I remember my parents buying their first record player. Or
gramophone player. It was covered in cream and maroon vinyl, and it was placed
in the dining room, where we all looked at it and wondered what it was doing
there.
My brother knew what it was doing there. He seriously bought
records, EPs and LPs – still has all the original Beatles records, and he
followed the charts religiously.
I wasn’t really interested in music, and in this, I took
after my parents, which is why I wondered why they’d bought it. The purchase
did compel them to invest in some records. There was, as I recall, an EP of
Ella Fitzgerald. We also had a few classical LPs stamped with ‘Fire Salvage,’
which might explain why the labels couldn’t be trusted. It was years before I
discovered that what I’d thought was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was actually
Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto. My
parents really felt far more comfortable with the spoken words, so we had Dylan
Thomas reading some of his poems, Under Milk Wood and several Shakespeare
recordings. This is why I can still quote most of Henry V from end to end.
But there were music records that made an impact in the
family: songs by Pete Seeger. We played them religiously, and every Sunday we
would go to the pub at lunch time (long before serious campaigns about
drink-driving) and come home roaring ‘The Banks are made of marble’ or ‘If you
miss me at the back of the bus’ or, if we were too tipsy to manage complicated
words, ‘We shall overcome.’ We were, of course, a radical left-wing family, which
we demonstrated by singing Pete Seeger songs on our inebriated way home.
So perhaps, the best song to commemorate Pete Seeger, for
me, is not one of his but ‘As soon as this pub closes, the revolution starts.’
