The Music and Me
I know – It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but today I am beginning again, although with a slight difference. While this blog has never been a typical food blog – I always believed I should offer a well written story, and was concerned with many things besides just offering a recipe or restaurant review – it did adhere mostly to food, travel and entertaining. I certainly haven’t stopped cooking – in fact, I’m probably cooking more than ever – at least at home for myself – but I feel I am compelled now to open things up here. I have so much more I want to talk about. The blog was originally named PainPerdu Blog meaning “lost bread”. There will still be a theme of loss (for the Perdu) running through it, and I hope will deal in a broader sense with the Pain – the bread. Bread, meaning sustenance and nurturance, as there are many things that sustain us beyond just what we eat. And the pieces I write most definitely will still reflect who I am. So, I hope you will join me on this journey. Thanks. This piece was written on May 24th – Bob Dylan’s 82nd birthday, and the day Tina Turner died. Portrait of Harry Belafonte, singing *1954 Feb. 18 *gelatin silver Carl Van Vechten – Van Vechten Collection at Library of Congress What a month it has been – beginning with the death of Harry Belafonte. In my childhood household, like so many others, we heard Day-O, Day-O – the Banana Boat Song – over and over again. We sighed for the Brown Skin Girl, left behind to stay home and mind baby. My uncles sang Scarlet Ribbons to us as lullabies, feeding my nascent love of folk music. We watched the tall, handsome performer march alongside Dr. King on our black and white TV’s. And then a few days later, Gordon Lightfoot – the clear, light baritone voice I fell in love with as a teenager. In the summers of 1967 and ’68. I would lie in front of the stereo speakers listening to him sing Black Day in July, over and over again – the black days, some of which had erupted just down the hill from my childhood home. When I got to college, I was fortunate to have a roommate who loved him, too. We listened to him tell the story of his Canada that “existed long before the white man and long before the wheel, the deadly silent silence too silent to be real”. Between the years of listening to Belafonte and Lightfoot, it was Peter, Paul and Mary, who I sometimes like to joke raised me, as I listened to their voices so often in my formative years. I aspired to speak and sing in the deep rich strong voice of Mary Travers. I grieved for her as if she was a personal friend when she died. International Talent Associates (management), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons And then I was introduced to Joni Mitchell. I had never heard of her before a group of friends bought her album, Clouds, and gave it to me as a gift on my 17th birthday – only one month before I left for college. I stayed awake...
read more
