Three-part Harmony, third part

[rcvesselstyn]

I was down at the boat checking everything out after the rain storms. It was a nice sunny day and a couple of boats over a guy was sitting in his cockpit strumming on a guitar. I stood in the cockpit with the sun warming me and the music washed over me like a wave. It's funny how sometimes conditions will just match up and connect with memories. 


My brother would always bring his guitar along on our sailing adventures.
Our parents had encouraged us as children to play an instrument and sing. My brother had learned to play flamenco guitar. I was trained in classical flute. By that summer of 1964 we could hear a song on the radio and play it by ear before the song had finished. We were over at Howland's Landing sitting around the campfire at the beach. We were singing some of the popular folk songs of the time. I would play some parts and then sing harmony. We'd only been playing for 20 minutes or so when we noticed a group of three girls coming down to the beach. They sat down around our campfire so we encouraged them to join in. As we continued to play and sing more and more girls started streaming down to the beach. It turned out they were coming from the girls camp up the canyon. Neither my brother nor I were sad about the company. We continued to play and sing until the last of the driftwood had turned to just red embers. All the girls headed back up to their camp, we packed up our stuff and rowed back to the boat. From that time onward the guitar was always aboard.

[SailingChris]

My musical training was as a trombone player. Hauling a trombone on a small boat isn't really feasible and would probably be seen as a bit odd. But when i was in high school, that one hour of making music was always the brightest spot of the day. An NPR news musical clip--Julian Lage playing "Crying"--led me back to Roy Orbison's original, and it started playing in my head. The best music is always there, even when we're not thinking about it. I've read repeatedly that music is the last of the elements of consciousness to be lost in dementia. At her 102nd birthday party, my grandmother, otherwise absent, improvised a stanza of "Happy Birthday" after we sang the standard one. Hope I can repeat that performance.

Chris Campbell
Cal 20 #1220, Martha C