I love music. I grew up as the daughter of country music – turned southern gospel musical parents. And what a life that was!
I got my love of singing harmony from those roots. Even as a young girl I enjoyed singing and harmonizing. My childhood best friend, Colette and I would often be found in our basements, or sitting in her mother’s car (anywhere private) singing and recording our creations on our compact reel to reel tape recorders. We both got them for Christmas one year.
We would take songs we learned at school and add harmonies; sitting in the car, walking down the street, we would sing those tunes over and over.
One of my favorite childhood memories is when she and I were asked by her older sister to sing a song she and her friends had composed for a YMCA meeting that was held in a Holiday Innconference room.
I only remember the first verse (hey, I was in elementary school), and the extreme excitement, and intense nervousness that grew as the day of our performance drew near. We were positive someone would hear our vocals and we would become stars!
The lyrics:
Start the race now
Right to the Y
The Y’s the place to be
Get in your car
It’s not too far
Lead a team to victory.
I think there were two other verses. No chorus, no bridge, just the verses.
And just in case you are wondering, we didn’t make stardom.
We were notorious (in our own minds) for taking existing tunes and adding our own lyrics.
If I could remember the name of the tune, you could sing along. Actually, I think it was the Looney Tunes Theme Song that we revised a wee bit to fit our lyrics. Do the best you can with it. Here are our words.
Lisa went to Bible school
Amy’s not at home
The only thing that we can do
Is roam, and roam, and roam,
Ellen does not want to play
We don’t like Lynette
The only people we play with
Are Laurie and Colette.
Shelly’s cleaning up the house
Mary Jean is too
Kelli lives too far away
So what shall we do?
That takes care of all our friends
Even enemies
So we’ll just sit here on the porch
And chew our Wrigleys
That’s it! It took a while to come up with that last line. I’m sure you understand why.
The rest of the song simply wrote itself. Just saying.
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