Blogging from A to Z April 2024 Challenge: M

Aging: The Good, the Bad, and the Tolerable

M is for Music is Magical

I was standing in the middle of an aisle at the Dollar Store. It was the beginning of COVID, and our neighbor told me that the store still had thermometers on the shelves. The song, Silhouettes on the Shade came over the intercom, freezing me in place. My breath quickened. Tears seeped from my eyes. I wasn’t the 78-year-old woman wearing a mask in the midst of a pandemic but a brown-haired teenager in Jersey City swaying to the Doo-Wop tune. I stood transported unaware of other customers until the song ended. It took a while to re-enter the present. I left the store, thermometer in hand, singing Silhouettes on the Shade in the car until I reached home.

The experience surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought that song would have had such an effect on me. I hadn’t heard it in years. It wasn’t even in my memory bank of favorites.

My music preferences as an adult lean toward classical, jazz and a smattering of country and western. What I have learned about music is that it worms into our brains most deeply during our teens and young adult years.

I can still recall standing in the Dollar Store listening to the song today.

Music can be magical.

Doo-wop (also spelled doowop and doo wop) is a subgenre of rhythm and bluesmusic that originated in African-American communities during the 1940s,^[2] mainly in the large cities of the United States, including New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore, Newark, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.^[3][4] It features vocal group harmony that carries an engaging melodic line to a simple beat with little or no instrumentation. Lyrics are simple, usually about love, sung by a lead vocal over background vocals, and often featuring, in the bridge, a melodramatically heartfelt recitative addressed to the beloved. Harmonic singing of nonsense syllables (such as “doo-wop”) is a common characteristic of these songs.^[5] Gaining popularity in the 1950s, doo-wop was “artistically and commercially viable” until the early 1960s and continued to influence performers in other genres.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia