Music to Last a Lifetime

Bold notes, soft harmonies and melodies of all sorts meandered with her on the trail of life.

NO MATTER the tune, music will arouse an emotion, and all variations have had a place in my heart.

As a child living on a farm near Garnett, Kansas, during the Great Depression, some of my earliest memories are of my mother sitting down at the old upright piano and playing Shall We Gather at the River? and In the Garden. She also played a feisty Red Wing and Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet.

We later moved to Kansas City, Kansas, and several members of a neighboring family played in a country-western band called the 101 Ranch Boys. I began taking guitar lessons, and when the band practiced, I often sang along with Tumbling Tumble-weeds, The Strawberry Roan and I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande).

At my 16th-birthday party, we danced to In the Mood, String of Pearls, Chattanooga Choo Choo, Stardust and Sunrise Serenade.

I started working in the hardware department of a Kresge five-and-dime store. The girl working in the nearby pet department loved the Dentyne Gum commercial that went, "Dentyne Chewing Gum, it's keen chewing gum. ..." When it came on, she would leave whatever she was doing—customer or not—go to the radio and sing along with the jingle. Soon there was a new girl at the pet counter.

One day in 1946, Dad announced we were moving back to Garnett, and the bottom dropped out of my world, But music again helped me adjust as I joined the high school band. I think we played every march John Philip Sousa ever wrote; I especially remember Stars and Stripes Forever, Semper Fidelis and The Washington Post March.

Sometimes a bunch of us pooled our money and drove the 85 miles to Kansas City's Forum Ballroom to dance to the bands of Glenn Miller, Woody Herman and Tommy Dorsey playing Moonlight Serenade, Stomp-in' at the Savoy and many other great tunes. It was definitely a dress-up place to go.

A girlfriend and I entertained with guitar and vocals at box and pie suppers in Garnett, singing I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart (yes, we yodeled), Worried Mind, Don't Fence Me In, That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine and Old Shep.

One summer, the county fair board asked me to ride into the arena at fair time, singing and playing songs on horseback. When I did, the noise of the crowd, the lights and the excitement were too much for the horse, which took off at a run. I hung onto the saddle horn for dear life as the guitar thumped the horse and spurred him on to greater effort. One of the cowboys rode out, stopped the horse and led us to the microphone, where I breathlessly sang El Rancho Grande and Red River Valley.

After graduation, I went to western Kansas to teach. The many Ger-man Catholics in the area danced the old schottisches and waltzes to One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart), Paper Doll, Careless Hands, Show Me the Way to Go Home and Goodnight, Irene.

I later married a western Kansas man and raised a family. We lived on a ranch and there was plenty of work to do, so we cleaned house to music. Wastebaskets waltzed and pillows were plumped in time to A Storm at Sea, while children carrying packs of folded laundry clip-clopped into bedroom canyons to the Grand Canyon Suite. Other chores were done to Peter and the Wolf, the William Tell Over-ture, Schubert's Serenade and piano concertos.

As I drove my oldest daughter to college in Sterling, Kansas, we listened to the radio playing Leaving on a Jet Plane and Sounds of Silence. Those were appropriate, since we had lost my husband in a tragic farm accident months earlier.

Now it is my grandchildren's turn to listen to music. I made it through Beatlemania, but now I am back taking my daily walk while listening on headphones to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Marty Robbins and Benny Goodman.

The bumps along my life's way have been smoothed by music. As Roy Rogers used to say, "Happy trails to you."

—By Marie Fletcher
Leoti, Kansas