Your earliest music memories

June 03, 2009 09:25 am

— 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.
Radios just weren’t a big feature in my house. The car was a different matter. Dad listened to some pop/rock in the very early 80s, probably the last Top 40 tunes he ever listened to, but most of the time the radio was tuned to an oldies station that played music from the 50s and 60s.
That explains why my earliest musical memory was “Always Something There to Remind Me,” by Naked Eyes, followed by quite a lot of Beatles music. Elvis and The Beach Boys followed. I listen to very little of the latter now, but I still love The Beatles.
— Matt Milner

Some of my earliest memories involve two songs.
As my mother would work in the kitchen in our house on Second Avenue in Vinton, she would always listen to a country music radio station.
I must have been 4 or 5, but I can still recall distinctly as she would hum or even sing along to “Rose Garden” by Lynn Anderson: “So smile for a while and let’s be jolly. Love shouldn’t be so melancholy. Come along and share the good times while we can.
“I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometimes.”
The other was a tune that would always seem to play while we in traveled in our 1972 brown Ford LTD sedan.
As my mother would adjust the AM radio dial, the familiar strains of Lobo’s “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” would emit from the speakers.
I would always ask Mom to turn the radio up: “Me and you and a dog named Boo. Travelin’ and livin’ off the land. Me and you and a dog named Boo. How I love being a free man.”
— Jeff Hutton

Before I was pleasantly corrupted by rock music, the first songs I recall hearing were probably all the educational songs that were on “Sesame Street,” which was just getting big when I was a really little kid. (“One of these guys is doin’ his own thing, one of these guys just doesn’t belong ...”)
The first time I remember hearing a song on the radio it was “The Candyman Can” by Sammy Davis, Jr. (Of course I didn’t know it was Sammy Davis Jr. In my mind, there were a bunch of little people living inside the radio who talked and sometimes sang.)
The first song I ever remember singing aloud by memory was “Jesus Loves Me” at Sunday school. A few months ago, my church choir sang a unique arrangement of that song and it brought me back. My eyes even welled up a little. A base, nostalgic reaction, I guess, to something so simple made to seem so beautiful.
— James Grob

Depending on response, we may run some of our readers’ earliest musical memories. Please don’t telephone the newsroom and sing the song to us. E-mail, drop off or mail your memories in writing to The Musical Newsroom, 213 E. Second St., Ottumwa, Iowa, 52501 or
news@ottumwacourier.com.