It’s an amazing thing, the human mind (even mine!), when things long ‘forgotten’ can actually be lurking there all the time and just need the smallest nudge to start re-emerging complete…
So I used to know loads of tunes when we had a gigging band some twenty years ago, but most had simply ‘disappeared’ through years of only sporadic trad. playing since. Then, on finding myself starting to play whistle again regularly (like hours a day instead of rarely at all!) last summer, they just started to find their own way back. Like The Mountain Road followed by another reel we used to play as a set, and the second reel (in G) was all there but I was darned if I could remember its name (it’s Paddy Canny’s, aka various other things). Then, playing flute a few weeks back, I found myself (subconsciously prompted by Jem’s McCarty review?) playing The Musical Priest, which we used to do as the middle reel of a set of three. The first (The Maid Behind the Bar) soon followed when Cathy Wilde posted its name in response to a question from Chris Coreline, and was back complete within a few goes despite neither listening to nor looking it up. Which just left the final tune of the set (a reel in D with a great second part the way I learned it), and that just spontaneously found itself following The Musical Priest the other day despite being out of sight, mind and earshot for longer than I could say. But, although the tune was back, I was still stumped by its name (just knew that all three were ‘about’ people), and had to think where I got it from before identifying it as The Scholar!
Anyway (to cut a long story short), these aren’t isolated cases and I’m constantly finding myself playing stuff I’d forgotten I knew… so how about anyone else?
This last week, I played the song “Turn to Me” on my flute. I had never played it on a flute and hadn’t played in on a guitar in many years. I’m not sure why this song even popped into my head. I have no idea what is going on inside my brain, why should I expect other people to know what I am thinking?
I notice this most often with old (and usually frightfully bad) pop songs that I may not have heard once in literally 30 or 40 years. Two seconds in and I’m singing along, words and music both, as if it were yesterday. And I think to myself: No wonder I can’t remember my telephone number, or the quadratic formula, or the capital of Namibia … because “Muskrat Love” or “Winchester Cathedral” has fought a pitched battle with some other genuinely useful fact in long term memory and emerged the victor. Then, to celebrate its victory, the song turns into an earworm for 48 hours, requiring an extended session listening to the collected works of Karlheinz Stockhausen to drive it back into its cage … until the next one comes along and obliterates your memory of who invented the sewing machine …
The brain keeps track of everything, but it forgets where it stores it all. Until something triggers it, a song, a smell, a place that feels so familiar…
Yes, those old pop-songs are in there, curse them. But it happens with classical pieces too. I was presented with sheet-music for a guitar-duet and could play both sides immediately. I don’t sight-read that well. I had played the tune a long time before. I haven’t played it for years and couldn’t play it properly, but it meant I knew what was coming next in the duet! Then tripped over my feet on the next one…
My sister-in-law is fond of telling the story of how she met my brother. It involves a song from an old Guess Who album. I verified with my brother that the didn’t have the album on CD, and got her a copy for Christmas. She said it only took once through before they were both singing along with it, remembering most of the words after not having listened to it for 20-odd years.
Below is one of the weird stories I ran into while researching my father’s elder brother. I never met him, but he was a doctor who appears to have done a number of mysterious and not especially savory things for MI5 and MI6 (British military intelligence). He’s not mentioned in this account, but other info identifies him as having been part of this effort:
The program called for the production of > thirty million darts> . This would require a large number of specially-made needles; the head of the British project contacted the obvious source: the Singer Sewing Machine Company, in a letter apologizing that: “It is a little difficult to explain what I want sewing machine needles for… ”
The reply from Singer was helpful, if baffled: “From your remarks it would seem the needles are required for some purpose other than sewing machines. In any case, we should like to help you, if at all possible.”
A pretty girl is like a melody
That haunts you night and day,
Just like the strain of a haunting refrain,
She’ll start up-on a marathon
And run around your brain.
You can’t escape she’s in your memory.
By morning night and noon.
She will leave you and then come back again,
A pretty girl is just like a pretty tune.
At the music store there was a accented gentleman who came in maybe once a month or so and bought guitar strings. Always singles - 8’s, 10’s, 12’s, etc. Trying to be helpful one day, we asked him what kind of guitar he played.
“No guitar! Cheese!”
We figured he was either a restauranteur or an assassin for hire, and we didn’t ask him again.
(I had the impression that assassins used piano-wire. There was the Turkish Mute with the bowstring, but that would be an archery bow. Them horsehair yokes wouldn’t strangle a gnat.)
Cutting the cheese is just one of the myriad uses for guitar strings. They’re also great for doing whip finish wraps on cracked whistles, wrapping fishing rods, tying nautical knots, slicing eggs,and mushrooms, clay pots from the wheel…
It was a petulant expletive, same as “jeez”, only more forceful. Spluttery, like. Imagine saying it while stamping a foot. Obviously yer man played no guitar, but something else, and was good and tired of having to explain things.
BTW, I grew up hearing and pronouncing the word “Appalachian” the same as “appellation”. So did everyone else, it seems to me. Don’t know if it’s generational or what, but now everybody says “apple-latchin’”. I’m officially registering my complaint to you all - because you’re convenient - that it’s really irritating to find out your’e unfashionable and wrong when nobody ever sent you the things-are-gonna-change-so heads-up-lest-you-be-uncool memo.
