Dear Vocalisters,
While I basically agree with Dr. Dean that what we are exposed to
first sets our tastes, I have to admit, I have loved to listen to
nearly anything and everything for as long as I can remember. I
honestly think I would have loved anything I heard. I was 5 or so
when I got my first record player, one of those little boxes that
played the 45's with the small holes in the middle. My records were
all brightly colored plastic, some of them translucent, some opaque
red, blue, green, yellow and of course black. "The Old Chisolm
Trail", "You Are My Sunshine", "Scuffy the Tugboat", songs by Roy
Rogers, Dale Evans, and Gene Autrey (for some reason, I remember not
caring for his voice much) all kinds of popular music that I listened
to hour upon hour filled my little room! We were too poor to have a
television set. It was 1951 when I was five and television hadn't
come into widespread use. So my primary entertainment was listening
to those records. I knew them top to bottom, front to back, every
note, every lyric, every performer's stylistic nuance.
Dad was in Korea and it was Just me and mom. She loved to listen to
the radio and sing. Her aunt was her best friend and used to come
over a lot. She and mom often would sing together, improvising
harmony, sometimes along with the radio, sometimes a capella.
In those days, they played much more of a variety of music on the
popular radio stations. You could hear John Charles Thomas, Ethel
Merman, Kate Smith, Nelson Eddy, Jeanette McDonald, Bing Crosby,
Rosmary Cluny (sp?), Frank Sinatra (my mom's fave), Jo Stafford, Burl
Ives, Ella Fitzgerald, Vaughn Monroe (couldn't stand him, too nasal),
Mario Lanza and many, many others on any given day.
If they told the story well, sang on pitch and in time, I didn't care
what style a performer sang in; I loved it all. It was in Junior
High that I started to become more picky about who and what I liked.
I recall that lot of that was influenced by my mom, my family and my
peers, pretty generally in that order.
There were two other incidents that helped to mold my tastes in
music. One was when we went to a drive in theatre to see a musical
for the first time and one was when I first heard a record of Mario
Lanza singing songs from "The Student Prince" (I think I was 10 at
the time). As soon as I heard him, I wanted to sing like that.
It was never as much a case of what I didn't like as it was a case of
what I liked when I encountered it.
Regards,
Les
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