Remembering my mother's music | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

I never know what to get my mom for Mother's Day.

If she wants something she won't say so, and I don't know that she needs anything--though I'm remembering too late that she has asked for fresh photos for the digital frame we gave her a few years ago. (And how hard is it to load a bunch of JPGs onto a SDHC memory card anyway?) So mostly I default to the commercial tokens of flowers and candy.

But I've been thinking about my mother's music.

Like most people, my mother sort of quit listening to new music after a while. Her tastes were established in the '60s. She didn't have much enthusiasm for the jumpsuited late-career Elvis, and while she tolerates the Beatles and Creedence Clearwater, she still favors the sort of countrypolitan that hit its heights with Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors" and its nadir with Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey."

These days she mostly listens to the radio, though her latest car has a satellite receiver. She doesn't know whether she'll keep the service after the six-month trial period is up. She says she doesn't spend that much time driving, though she spends as much time behind the wheel as anyone I know. It's a 15-mile commute to the office she goes into most weekdays; she thinks nothing of driving from Savannah to Louisiana or Mississippi to watch her granddaughter show a horse. I advised her against leasing a car--she couldn't stay under the 12,000 mile a year limit.

I don't really know what she listens to, or if she listens to anything at all. I suspect all the presets on her car radio have been commandeered by young relatives. I guess it is possible she doesn't care. That's what she says at least; whatever anyone else wants to put on is fine.

But I remember when she did listen to music, when she had clear and definite tastes. I don't remember my parents buying records, though I remember them playing them. We were an itinerant military family, not much given to acquisition, and for my entire childhood--until I started buying my own albums a couple of years after the Beatles hit-- they had just a few long-playing platters, nothing so grand as a collection, maybe a couple dozen cardboard-jacketed albums they kept in a brass wire rack next to the Magnavox.

I remember most of those old jackets. I can see Patsy Cline in her red pedal pushers, the Johnny Horton album with all the history lessons, Mitch Miller in a Santa hat, Marty Robbins with a race car called Devil Woman, Jack Greene and Jim Reeves and Burl Ives in a Greek fisherman's cap. I can see young Elvis in a color shot, left profile, his head tilted up as if in prayer, a guitar across his lap.

This was his second RCA album, titled Elvis. (The first RCA album, also from 1956, was called Elvis Presley.)

I knew that album before I knew who Elvis Presley was, before I developed a sense that there were people in a world beyond the boundaries of our house and yard that had nothing whatsoever to do with us. For a while I think I confused the photo of Elvis with the corporeal presence of my Uncle Roy, my mother's younger brother, a paratrooper who had about him--to my preschool sensibilities--something of the air of a pop star.

There are nameless things to be pulled from the primordial murk, the time one lived before one began to give things names. One of my earliest memories is musical, and appropriately enough, I now realize, it was an Elvis song.

It was about a boy and his faithful dog, a maudlin tune written by Red Foley, a cornpone schmaltzer with a dark side (his wife and frequent duet partner Judy Martin committed suicide, reportedly over Red's affair with another woman). It was called "Old Shep," and it was sung by Elvis in his most plaintive golden brown tenor. He afforded the mawkish lyric the high seriousness of a hymn:

When I was a lad,

and Old Shep was a pup

Over hills and meadows we'd stray

Just a boy and his dog

We were both full of fun

We grew up together that way

Because I registered a response to the sentimental lyric and the syrupy voice, my mother decided "Old Shep" was my "favorite song." (I also confused Nipper, the RCA trademark who sat listening at the Victrola for his master's voice, with the dog in the song.) This despite the fact that the thing nearly always left me in tears (and it shames me to confess that, even as I type these words, my eyes are moistening, because I know what's coming next).

For, like life itself, the song could not long support such bucolic imagery. While little boys grow up, little doggies grow old, and there eventually comes the day when the vet looks in your eyes and tells you he can do no more for your dog. With love comes responsibility and duty.

With hands that were trembling

I picked up my gun

And aimed it at Shep's faithful head

I just couldn't do it, I wanted to run

I wish they'd shoot me instead

Yet Shep is brave and reassures his master, who I certainly took to be Elvis--or my Uncle Roy.

He came to my side

And looked up at me

And laid his old head on my knee

I had struck the best friend

that a man ever had

I cried so I scarcely could see

We're all imprinted with the preferences and prejudices of the people who were big when we were small. We have to actively decide whether to embrace or reject these things.

When I look at my own largely digitized music collection, I realize I've collected just about all of the records my parents had in their inventory, if not in the original forms, at least I have copies of all the individual tracks that might be considered even vaguely "important." (Not the Mitch Miller. )

Fifty-odd years later, I know "Old Shep" is a criminally bad song, tasteless and manipulative. And part of me is ashamed that even my precognitive self could have been taken in by its sappy lure. But I am yet susceptible to "Old Shep" and not just the Elvis version; a couple of years ago I heard country music scholar Bill Malone play and sing it for purposes of demonstration that are cloudy to me now. It still hurt.

I still love it.

Thanks, Mom.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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