During lulls in our nightly dinner table war my father would sometimes grow sentimental.   He’d tell me, with a petulant air, that I ought to read the play “I Never Sang For My Father.”   I guess he had read it, and found it moving, unbearably poignant, and maybe something he, a guy who’d never sung for his father, thought might spur me to treat my father more kindly.  

“It was worth a shot,” said the skeleton of my father.  

I had the book in my room, I remember.  You must have given it to me at some point.  It sat on the bottom shelf of my bookcase, gathering dust.  I don’t ever remember so much as picking it up.  

“Well, that’s you in a nutshell,” said the skeleton.

I found myself suddenly thinking about this as I played a tune from Oliver! last night.  I was at a party years ago where the host had the score, and I jotted down the chords to “Where is Love?”, a beautiful melody beautifully harmonized by the composer.  I transposed it into D recently, which made for some very cool open stringed Djangoish melody playing options.

“You lost me there, Elie,” said the skeleton.  

Well, as a guitar player, I’m not really the person to explain this, but for every note you sing there are other notes that harmonize it, sound good with it.  When you sing a C note you can add an E and a G, a basic three part harmony that will almost always sound good.  On guitar you play the three notes together and you have a major chord, you don’t even think of the harmony under your fingers.   You can also add a note like D, which is the second tone in the C major scale, usually voiced as the ninth in a chord, as long as the flat seven is also there.  Anyway, the guys who wrote the score for Oliver! really knew what they were doing, like those guys who wrote the hits for Johnny Mathis.  It was a sophisticated arrangement, is what I’m saying, very jazzy.  The chords, simple in themselves, the harmonies, played against each singing note made the song much more beautiful.  

“OK, and what does that have to do with the price of chopped meat in Peekskill?” said the skeleton.  

You instilled a love of soul music in me, I trace it directly to those Sam Cooke records you used to bring back from Sam Goody’s.   The way Sam took his time, warbled around those harmonies in the arrangements, man!   You couldn’t resist a one or two bar imitation of him at the table sometimes.   “I-i-i-i-i-i wish … you…. blue-birds….”  

“Nobody sang like Sam Cooke,” said the skeleton.  “You know, if I had it to do again, I would have taken up a musical instrument, I think.”  

You wouldn’t have regretted it.  I was always trying to learn to play well enough to be an instrumentalist.  

“Meaning?”  

I didn’t just want to learn to strum along accompanying myself as I sang, I wanted to be able to play the entire arrangement on guitar, the chords, the bass line, the little moving lines, the melody, counterpoint, etc.  As a result, I never sang much, for you or anybody else, I focused on my playing– not that I couldn’t also have been singing all that time.  The greatest pleasure for me, comparable to singing, is bending a melody note to make it sound like Sam Cooke’s singing.  

“Very bluesy, but I really don’t have much sense of why you’re bringing any of this up,” said the skeleton.  

Mom was told, by some asshole choir teacher in the Bronx circa 1934, that she was a ‘listener.’   This bitch made mom self-conscious about singing, something she loved to do.  Look, most people like to sing, some people love to sing.  You, yourself, could not resist sometimes, would be swept away for a few seconds, sing a little snippet of some song you loved.  You’d sing a few soulful syllables, then, boom!  Lips clamped, the faintest trace of a smile, back to whatever we were talking about, acting like nothing had ever happened.  

“‘Music, sweet music,’ as your friend Mr. Hendrix sang in ‘Manic Depression’.”  

One of the few, if not the only, rock songs ever written in 3/4 time.

“Whatever,” said the skeleton.  “You’d better get over to your doctor’s office, find out the latest on what’s happening in your blood.”

Yahvold.