So many people in this age of the Kindle bitch about the death of the book. Allow me to ask the equally Luddite question: What about the death of the LP?
Plenty of boomers love their iPods, me included. I use mine in lieu of Xanax. But I feel sorry for kids who never grew up with a proper record collection. I’m talking about a shelf full of vinyl albums in all their two-sided, 12-inch glory.
I could go on and on about records I have loved and lost —“Sticky Fingers” with the working zipper on the cover; “Déjà vu” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in its original textured jacket; the Beatles’ White Album with the four photo portraits enclosed.
Those and other records defined my teenage identity and set my musical tastes. Of no less importance were my parents’ records, the ones that provided the soundtrack to my childhood. In the miasma that is the mind of a toddler, their music imprinted on me like a mama duck on her ducklings.
I remember our recording of “Peter and the Wolf,” and can still hum every motif from memory. The album cover featured a painting of a gloomy forest with chipper, red-coated Peter marching bravely past a drooling yellow-eyed wolf that scared the Prokofiev out of me.
We had a wacky Bing Crosby record called “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” which, along with the Lucky Charms leprechaun, constituted my introduction to Irish culture.
There was “Three Billion Millionaires.” At the time all I knew about this 1963 album was that it featured big stars such as Judy Garland, Danny Kaye and Sammy Davis Jr.
I did not realize then that it was an ambitious project of the United Nations, a concept album that sought to push the U.N. vision of a unified, peaceful world. Why not? JFK was still alive and hardly anyone had heard of Vietnam.
I can still hear Sammy Davis singing the title track to a swinging, big band arrangement: “Three billion millionaires are gonna have themselves one great, big, beautiful ball!”
That is to say, presumably, all human beings shall one day be rich and dress in tuxedos like Sammy. The album foretold a messianic age as envisioned by the Rat Pack midway through the American Century.
Today I laugh at the naiveté of it all. Three billion millionaires? More like 7 billion hard-luck cases battered by melting ice caps and ISIS.
One record made the biggest impression of all: “Songs From Everywhere,” a 1963 album by the female a cappella septet the Pennywhistlers. They sang a mix of Balkan, American and Jewish folk tunes, and in our stubbornly secular home, the Pennywhistlers were as Jewish as it got.
One song that especially touched me was “S’falt a Shnei” (Yiddish for “The Snow Falls”), a lament about a Jewish shtetl girl sewing away deep into the night.
Why did “S’falt a Shnei” get to me? Maybe because I was only just beginning to make sense of my parents’ divorce, and the song’s wintry sadness matched how I felt inside.
More than that, even at a young age I responded to the voices of women. The Pennywhistlers led me to Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin, to Joni Mitchell and Alison Krauss and the Dixie Chicks.
There was something else in that song, something in the sonority of sung Yiddish that pierced my heart.
My Chabad friends talk about nefesh Yehudi, the Jewish soul. They say it’s something we’re born with, something that shines on, no matter how much the modern world may try to blot it out.
Little did I know when I first heard “S’falt a Shnei” that its lyrics could have been describing my grandmother, born in a shtetl near Riga in 1880. Little did I know its tune echoed the melodic minor tradition of the great hazzanut I would come to love years later.
Little did I know then that “S’falt a Shnei” was about me.
I’d be curious to know which albums rocked your world growing up. Meanwhile, I’d like to amend one thing. My introduction to Irish culture was not that Bing Crosby song. It was my parents’ nightly lullaby, sung to me before anything in this world came into focus: “Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.”
Dan Pine is senior writer at J. Reach him at [email protected].