What are your earliest “pop” music memories? Glenn Miller? Hank Williams? Joan Jett? Think back... what songs are the first songs you can remember?

If you’d like to share, drop us a short note. About the length of the ones posted below written by a few members of the Courier’s news staff.

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As a little boy, I remember us singing songs in kindergarten and preschool; songs I didn’t realize were actually on the radio. I thought they were just for kids, like the “alphabet song.”

Two of the first songs I remember hearing (and singing) were American Pie and Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head. I was in pre-school around 1971.

Other earliest-song-in-my-memory nominees are I Shot the Sheriff, Layla and Aquarius (Let the Sun Shine In). For some reason, those last two always made me feel kind of weird. Still do.

— Mark Newman

Back in the 1940s, the radio wasn’t blasting all day as is likely in many homes, offices and stores nowadays. “Pop” songs weren’t part of my culture until Elvis Presley came along and I saw him on his infamous Ed Sullivan Show TV premiere while sitting on the floor with my friend Diane Fleming Quince in her home in Mt. Union. I don’t think her parents (her dad was our school superintendent) were very impressed.

I heard Jo Stafford singing “You Belong To Me” on the juke box at the hall in Mt. Union. And, I remember “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and the colorful, animated birds in the Disney movie, “Song of the South.” And singing songs in Sunday school such as, “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

— Judy Krieger

I don’t remember much music early in my life. My parents didn’t listen to much. I vividly remember being shown a world map and my great-uncle tracing out where Great Britain and Argentina are during the Falklands War, but not much music.