. We sang that song time and time again, both in class and at home. But I must admit, I thought it was a Music for Children original. I didn't know it was based on another song until I was sitting in that restaurant in the Adirondacks last weekend and the familiar tune spilled out from the restaurant's speakers.
Hearing that rather obscure song from our past was already kind of a strange coincidence, but it got stranger. The next song that came on was Jean Pierre Rampal playing a movement of the Bolling jazz suite. Emma had learned to play all the movements from this piece on her flute in her freshman year of high school when she got interested in jazz music. Emma and my nephew even performed one of the movements for my mom's 90th birthday - Stephen on piano and Emma on flute. So when that song followed the first we heard, I immediately looked at Peter and said, "Do you hear what they're playing now?!"
But it didn't end there. The next song that came on was a jazz anthem that Emma had performed with her school's jazz band at a dinner dance held just a little more than a month before she died. For the typical restaurant goer I would expect that the song seemed to have nothing in common with the songs that came before it, but for us there was one unifying theme for the music we were hearing - Emma.
The next morning at breakfast it continued. First, another Emma song played. Next, a teenager strolled into the inn's restaurant wearing Emma's signature fedora. And after that, I overheard a parent-child conversation at the next table that brought back a vivid memory of traveling home from Jamaica with Emma when she was 3 1/2 years old. But maybe that's another story...
In the meantime, I was inspired to find out a little more about the song that inspired so many happy times in our Music for Children classes. It was called "It's a Good Day" and it was written by Dave Barbour and Peggy Lee and recorded by Peggy Lee in July, 1946. Click here to see a clip of Peggy singing her hit tune. See Emma? You're still teaching me new things about music.
And here's a link of Rampal playing Bolling's Baroque and Blue Suite for Piano and Flute. Emma played this very difficult piece beautifully. Her music was one of the very tangible ways she enriched our lives.
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