© 2024 Maine Public | Registered 501(c)(3) EIN: 22-3171529
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Scroll down to see all available streams.
Have a musical memory that you’d like to share? Throughout the month we will post listener submitted recollections here and share a few on MPBN’s Facebook page. Send your memory to us at music@mpbn.net.CLICK HERE to hear a musical memory aired on Maine Public Radio and Maine Public ClassicalCLICK HERE to learn more about MPBN’s instrument donation projectOur listeners’ favorite music recollections:

Sheila Pulver, Harpswell

When I was driving home last evening from caring for my three little Maine grandchildren, which I do two days a week, I had NPR on in the car which I often do, and Music That Moves Me came on. It made me reflect on how powerful the hold of music is on our emotions and memories, and in particular about an experience with my grandkids that day. Piper, age five, was excited to show me a children’s book of folk songs he’d found at the library that had in it the lyrics to a song I’d sung to them since they were babies so he associated it with me: “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”

It’s a song of yearning for a beloved who’s far away, and the singer wishes for the ocean winds to blow him or her back. It was a song that my own grandmother had sung to me when I was little, and it’s always made me think of sitting with her on warm summer afternoons on her terrace overlooking the river as she sang to me while peeling apples for the fresh applesauce that she made for my grandfather’s supper every night. I can see the bright red coils of apple skin as she unfurled them with her blade and hear her gentle voice singing those wistful words.

I didn’t know anything about the origins of that song, but last night when I got home I looked it up online: it’s a Scottish song from the 1700s, and the words may have been a secret code for Bonnie Prince Charlie, the much-heralded hero of Scottish history and not solely a love song. But that’s not what it means to me.

When my first grandchild was born (there are five now, born within five years), he had cerebral palsy which caused him to cry for long periods and have trouble falling and staying asleep, so I spent many hours rocking him and singing him to sleep and even after he fell asleep so he wouldn’t wake up too soon. I searched my memory for songs that I could sing to him, especially soothing ones, and that one emerged from those long-ago summer days of childhood. I’d probably sung it to my own children, but I had no specific recollections of doing so. But as I rocked back and forth with my baby grandson and sang that song to him, it brought flooding back not only memories of hearing my grandmother sing it to me, but a deep and comforting sense of connection with a long family chain of women singing to their children and grandchildren. When I grew up and my grandmother had been dead for years, I learned that she’d had two children who had died at very young ages in epidemics. She never spoke of them to us kids, but perhaps there was a lingering note of sadness for her in singing about a lost love. But for me, as I’ve continued to sing that song to all five grandchildren, it’s about the lulling gift of music from one generation to another.