This is a perfect book for dipping into and enjoying on a summer afternoon. It’s packed with musical memories from all sorts of celebrities – musicians, writers, politicians, television personalities – and the music which means most to them will come as a surprise to many of us. Ann Widdecombe – what piece of music means most to Ann? A classic waltz, an excerpt from an opera, a pop song? You’ll never guess!
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
My mother had Alzheimer’s for so many years before being diagnosed and music certainly helped me cope with her disease.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
Music is vitally important to me. My father was a musician, traditional jazz and popular dance, and I grew up in the company of musicians. I would sit for hours in empty auditoriums listening to the bands rehearsing. At our olive farm in the south of France I have over 3,000 CDs and on my ipod almost two years worth of music. Making choices is therefore always difficult and quite impossible to pick one piece but if I must I am going to say Oscar Peterson’s rendition of his own composition and now a jazz classic, ‘Hymn To Freedom’. I don’t know how many albums of his I have with this stirring piece on it and, for me, even the pauses are full of soul and yearning. Duende. My husband Michel used to put this on every morning as he brought me my coffee in bed and I was woken to this rousing and spirited tune. What an inspiring way to begin any day. We saw Oscar’s last concert in Paris and by mistake he played ‘Hymn to Freedom’ twice and I could not have been more delighted. He was barely able to shuffle onto the stage and had to be led by two men, one on each arm, but when he sat down at that stool and lifted his hands to the keys, it was as though a muse entered him. His body language changed entirely. He was upright, strong, lost within his interpretation of the music. The audience was spellbound. Oscar Peterson, one of the greatest of twentieth-century jazz musicians and composers. RIP, Oscar. I hope they supplied him with a piano when he stepped through those Pearly Gates.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
Can music spark off memories other than our own? That’s what I think when I listen to Billie Holiday’s beautiful tones, so redolent of melancholy. Because one bar of ‘The Man I Love’ and I’m me and her simultaneously, in the Deep South with the shimmering sun rising outside a smoky club and yet somehow, also at my desk in cool, crisp Wicklow.
The music lays down a hypnotic beat that makes me fall into that other place, like muscle memory helps people play the violin and evolutionary memory helps the finger-sized baby kangaroo instinctively crawl up its mother’s belly to the safety of her pouch. Music crosses all barriers of time and place, cradling us in warmth.
For the last ten years of his life, my father had dementia and the parts of him that were the last to go were his memories of the far past. Yesterday was gone from him but he talked of ‘going home’, when home was a big red-bricked house miles away from our home, the one he’d lived in for thirty years.
He loved music, from the classical tapes he collected the old LPs of jazzman, Bix Beiderbecke. As a family, we feared the words dementia and Alzheimer’s as terrifying bogeymen. It was as if those words themselves had power and, until we got a diagnosis, the words could not be real. But they were.
In those years, we thought the right thing to do was to keep his dementia from him. We were mute when he yelled that all the paintings had been moved, and why were we doing this to him?
Now, I wonder if music could have helped? If listening to the music he loved could really have soothed the savage breast? In a world that must have seemed like a surreal painting, the soft murmuring of jazz or classical music might have brought him quickly to a happier time.
I’d do it differently now. With the benefit of hindsight, I think he should have known the truth. But we were only trying to help, to soothe as best we could.
We never listened to Billie Holiday together. He loved jazz before I did and he liked different sorts. Louis Armstrong’s gravelly ‘Mack The Knife’ was one of the few we both adored.
But when I hear Vivaldi, I can still see the cover of the tape he loved of ‘The Four Seasons’. I can see his desk with all his tapes and papers neatly organised, along with his fountain pens. There might be a bit of paper out, filled with his tiny, obsessively neat handwriting in the dark blue ink he favoured.
‘The Four Seasons’ brings me back. Like magic. But then, music is magic.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
The song ‘What’s the Matter Baby’, written by Clyde Otis and Joy Johnson for the late Timi Yuro, who has to be one of the greatest singers who was around in the 60s, always gives me goosebumps.
In 1988 I did an album called ‘Bookbinder’s Kid’. On that album I did a tribute to Timi and sang ‘What’s the Matter Baby’.
That year I did a tour to promote the album. Having come off stage one night and enjoying a drink with my family in our motor home, Timi called me on my new mobile phone (quite a thing then) to tell me she thought I did a fantastic version of the song.
What a woman she was! She could hardly speak then because of the cancer in her throat, but she just wanted to make contact.
I have to say it is one of the proudest moments in my career.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
My mother had Alzheimer’s. Conversation with her had become impossible, yet on a car drive one day she sang every song word-perfect to a Frank Sinatra CD.
Music seems to have an effect on this illness.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
‘Angel Eyes’ is a song that’s very special to me. My mom, dad and several of my five brothers had great voices. The boys had a singing quartet which I wasn’t allowed to be a part of because not only was I too young, but I was a girl! My mom used to sing around the house all the time, and I greatly admired her voice. A short time after having had surgery on a goitre she was trying to sing and found she couldn’t hit the notes. She turned to me and said, ‘Sing that for me baby, will you?’ Well, you would have thought it was a command performance for the Queen of England! I didn’t even know that she knew I could sing. I was so thrilled I nearly couldn’t sing! The song was ‘Angel Eyes’.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
I think music more than anything else can evoke a memory, a moment or an emotion, and it can send you travelling back in time to the place where you first heard it, or the person you heard it with. It can produce a vivid recollection of something special, either happy or sad.
I have many musical reminders of things, some connected with my children or grandchildren, or friends, some that make me laugh or want to cry, but perhaps the one that has always brought back happy thoughts and happy times is Nat King Cole singing ‘When I Fall in Love’.
The very first time I heard it was with Bryan. We were celebrating our first wedding anniversary. We were in Los Angeles and we’d been invited to hear Nat King Cole in concert. We were given ringside seats and I gather someone had told him it was a special night for us because not only did he dedicate ‘When I Fall in Love’ to us, but he sang it to me. It was one of those fabulous moments you never forget. So I’m sure you’ll understand why Bryan and I have always regarded it as ‘our song’. Whenever I hear it today I am reminded of that occasion and memories come flooding back of the many happy times we’ve spent together since.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
The song is ‘Sonny Boy’ by Al Jolson. There are so many songs I would have liked to choose as I like many different forms of music and there are so many songs I have fallen in love with over the years.
The reason for choosing this Jolson classic is that it reminds me of my ludicrous impersonations designed to impress my future wife, and takes me back to a time when being light-hearted and ‘devil may care’ was the norm rather than the exception.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
I have many favourite songs but I think the one I’d like to pick is Simon & Garfunkel’s; ‘For Emily – Wherever I May Find Her’. I first heard it when I was fourteen and fell in love with the tune and lyrics. I vowed then that if I ever had a little girl, I would name her Emily, which I did. Even though the song is not about a baby, the lyrics in the last couple of verses describe exactly how I felt when Emily was born.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives
They Can't Take That Away From Me 