Good Parenting

Mahalia Jackson was alive and well and singing for change. Or so it seemed one recent afternoon, as I waited for the train on Chicago’s Jackson St. platform: “Jesus loves me…

… this I knew in 1967. But I didn’t know the song. In fact, I didn’t know any song, and this caused me a great deal of frustration. I tried singing, like I had seen the real Mahalia Jackson do on The Ed Sullivan Show. But no words came out. Only gibberish attached to my own spontaneous melodies.

I didn’t know what scat singing was. And I didn’t know what singing in tongues was. All anyone knew about my obsessive vocalizations was that, like a noisy bird too early in the morning, I could not be silenced. “Quiet down, now!” my grandfather would occasionally bark.

This was not the first manifestation of my musicality. After seeing The Beatles, the Stones and The Doors on Ed Sullivan, I was given to assembling the paint cans in the garage around me and beating them with sticks, as if they were Ringo Starr’s very own drum set. My grandfather offered to buy me a real drum kit. But the women (my mother and grandmother) would have none of that!

Next came my penchant for picking out melodies on my grandmother’s Wurlizter. She would play Easy Listening hits of the 60s, like “Moon River”, “Cherish” and “Something Stupid” out of an intermediate song book. (Except, back then, they didn’t call it Easy Listening. They just called it Pop.) And when she was done, I would climb onto the slippery wooden bench–from which I would sometimes slide off, landing in a clutter on the pedals–feet dangling, and repeat those melodies, very slowly, from memory.

Sounds sweet, right? Sounds like I was a little Mozart. But that wasn’t the case. A little Stockhausen, perhaps.

Since I knew nothing of common chord structure (triads, 7th chords and the like), I would harmonize those melodies with random note clusters. I was particularly fascinated by minor seconds–two adjacent notes (e.g., a C and a C#). Sometimes I would play three, four or even a whole fist full of notes at the same time, holding down those dissonant clusters until, a minute or so later, my grandmother would stomp into the room from the kitchen with a mixing spoon in her hand, bellowing, “THAT IS ENOUGH!”

Next came the unstoppable scat singing. Eventually, my mom sat me down. “Son,” she said, “I want to teach you a song.” What she meant, of course, was that, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, I needed to start singing in a key, other than the Key of Me.

I can still feel the excitement I felt in that moment. I was going to learn a real song; no more gibberish for me!

That song was “Jesus Loves Me”. The next time Mahalia Jackson appeared on TV, this time during a Billy Graham crusade, I was able to sing along.

... little ones to him belong…” The train arrived at the subway platform. I dropped a dollar in “Mahalia’s” basket. Between phrases, she added, “God bless you!” I thought, He already has, more than I can say. And like you, dear lady, I can sing about it.