Songs my mother taught me,
In the days long vanished;
Seldom from her eyelids
Were the teardrops banished.
Now I teach my children,
Each melodious measure.
Oft the tears are flowing,
Oft they flow from my memory's treasure.
From Gypsy Songs, by Antonin Dvorak
My mother was a singer and my mother’s mother was a singer. It seems that at least one of my daughters has a strong, clear voice, but they’re still too young to tell. I, on the other hand, am not a singer. Sure, I sang in the Glee Club in college, even scoring a spot in an exclusive a cappella group. Growing up in New York I was also in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Choir, the Juilliard Pre-College Chorus and school and church choirs. Some people might call that quite a substantial hobby. But I was never a real singer, in the tradition of the Bybees, and I always knew it.
My mother was a mezzo soprano soloist at the Metropolitan Opera for eighteen years. I grew up hearing how Placido Domingo had sent her flowers in an amorous overture. The New York Times had reviewed her performances. She sang over 450 performances with the company, traveling all over the United States and Japan. So when I belted “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!” along with my cassette tape of Annie in the back seat of the rented Cadillac Sedan de Ville during summer road trips, my mom gently encouraged, “Use your pretty voice, Neylan. Use your pretty voice.” It turned out I didn’t have much of a belting voice or a pretty voice, although it proved enough to get me into the college Glee Club.
As baseball is to the United States, so was singing to my family. It’s just what we did. My parents directed me to the piano at an early age so that my embarrassing vocal gifts wouldn’t get in the way and I could instead accompany the singing on the piano. But even I could abandon my concerns about having the ugly duckling voice when my aunts and uncles and cousins got together to sing “the family songs”. These were a hodge podge of spirituals, pioneer hymns, folk songs, ballads and rounds that were passed down through my mom’s father -- Boompa -- and mother -- Grammy.
Boompa and Grammy divorced in 1962, but they had five children all with professional-quality voices who loved those family songs and didn’t let their parents’ separation stop them from singing. Boompa had been a music teacher in Southern California while my mom was growing up there in the 1940s and 50s; he’d even dabbled in a paid quartet and referenced that brief stint to justify calling himself a “professional”. Grammy was professional in this same stretch: a frequent soloist in church choirs, Grammy’s singing highlight was performing the Rigoletto quartet at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles during a regional church talent show.
Although I never heard my Boompa and Grammy in their primes, my mom’s two brothers and two sisters each has an exceptional voice. It was my mom’s older sister who had received the special gift of voice lessons during her sophomore year of college. The family was financially strapped with a couple of children still at home, and voice lessons were a luxury my aunt had been warned not to squander. But when my aunt didn’t return to school that fall and the lessons were already paid for, her little sister -- my mom -- slipped into the one-on-one tutorials in her place. A simple shifting of schedules with enormous consequences: By the end of her junior year, my mother was singing the title role of Tosca in the university production.
Despite her illustrious career in the country’s premier opera house, my mom always returned to those simple family songs to bind her to her brothers and sisters, to me her daughter, and now to her granddaughters. Lounging at balmy backyard cookouts, now with their parents long gone, my mom and her siblings still break into four-part harmony for “On Tom Bigby River” or “Babes in the Woods”. Their children and grandchildren hover, some more interested than others in learning the actions to the round “Scotland’s Burning” or the various instruments for “The Orchestra Song”. Those who marry into the family may make the mistake of assuming this is a quaint family pastime. But we Bybees take the family songs just as seriously as performing an opera aria or competing in a regional competition. And this professional approach gets results: aside from my piano abilities, I have cousins who write and perform their own songs with acoustic guitar, cousins who have formed their own bands, and cousins with budding classical careers of their own.
This morning, my five-year-old daughter Esme played “May Song” on her violin. It’s the sixth song in Book I of Suzuki’s famed violin curriculum; she’s been taking lessons for five months. The song is a three line ditty where the third line repeats the first line. But as I played the oompah accompaniment on the piano while she sawed her way through the song, I felt immense satisfaction at bringing the Bybee family legacy into my own home. Esme’s kindergarten teacher seemed surprised I was so nonplussed when she told me recently that Esme is “unable” to catch a ball. “Well,” I laughed, “my family’s never been known for our athleticism. But how’s she doing in music?” Now that is serious stuff.
This article appears in Neylan's Column on The Power of Moms.
