Music, music, music - February 12, 2015

As published in the White River Current - Thursday February 12, 2015

Put another nickel in; In the nickelodeon; All I want is having you and Music, Music, Music.  So went the million-seller hit recorded by Teresa Brewer in 1950.  Several of my articles have contained references about  music, so you readers should be aware that it has been a big part of my life.  I began taking piano lessons in the first grade and continued all the way through high school and the first year of college.  I think if I had continued with the lessons, I might be a good pianist; instead I am only a fair piano player.  Never-the-less, I have developed a great love for music.  All music, you know, is created from a combination of twelve musical sounds and tones (notes) played at different locations on the musical scale, from treble to bass. “Music is that elevated science that affects the passions by sound.  There are few who have not felt its charms and acknowledged its expressions to be intelligible to the heart.  It is a language of delightful sensations, far more eloquent than words.  It breathes to the ear the clearest intimations; it touches and gently agitates the agreeable and sublime passions; it wraps us in melancholy, elevates us in joy and melts us in tenderness.  Ah! Music, music, art divine; thou dost  move and stir the heart as nothing else can do.  Yet never canst thou sweet potency be better used than when it expresses praise and gratitude to the great God and Master of us all.”  The words between the quotations are a recitation that I gave at performances of the Drug Store Cowboys before we launched into a rousing medley of gospel songs to bring an end to our program.  I believe I have mentioned the Cowboys in earlier issues of the Ramblings column, but to refresh your memory, it was a country/western band composed of pharmacists mostly back in the 80s.  My good friend and faithful Ramblings reader, Don, and I were charter members of this group.  Don was the lead vocalist and I played (carried) the banjo and we both shared MC duties.  We played in the bandstand at the CR Riverside Festival one year.  The highlight of our career was playing a performance at a national pharmacy convention at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas.  The group has mainly disbanded but Don and two others (Bill and James) have continued to perform, primarily in the Little Rock area, as the Drug Store Cowboys Trio.  Don told me that they had four gigs lined up for this week (keep it up, guys).  Since we are on the subject of music and I mentioned piano lessons, maybe I should give a little space about my piano teachers.  My first teacher was Miss Ruby Kate Evans.  She was the daughter of Levi, one of the Evans brothers who owned the drug store.  She taught me all the basics such as the music staff, scales, key signatures, etc.  She was the church pianist and, after about three years of lessons, I began playing along with her on an old pump organ while she played the piano during the church services.  Miss Ruby Kate became ill and died when she was only 52 years old.  My next teacher was Mrs. Montgomery.  She taught me more of the fundamentals and the importance of timing.  My teacher for the next several years was Mrs. Gertrude Houck.  She taught me a love of the classics from composers like Chopin, Beethoven and other musical greats and had me playing pieces like “Minute Waltz,” “Moonlight Sonata” and other difficult selections plus fun things like boogie-woogie and ragtime numbers.  One of Mrs. Houck’s students from the early 50s, Bob Hudson, recently did a genealogy search and discovered that a German resident, Gertrude Fugmann, wed a WWI veteran, Alfred Houck, in New York, soon after crossing the Atlantic on the ship, SS St. Paul, on July 7, 1922.  The newlyweds left soon after and established their residence at Alfred’s ancestral home in or near Coffeyville, Kansas.  Our real interest begins when the Houcks moved to the Iuka community of Izard County, Arkansas, in the spring of 1942.  That fits my timetable because I became Mrs. Houck’s piano student in September, 1942 and studied with her for five years.  She was a concert pianist, a graduate of a conservatory in Germany.  She loved to perform.  At every recital, after the students had done their thing, she would explain that her pupils had asked her to play, so she did, in grand style.