I was reminded yesterday that it was Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. I grew up with Ella playing on scratchy LPs as I danced around the den on top of my father’s feet, listening to him sing off-key.
My father had eclectic taste in music, and he clearly felt it was one of his greatest parental obligations to introduce us to all of it.
Music, for my father, was more than a song. It was a story.
He would play the staples of his college days–The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel–and tell us the story of the anti-war movement, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution. He would play Broadway show tunes and tell us about political corruption in Chicago, the gangsters and bootleggers of the 30’s, or wartime in London. He would play Motown and tell us of growing up in the south and how music changed his generation’s views on race. He would play some new band and remind us that songwriters are the poets of modern society.