Sing a New Song

I grew up on street corner doo wop and girl groups, but also on Eartha Kitt and Ella and Peggy Lee. The Great American Song Book was my Bible and singing felt like the eleventh commandment. That shalt know all the lyrics to every song in the Top 40. Spend as much time as possible fantasizing about yourself purring into a microphone in a smoky jazz club or belting out an Ethel Merman showstopper in front the bedroom mirror. We all sang all the time.

Consider the miracle of the human singing voice. My body and yours are wondrously constructed so that the muscles of the larynx respond by means of telekinesis, adjusting the length and tension of the vocal cords to produce a tune that seconds before only existed in our imaginations. I can make that happen abracadabra, a word from the Aramaic meaning “I will create as I speak.” Abracadabra, the tune pours out into the world exactly as it sounded inside my head. Down a minor third and back up again and there you have it, “Summertime.” Your mind and your body are making time with Gershwin. You are Dorothy Dandridge, at least in the shower. You don’t need a keyboard, or a capo, or a trumpet mute. All you need is the breath that you were born with and you can make music. Breath is all there is in the end, so everyone is just inhaling and exhaling together, sustaining the life of the world in this moment as it has always done. The lilies are breathing. The foxes are breathing. When you think about it, singing is the essential spiritual offering, the original language. Think chant. Think hymns in church and blues in the fields.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

A quick review of the research indicates that singing helps to lower stress, boost immunity and lung function, enhance memory, improve mental health, and cope with physical and emotional pain. In the nursing homes where I used to work, the dementia patients on the memory unit knew all the words to all the old songs. And singing is free! This strikes me as the practice I’ve been searching for, the medicine that could elevate my consciousness out of the heart of darkness where it’s been crouching these last years and onto the sunny side of the street. You can see me there in 1966, my last year of college, peering into the distance singing “(What a Day for a ) Daydream,” even though I had no idea what a Lovin’ Spoonful was.

You can see my daddy, rotund and twinkly-eyed, some Father’s Day long ago, marching around the red linoleum in the kitchen singing the World War I song “(Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and) Smile, Smile, Smile.” We practiced singing as an antidote to fear and despair. A little soft-shoe wouldn’t hurt.

In my twenties, I actually took lessons with an Italian tenor in my mother’s building. He had me doing all the usual vocal exercises and seemed to see me in Puccini, even though all I ever wanted was Gypsy in summer stock. I was a skinny thing with a big voice who thought she was Ethel. But fifty years later, the music doesn’t come out of my mouth the way I hear it in my head anymore. It creaks and cracks. Like the rest of my body, my vocal cords have shrunk and shriveled with age. They don’t tell you about these things, these minor inconveniences. They don’t tell you that if you plan to sing a cappella in public at the age of seventy-six, you’d better scope out the first notes lest your voice end up banshee-screeching or vanishing into the lower register later in the song. It’s like taking the wrong exit off the BQE. Once you’re lost, you’re lost.

But what if I once was lost, but now I’m found? And what if singing in these more desperate and more self-aware times, isn’t merely an antidote, but another way to experience what life has been serving up for all of us, a way to engage the fear and despair, and most of all a way for me to enjoy myself. Maybe I can dig deep into my fake book and retrieve the music that’s been looking for me at this time in my life. Some days, I’ll ask Billie “Am I Blue?” But some days, I might just go for it. I might get down with Judy and “Get Happy.” It’s all there for the asking.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.