Category Archives: music

Rain Songs

family, music, nature, water, , ,

Rain is falling and I’m happy. Recently I refreshed my memory bank of rain songs by means of the recording, “Rainy Day Dances, Rainy Day Songs,” by Patty Zeitlin and Marcia Berman. We used to borrow an LP from the library when the kids were little, and the songs have lodged in my mind forever.

On the recording there was also an instrumental tune, “Over the Waterfall,” played on the hammered dulcimer. I can’t find anything on YouTube by the musicians who gave us this collection that so blessed my children and me, but I did find a similar, simpler rendition.

I loved the silly dancing and singing we did to songs like “I Don’t Care if the Rain Comes Down,” “Windy Day,” and “Why Can’t I Play in the Rain?”

I bought my CD copy of the album from the Bullfrog Ballades site, where you can also hear samples of the songs. Today I’m having a lazy day being thankful that God is watering the earth again, as I let my thoughts slosh about in rainy images like this one of me (on the left) with my sister a long time ago. If you can’t play in the rain, perhaps a puddle will do.

Glorious Mud

music, play, poetry, video,

Homeschooling Beach Babies enjoy playing in the mud. The sight of these darlings and the memory of my own children in similar settings brought to mind the song I used to sing to them. Nowadays it’s easy to find such things on YouTube, which I did.

It turns out what I had gleaned from who-knows-where was only the chorus of a long song titled “The Hippopotamus,” by Flanders and Swann, which tune and words form the soundtrack of a suitably watery video.

One can find the words of the verses online, but they aren’t really for children. The chorus alone was sufficient to spark up our family’s muddy excursions, and it goes like this:

Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow,
Down to the hollow,
And there let us wallow
In glorious mud!

Have fun!

Funny Wasp Thing

music, nature, ,

The wasp approached in the afternoon as I was sitting on a leafy patio listening to my companions’ leisurely conversation. He quickly got down to business and stung the back of my knee. I don’t recall ever having been stung by a wasp before, so I didn’t know what to expect, having seen and heard of extreme reactions.

I decided to go inside the restaurant and ask for some ice to put on the spot, to calm things down, and when I got back I explained what happened. Nearly all the people sipping drinks under the umbrellas were nurses or doctors, so they wanted to be sure I was o.k., but after I assured them that the ice was working fine, we went on talking about other things in the world.

Yellow Jacket

But I haven’t got to the funny part. On the drive home I had to leave off icing that still-stinging place, and it did start hurting again; the heat was spreading and stabbing a little, too. I’ll just have to take some Benadryl when I get home, I thought.

I switched on the radio in the middle of “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” but perhaps because it was not exactly a bee that had got me, I didn’t think anything of it. At the end of that piece, the announcer said that after that he felt he really must play “The Wasp Overture” by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune — or what was surely a little medicine custom-formulated by God. The remedy seemed to work, because by the time I got back to my town, the site of the sting was not swollen or painful anymore, and there was only a little red dot where that (probably) yellow jacket had attacked. Mr. Glad called it a musical form of homeopathy: like cures like.

I didn’t even take the whole remedy, because the overture was still playing when I had to turn of the engine and go inside. It was a beautiful piece, more evocative of the lovely aspects of a summer afternoon than the wicked wasp himself — that is, what I noticed of it.

Mostly I was amazed, as I listened, that anyone would compose music with that title, and that I was hearing it for the first time after my recent insect encounter. Since then I’ve learned that it was written for a production of Aristophanes’ play The Wasps, and is a fairly popular piece. But at the time all I could think was, Could Vaughan Williams have written such a thing if he’d ever known a wasp the way I did that day?

Bluesy Boots

music

Mr. Glad took me to a nearby art and garden festival mostly so we could hear some music for free. We browsed through some booths and considered buying a painting, admired hand-carved wooden bowls, and pottery. We bought pizza and wine and beer, and then stood near the back of the stage so my husband could keep an eye on the drummers.


Two bands performed during the time we were there: a Santana cover band, and the blues band of Tommy Castro. I didn’t think of taking pictures of the first one, though their music was more to my liking — very much so. And their drummer was amazing.

Quite a few people were dancing close to the stage, and that was fun to watch. I particularly liked one man’s shirt with bright birds.

I couldn’t make out most of the words to the Castro numbers. That band is famous in their genre, and I did enjoy listening, but after Mr. Glad pointed out to me that the musicians in the front were all wearing cowboy boots, my camera eyes were framing pictures everywhere. The drummer was wearing black athletic shoes, and he didn’t seem to be working very hard, so I left him out.

The trumpeter, however, was impressive in his placidity, and for his long gray braid. And Tommy made sure to turn and face three directions from the stage in turn, so that we could all watch his fancy guitar-playing.