Mom loved to sing. She would just break out into song. Dad too for that matter. When I was little, we would sing “Mary had a Little Lamb”. We would also sing “Row, row, row your boat”. We would even sing it in a round. If you don’t know what that means, to sing a round is when a group of people, 2 or more will sing exactly the same melody, but with each voice beginning at different times so that different parts of the melody coincide in the different voices and when you get to the end, you start all over. You repeat this however many times is agreed on. We also sang “Frère Jacques” and 3 Blind Mice. She would sing the Purina Cat Chow commercials; “Purina Cat Chow, chow, chow, chow. Little Friskies cat food used the tune to the Bob Seger song “I like that old time Rock-n-Roll. Which went like this…”Just take those Little Friskies off the shelf, I could eat the whole box by myself.”
Mom sang crazy stuff that I never heard of before like The Ugly Bug Ball”. She would sing “T for Texas, T for Tennessee”, “The Yellow Rose of Texas”, “Roll out the Barrells”, “On Top of Old Smoky”, “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain”, “Camptown Races” and others. Then she would sing some old hymns like “The Unclouded Day” and I”ll Fly Away were her favorite, I think. She told the story of being a little girl and Mawmaw Alice would sing “I’ll Fly Away while rocking mom to sleep. Mom would cry, thinking when she woke up that Mawmaw Alice wouldn’t be there. I wish she were here to listen to David Crowder’s rendition of “I saw the Light”, she would love it.
My sister, as a teenager in the mid-1970’s went with some friends to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Louisville. I remember Mom, Dad and I waiting in the car when it was about over. My mom was getting hotter by the minute, I don’t mean the weather, even though it was summer. She was carrying on about the concert running too long, and all things that could possibly be going in there! Back in those days, when the concert was nearly over, no one cared who walked in. So, mom took the bull by the horns and marched herself in there to find my sister. According to my sister, Mom was having such a good time, that she didn’t want to leave!
By the time I got to be a teenager, early 1980’s, mom was listening to my music too. Of course, I turned it up really loud and she was ok with that. She liked Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. She and I even went to their concerts. We went to see Barry Manilow and we also saw The Statler Brothers.
Mom sang Christmas songs too. The usual carols but she loved the barking dogs doing “Jingle Bells” the best. She especially liked “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”.