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When my brother and I were little, our parents would put us to bed with songs.
It's not that they didn't read to us - we were a very bookish house and books are still one of our most common gifts. But when it was time for bed, they sang.
Which is why I can sing the entire Cal Berkeley drinking song (the '69 version) and how to hit all the notes on "O Holy Night", even though I can't normally carry a tune in a bucket if you glue the lid on. I know the first verse of a little nursery-rhyme style song about a cat that has, unfortunately, become suggestive in the intervening years. I remember parts of the Army version of "Old King Cole" (though I never could memorize all of it).
My father also sang around the house; he played ragtime piano for fun, which is also why I can fake a large portion of "You've Gotta See Mamma Every Night (Or You Can't See Mamma at All)". I can probably recite most of the (unfortunately racist) "That's What I Like About the South", and like a surprising number of my generation, remember quite a bit of the M.T.A. song.
Recently I found myself remembering a short verse my father would sing from time to time; it pops up in my head every so often. This time, on impulse, I decided to actually look it up online.
(Folks who grew up using the Internet have no idea how revolutionary it is to have so much information literally at one's fingertips. It is absolutely astonishing.)
It's a simple, jaunty little song. South Dakota is the sunshine state/All the people are feeling great/Sunshine and smiles are their stock in trade/Sunshine and smiles of the very best grade/South Dakota! South Dakota! That is the sunshine state!*
To my bafflement, I found...exactly one mention of it. One. In a PDF of a 1936 South Dakota 4-H program booklet on American composers. Thank you, South Dakota State University.
This seemed extremely odd. I'd been hearing it all my life! How could it only exist in one place? South Dakota does have a state song, but it's not that one.
So I asked my dad where he'd heard it, and he said his mother taught it to him.
Well, Grams did grow up in the Dakotas, though I can never remember precisely where. I don't know if she ever participated in 4-H; her family moved to California when she was in her teens, so the booklet at least is too late - she was born in 1911 and eloped in 1936.**
I suppose it's irrational of me to be bothered by this. But it just feels strange that I know it, and my father knows it, and my mother probably does, and yet all there is out there is one scan of an old songbook.
Surely there are others who can sing it. But I'll probably never know.
It's not bad, necessarily. Things fade out of memory and knowledge as steadily as they come in. Just take a look at the advertisements at the back of any book prior to about 1990 and you'll see ads for titles you've never heard of (I'm still tremendously tickled by James Dean: The Mutant King), and the further back in time you go, the harder it is to even prove those books ever existed. And yet to judge by the ad copy some of them were best-sellers at the time of printing.
Not everything is worth remembering, or keeping, except perhaps in an archival sense. I doubt this little scrap of song is either. Unless it got passed to some of my father's cousins, it too will vanish when I do, except for that PDF, and who knows how long that will remain accessible?
The sands of time erode us all...
*Dad had the lyrics slightly wrong - it's "Sunshine and smiles is our stock in trade". Pace grammarians.
**The elopement wasn't due to familial disapproval; it was during the Great Depression and she and Gramps were just trying to keep their families from spending money on a party. It didn't work.***
***Grams sang too. A German song about a cat - Dad can still sing bits but doesn't remember how to translate it - and the one about the birdie with the yellow bill - and a rather creepy and sad song about goblins.
It's not that they didn't read to us - we were a very bookish house and books are still one of our most common gifts. But when it was time for bed, they sang.
Which is why I can sing the entire Cal Berkeley drinking song (the '69 version) and how to hit all the notes on "O Holy Night", even though I can't normally carry a tune in a bucket if you glue the lid on. I know the first verse of a little nursery-rhyme style song about a cat that has, unfortunately, become suggestive in the intervening years. I remember parts of the Army version of "Old King Cole" (though I never could memorize all of it).
My father also sang around the house; he played ragtime piano for fun, which is also why I can fake a large portion of "You've Gotta See Mamma Every Night (Or You Can't See Mamma at All)". I can probably recite most of the (unfortunately racist) "That's What I Like About the South", and like a surprising number of my generation, remember quite a bit of the M.T.A. song.
Recently I found myself remembering a short verse my father would sing from time to time; it pops up in my head every so often. This time, on impulse, I decided to actually look it up online.
(Folks who grew up using the Internet have no idea how revolutionary it is to have so much information literally at one's fingertips. It is absolutely astonishing.)
It's a simple, jaunty little song. South Dakota is the sunshine state/All the people are feeling great/Sunshine and smiles are their stock in trade/Sunshine and smiles of the very best grade/South Dakota! South Dakota! That is the sunshine state!*
To my bafflement, I found...exactly one mention of it. One. In a PDF of a 1936 South Dakota 4-H program booklet on American composers. Thank you, South Dakota State University.
This seemed extremely odd. I'd been hearing it all my life! How could it only exist in one place? South Dakota does have a state song, but it's not that one.
So I asked my dad where he'd heard it, and he said his mother taught it to him.
Well, Grams did grow up in the Dakotas, though I can never remember precisely where. I don't know if she ever participated in 4-H; her family moved to California when she was in her teens, so the booklet at least is too late - she was born in 1911 and eloped in 1936.**
I suppose it's irrational of me to be bothered by this. But it just feels strange that I know it, and my father knows it, and my mother probably does, and yet all there is out there is one scan of an old songbook.
Surely there are others who can sing it. But I'll probably never know.
It's not bad, necessarily. Things fade out of memory and knowledge as steadily as they come in. Just take a look at the advertisements at the back of any book prior to about 1990 and you'll see ads for titles you've never heard of (I'm still tremendously tickled by James Dean: The Mutant King), and the further back in time you go, the harder it is to even prove those books ever existed. And yet to judge by the ad copy some of them were best-sellers at the time of printing.
Not everything is worth remembering, or keeping, except perhaps in an archival sense. I doubt this little scrap of song is either. Unless it got passed to some of my father's cousins, it too will vanish when I do, except for that PDF, and who knows how long that will remain accessible?
The sands of time erode us all...
*Dad had the lyrics slightly wrong - it's "Sunshine and smiles is our stock in trade". Pace grammarians.
**The elopement wasn't due to familial disapproval; it was during the Great Depression and she and Gramps were just trying to keep their families from spending money on a party. It didn't work.***
***Grams sang too. A German song about a cat - Dad can still sing bits but doesn't remember how to translate it - and the one about the birdie with the yellow bill - and a rather creepy and sad song about goblins.