When I was a kid, my parents and sister sang a lot of gospel music.
And by “a lot,” I mean I cannot count the times I was bounced out of bed at what I considered an offensive hour by my mother pounding the upright piano that was on the other side of the wall from my room.
Dad usually sang the high lead, my mother the alto and Marilyn the tenor. Old-time singings still were popular in rural Pontotoc County at the time and my folks would go to one a couple of Sundays a month, usually at a Baptist or Pentecostal church.
Maybe a hundred people would gather to take turns leading congregational singing with the occasional solo thrown in.
And every Thursday night, my mother and sister would go to the Lightning Ridge Baptist Church, where they would meet up with a dozen or so die-hard singers and gather around the piano for two or three hours of singing out of shaped note songbooks.
If you aren’t familiar with the shaped note system, you should know that it uses the do-re-mi scale, with each of the seven notes having its own shape.
My mother developed Alzheimers and could remember very little shortly before she died, but I asked her out of curiosity one night: “What shape is do?”
“Triangle,” she said with no hesitation.
“La?”
“Square.”
She could not name all seven of her grandchildren at the time, but she knew the shape of every note.
I enjoyed hearing the old-time four-part harmonies and piano playing, but never had an interest in joining.
So, I would spend those long Thursday nights, especially in the summer, stretched out on a back pew, day-dreaming about this and that and keeping time with my foot.
As a seven-year-old, I played in a lot of World’s Series games, hiked many a mountain and caught some huge bass with “The Gloryland Way” and “Turn Your Radio On” for a soundtrack.
I thought the other day that I would like to go to a singing, for nostalgia, so I asked my sister if she knew of any.
‘Not like we used to go to.”
And that made me sad. A piece of Americana and an experience that influences me today - gone like the faded notes from the old upright piano.