Today, as I sat on the porch with my morning coffee, my mom
crept into my thoughts. As she often does! It's going on six years
now, since she passed on, but it's safe to say that some memory of her has made
me smile for each day of those six years.
And what made me smile today? A fragment of a song:
"K-K-K-Katy, Beautiful Katy ... You're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore
..." Do you know this song? It's a WWI-era song, sung by a
soldier who was headed off to "see if he could make the Kaiser
dance." Everyone knows "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" or
"Over There." Camille Wallis knew "the sensational
stammering song."
She knew quite an assortment of songs, and sang them all to
my brother and me: the "Erie Canal Song," though as far as I know she
never laid eyes on the canal; a Christmas ditty set to the tune "Country
Gardens," which I have never heard since, nor met anyone else who's known
it; ... and a completely un-PC
version of "After The Ball" that is so un-PC that I wouldn't even consider putting
the words down here! (If you ask me when you see me in person, I will
sing it to you -- provided you swear in writing that you will not let
it diminish your good opinion of me or my mother!) There have been
occasions in which I've been doing research, scouring old books for new tunes
for my repertoire, and found the fragment of a song which I already knew thanks
to the wild and wacky breadth of my mother's musical knowledge. "Oh
where have you been , Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" is but one example.
My mother was a classically-trained soprano, destined to be
so by her very name: my grandfather, a classical bass/baritone and cellist, named
her Camille for "La Dame aux camélias," the central character in
Alexandre Dumas's novel which inspired the opera "La Traviata." (At this point it should be painfully obvious that I have come by my
musical "nerdiness" honestly.) Too much a tomboy to have
mastered the piano -- because you can sing while climbing trees; you have to
actually sit at a piano -- she poured her heart into her singing, and had a
song on her lips almost constantly. I don't think she ever imagined
herself a professional musician, however; she sang for various social occasions
and in the church choir, and once competed in Florida's "Jeanie With The
Light Brown Hair" contest (though she did not win).
She did make sure that her daughter (that's me) mastered
the piano, however, in fulfillment of a promise that she made to my grandfather
on the day that I was born ... he noticed my long fingers and proclaimed
"that child is a born pianist." And she, and my father both,
were ardent supporters of all my musical endeavors. Even when I was
"only" performing as accompanist to someone else, it was the rare
occasion that I did so without one or both of them in the audience.
She loved Irish music, the musicals featuring Julie
Andrews, loved Nat King Cole and Engelbert Humperdinck, loved Roberta Peters
and Beverly Sills (both operatic sopranos), but the music she loved best, far
and away, was "church music," the old-time hymns and spirituals. She loved a good gospel quartet! And in her last years, she would
watch her extensive collection of "Gaither Homecoming" videos over
and over again, much to the occasional chagrin of my brother, with whom she
lived; he'd sometimes call me and say, "It's all Gaither, all the time,
here!" She'd watch them so often that she knew every line, every
joke, and to us it seemed boring, but to her it was bliss because, ultimately,
the Gaithers are all about music.
Of all the things my mother gave me and taught me, it's her
love of music that has had the strongest influence on me. So this
Mother's Day, as every day, I play with extreme gratitude for that love of
music, and the joy and fulfillment it's brought to my own life.
Happy Mother's Day, Camille Wallis!
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