Music

Small town, Oregon coast, 1940s and ‘50s.  That doesn’t equate to hearing classical European classical music. At school, music meant singing patriotic songs, like “The Marine Corps Hymn” or “The Caisson Song,”  then playing in the high school band:  clarinet for me, drums for Sandy, trombone for Mark.  Milly had an upright piano and pounded out “Chopticks.” Sandy and Tina had piano lessons, but their teacher, Miss Bray, wouldn’t let Sandy progress until she mastered “Kentucky Babe.” Sandy was stuck on that song for weeks, and I can still hear its thumping rhythm, “TAH du dah, TAH du dah, Sweeet Kentucky Babe!”

     Milly tried to keep records in the house, but standard issues were 78 rpms, and they were brittle.  A kid couldn’t seem to handle one without cracking a big chunk out of it.  When Vake’s friend Aino Kiander  got into the vending machine business, he had juke boxes, too, and would bring us a stack of more durable vinyl 45s when they were swapped out of one of his machines.  They had a broad spindle hole that we would plug with an adapter and listen to “Rhode Island Redhead from Pawtucket” (that’s a pun, kids—Rhode Island reds are a variety of chicken), or “Who Drank My Beer While I Was in the Rear?” which was the lament of a man who spent his last nickel on a glass of beer, only to have somebody else drink it when he left it alone for a minute to go use the toilet. I always felt terribly sorry for him.

     Uncle Gene was generous in lending money to people in need, and he made a loan to the singer Johnny Ray, who had a big hit with “Little White Cloud that Cried;” but Gene didn’t get the money back.

     When Milly and Vake moved to Florence in 1953, music was available only from KUGN radio from Eugene, OR. Radio reception was too awful for us to pick up anything else. KUGN played some popular songs of the day, like “How Much is that Doggy in the Window,” or “Shrimp Boats Is  A-comin’ There’s  Dancin’ Tonight!”plus country and western songs.  Popular music began to change, radically, when I was around 10 years old and Elvis appeared on the scene, but KUGN stayed with a country and western format. At church, Jimmy Worthylake was still playing his accordion for the congregation, but in the taverns, the Estep brothers from Mapleton were playing electric guitars.

      We didn’t get television reception at home until 1961, when I was 14 years old,  so I had to go to Uncle John’s house in town to hear popular songs on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,”  to hear Elvis, then Ricky Nelson, the heartthrob of the day.  It seemed incredible that a prior generation had admired Frank Sinatra equally as much.  Then, later at night when radio waves were skipping off of the ionosphere, I could hear Little Stevie Wonder playing his harmonica and singing “Clap Your Hands,” broadcast out of Portland, OR.

      We got that television in time to meet the Beatles, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan show. But I never appreciated how much of a local cultural phenomenon that country and western music was until I read Ken Kesey’s novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion.” It’s set in Florence, OR, and picks up local places and people, although their names are all changed. Kesey knew the country music well—his father ran the Darigold Coop that bought milk from all the local farmers, and Darigold was a sponsor of country music on KUGN.  Kesey headed each chapter of his novel with a verse from “Goodnight Irene” that says, “Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in the town. Sometimes I take a great notion to jump in the river and drown.”