It is a long time ago, in the fifties. I am about twelve or so,in the middle of taking piano lessons so when my brother and sister and I gather at the piano I get to read the sheet music. The piano is an old dark walnut upright with yellowed keys, and has a twanging sort of sound but is roughly in tune- with itself. I am not as good a piano player as my dad but he plays boogie-woogie by ear which no one can sing to.
We play from a stack of sheet music- some singles like 'Christmas in Killarny' which has ukeleli chords on the top line, but mostly from collections. We have a 'Steven Foster Song Book', things like 'I dream of Jeannie' (with the light brown hair), 'Old Black Joe', 'Way Down upon the Swanee River', 'My Old Kentucky Home' Some of these are written in a pretend Negro dialect where Black people are called 'Darkies' but you could hardly call us racist- I never even saw a Black person till my parents took us to see Disney's 'Song of the South'. For the record I was open mouthed that anyone could be such a beautiful colour.
Then there is a song book with things like 'Who shot the hole in my sombrero' which we delight in singing in a stage Mexican accent. More seriously, there is a song called 'Via con Dios' which I yearn to have someone to sing to besides my older sister.
Of course there are also those songs sung a capella which kids taught to kids -'Be kind to your webfooted friends, for a duck may be somebody's mother,who lives in the depths of the swamp, where the weather is very dahmp. Well maybe you think this is the end...well it is!' and the immortal 'My bonnie eats maggots for breakfast /my bonnie eats elephant's dung/my bonnie has bloody corruptions/and stirs them around with her tongue. Oh come up, come up,oh come up my stomach come up, come up. Come up, come up, oh come up my stomach come up.I'm coming, I'm coming for my head is hanging low(over the sink). I hear their gentle voices calling....Hasten Jason bring the basin, whoops plop where's the mop?' Guaranteed to reduce any eight year old to helpless hysteria.