Chapter 26

Music was always part of our lives growing up. Mother had the radio playing all day while she worked in the house. She often sang along with it. Sometimes one of us would walk by her and, if it was a danceable tune, she’d grab us and make us dance with her.

She belonged to a record club for some years, and we had vinyl records ranging from comedy albums (The Bickersons) to Broadway musicals (South Pacific) to classical (Ferde Gryffe’s Grand Canyon Suite). I can still hear the clip-clop of the mules walking down the trail — clever percussion instruments.

She especially loved Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and a few other country music artists. She would stand in the doorway of the living room, dish towel in hand, and watch The Grand Ole Opry when Daddy had it on the television set.  She’d run back to the kitchen during commercials. It took her a while to get the dishes done.

She decided one day she’d learn to play the ukulele.

“It doesn’t look that hard,” she said after watching someone play it on TV. So she bought herself a used one and taught herself to play some basic chords. She got pretty good.

Summer nights, we’d sit out on the enclosed front porch (which later became part of the living room), and she’d play the ukulele and we’d all sing songs like “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” and “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” Other favorites were “Mockingbird Hill” and “Ukulele Lady.” Andrea always requested “Don’t Fence Me In,” a hint at her personality if ever there was one.  

Our very favourite and most requested was “You Are My Sunshine,” which we girls also sang at her memorial service after she passed many years later. It was “our song.”

I say we all sang, but Daddy didn’t join in — usually. He sat in the other room reading his newspaper and just listened, I guess.  

Mother taught us how to harmonize. Daddy started calling us “the Lemon Sisters” after the all-girl quartet that sang on the Lawrence Welk Show. The whole family watched that show on Saturday nights, and Mother especially liked the dancers.

“I could have been a dancer,” she would often mutter, watching them twirl across the screen. “That’s what I wanted to be.” Truth was she probably could have been a professional dancer. She had amazing rhythm and could glide across a dance floor with the best of them. (At her 90^th birthday party, she danced for three hours in high heels — waltzes, fox trots, polkas, and a schottische.)

Daddy loved Joe Feeney and his Irish ballads, but we girls couldn’t wait for the Lennon Sisters to come on.  We each picked a character, but I was too slow on the uptake. Andrea got to be Diane, the oldest (and prettiest) because Andrea was the oldest. Cindy got to be Janet, because she was the youngest and also blonde. I had to be Peggy or Kathy, neither of which I wanted to be, so I’d vacillate back and forth. After Andrea got too old to play this game, I finally got to be Diane.
We were so enamoured of the singing sisters that we even had Lennon sisters paper dolls. Talk about die-hard fans!

Once in a great while, Daddy would sing a song for us. His go-to song was “Strawberry Roan,” an old Western song about a mean horse nobody could ride.  We all loved it and made him sing it again and again. He actually had a very nice voice. I think it was the only time we sang with him. We all eventually knew the lengthy lyrics by heart. We’d also get him to sing it in the car when we were on a road trip to Missouri, which was pretty much the only place we went on trips.

When I was little, I thought it was a sad song. The last two lines were:

I’ve rode wild ponies from Texas to Nome,
But none like Strawberry Roan.

I thought it meant that none of the other horses liked him, so I felt bad for the poor guy. That wasn’t what it meant, obviously. But I spent a long time feeling sad for Old Strawberry. It was years before I understood what a simile was.

Years later, when we were in our teens, Mother opened a little record shop. Daddy had purchased a piece of land in town and built an office and storage area for Hillman & Pigg Plumbing and Heating. There was plenty of space for Mother to operate her record store. Daddy also rented out part of the space to a hairdresser, so there was a record shop, hairdresser, and plumbing shop all in one place! Mini-mall in the making.  

Cindy and I worked there after school on weekdays and on Saturdays, selling the latest Top 40 hits and a pretty sparse collection of albums. We didn’t get paid, but we did build up impressive personal collections of music.  We got to “take it out in trade,” as Mother would say. We particularly enjoyed driving down to Minneapolis with Mother to pick out all of the new records we’d bring back to sell from a wholesale store.

Many years later, after we were all grown and Mother needed more music in her life, she taught herself to play a keyboard. She learned to play more than 100 songs on it by ear. She never could read music. She loved to play big-band tunes such as “Stardust” and “You Made Me Love You,” and some Patsy Cline songs, among many others.

One time, after Daddy died and she was looking for a way to make a little pocket money, she joked that she would take her keyboard down to the VFW on Friday nights and play.

“I’m pretty bad,” she said, “and I’ll tell them I won’t quit until the tip jar is full. And if I sing, too, I’ll be done in an hour!”

EPILOGUE: When Mother died, at age 98, we held a memorial service for just family on Andrea’s farm in the woods where wildflowers grew and placed her ashes. Cindy, Andrea, and I decided to sing “You Are My Sunshine,” together. A Lemon Sisters reunion! We asked our nephew, Dave, who played the guitar, to accompany us. He learned the song, and we proceeded as planned. The day of the event, Dave started playing, and we three started singing. Andrea choked up first and had to walk away, crying. Cindy and I choked up after the next stanza. Dave was left playing by himself.  Well, we tried!