The Fredösphere

In an effort to churn this "yodeling about film noir" thing a bit more, I was going to spend the weekend writing a country & western song/yodel about film noir.  The project was doomed on several levels:  my banjo skills are not what they should be; making the recording would take more time that the joke justified; and above all, the lyrics simply never came.  (Seems like there must be a hilarious rhyme with "noir" when it is pronounced "nuh-war" but I cannot find it.)

Waaaait, you say.  You were talking about yodeling, but then you said country & western.  To which I respond, do you not know about the great C&W yodelers from the 30s and 40s?  You may not know, but I know.  Oh, believe me, I know.

My mother's formative years overlapped with the big C&W yodeler craze.  She picked up the skill and maintained it long after others forgot about it.  Her occasional performances were an established fact of my childhood and I did not question them for a long time.  Eventually however, I became a teenager and started to notice that very, very few of my peers had mothers who yodeled.  Make that none of my peers.

I once read in the New York Times of a recital of Messiaen's organ music.  The reviewer described a piercingly loud note as expressing a "joy that is indistinguishable from terror."  Let me tell you, I have known an embarrassment that is indistinguishable from watching a rabid wolverine systematically gnaw your leg off over a period of three days.

Like everyone else, I survived my teen years and now, as an adult, I can look upon my parent's special characteristics with fondness and appreciation.  The simple fact is, without my mother's musical ambition for herself and her children, I would have never received entry into the glorious world of music.