Singing on the Road
We are somewhere en route: to California, to South Dakota, to the East Coast, to Panama City. My brother and I, both preschoolers, are in the back seat of the old Dodge, and (what a smart way to keep the kids in line) my parents are singing—and we are singing along, or trying to, not yet knowing all the words. Even my parents don’t know all the words, and many of the words they do know, I find out later, they know wrong. But that doesn’t stop them from singing with loud authority all the songs they can remember, from “My Darling Clementine” to “The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboango” to “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.”
Later: Our family has grown by first one sister, then another, and the songs serve a new purpose—to rev us up for the new place we will live for a while, which is typically half a continent away from our setting-off spot. We sing “Springtime in the Rockies” on the way to Colorado Springs, “There’s a Pawnshop on the Corner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania” on the way to where you’d expect, and many, many songs, a whole dancehall act’s worth of songs—“The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and cowboy songs galore—while bound for Fort Worth.]
The romantic images conjured by the songs have little to do with what we’ll find where we’re going, but they help us look forward instead of back. We may be plunked down in a typical housing development in Fort Worth, but not till we’ve sung ourselves through the mesas and tumbleweeds of the Wild West on the way there. The songs are like cheers: for the team of our family and the new playing field. We make up for weakness in tune-carrying by sheer volume.
It wasn’t just with my family that I used to sing on the road a lot. In practically every one of the places I grew up, there was a bus to take, to school or to play. To my mind, the virtues of the neighborhood school have been overrated. A school one had to be driven to seemed to me much more exotic and grown-up than the six-blocks-away variety and riding to school in a bus made the experience more definitively Getting Away From Home. Being bussed meant a free ride—with music. Maybe some kids sing while they walk to school together, but I’d bet most require wheels rolling under them to have that joy (those few who do, in this age of isolating electronic playthings).
More powerfully than anything that actually happened in a first-grade classroom, I remember those early bus rides, bound for school in St. John’s, Newfoundland, from Pepperell Air Force Base. Some older Woody Guthrie fans led us in “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” a song that I couldn’t distinguish the words of—though I did sing something—let alone what they meant. Now that I know the words, I can’t hear them without being for a moment back on that bus.
In Colorado Springs, I walked to school; but one summer, after first or second grade, I got to ride a bus several times a week, from the nearby Air Force base to the Broadmoor Hotel, to take swimming lessons with Sergeant Susan. The sergeant was from Hawaii (we accepted his last name like a foreign exoticism); he was short, stocky, and strong, with a voice as powerful as his arms, and he loved to sing. So sing we all did, nonstop, on the way to the pool and the way back.
The sergeant’s repertoire was heavy on military anthems, which most service kids grow up with, but his passionate rendition of “Off We Go Into the Wild, Blue Yonder” seemed to have more to do with flight and adventure—and even metaphorically with love—than it did with war. When we sang “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” not having the foggiest idea of what caissons were, I imagined them as something like the wheels of our bus, a magic bus taking us to magic places.
In those days I took my songs pretty literally, tried to make a story out of the lyrics whenever I could, and identified that story with whichever elders were singing. My mother must have been the woman to whom my father would sing “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly.” And Sergeant Susan I imagined setting down his suitcase at midnight in dimly lit halls of rooming houses across the land, still broken-hearted but always in hopes of finding his own true lover, whenever he sang “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.”
I wonder how many of the other kids on the bus still remember where they learned that song—whether, like me, whenever they hear it now, they see our sergeant, his arms extended as if offering his heart to the audience, and us singing back-up, thrilled by our mastery of lyrics so full of melancholy, mystery, and sweetness—an early introduction to the complicated pleasures and sorrows of the grown-up world.
In Altus, Oklahoma, where I arrived in time for adolescence, the local Protestants, who made up the vast majority of the town’s population, could be distinguished from each other by the extent of the restrictions imposed on their social behavior. Methodists were allowed to dance and sing and play musical instruments but weren’t supposed to drink alcohol. Baptists could sing and play, but not drink or dance. And members of the Church of Christ were confined to a cappella music. But no one was prohibited from singing, and there was lots of singing in Altus—in churches, in schools, and on buses—most memorably for me on the buses that took Methodist Youth Fellowship members on weekend outings, to camps in the country, or to Oklahoma City. A lot of what we sang was spirituals—“Do Lord,” “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Elijah, Rock”—but what they expressed for me was less religious meaning than joy at joining voices with others on the road.
There was much less of that in college, though now and then, in cars with friends, we’d try to sing all the words of songs with many verses, typically folk classics by the likes of Dylan, Joan, and Joni, in the cause of keeping the driver awake through a late-night trip. One day I took a long bus trip during which no one sang, the first of many. Even on buses bound for political demonstrations, singing was rare, people being too respectful of each other’s right to privacy and sleep to ask for musical communion.
Now when I’m on the road with friends, the singing is all on radio or CD or iPod. Most people I know say they can’t sing (meaning, I suspect, they don’t think they sound good enough to expose their voices to others), and therefore don’t. I can remember only one time as a grown-up, years ago when I got to sing in a car the way my family used to sing.
In the middle of my first trip to Europe, I’d arranged to meet up with an older friend, Shelley, and her friend George and drive around for a few days in George’s car, starting out from a village in southern France. The first day we rode through low mountains, George taking the frequent curves at a clip that left my stomach floating a beat behind the rest of me. Suddenly there was rain—a lot of rain—and no radio anymore. George slowed to a crawl, and the late summer afternoon darkened into autumn evening. Someone must have brought up a song, maybe asking if anyone knew the lyrics—somehow, without anyone’s saying, Let’s sing, we were singing. We sang mostly show tunes, songs from the childhood of Shelley and the young manhood of George, wonderful songs that I knew if at all, only the tunes and a few words of. A child again, of different parents—sophisticated, theater-loving, city-dwellers, whose ranks I aspired to join—I did my best to follow along.
Besides essays, Kathryn Paulsen writes novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and screenplays. Her work has appeared in publications from Canada to Ireland to Australia, including the Humber Literary Review, The New York Times, The Smart Set, The Stinging Fly, Scum, Craft, and Big Fiction. For fiction and playwriting, she's been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and other retreats. Kathryn lives in New York City but, having grown up in an Air Force family, has roots in many places. She sings with the New York City Community Chorus and enjoys dancing (especially English country and contra) and, during election season (beginning now), canvassing voters.