Trask Avenue

The elusive “they” say music is one of our strongest memory inducers. You can hear a song and be immediately transported back to a specific time and place from your life, the details of that moment as vivid as if you had just lived it. It is one of the brilliant powers of music – and one of the best. I know whenever I hear Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World I am once again in the 8^th grade cafeteria where the 45 rpm single spins effortlessly on a portable turntable. I am watching the girls dance together, wondering about their incomprehensible mysteries and secrets. I feel as if I could literally reach out and grab this memory, hold it in my hand and examine it as one would any relic. Those times hold a certain sentimental place in my life and heart. I don’t long to actually go back and relive them, but it is awfully nice basking in their memory, if just for a few minutes. I suppose that is the essence of nostalgia. I wonder if my remembrances would be quite so strong and warm without music, without the spark provided by Joy to the World. Maybe they would, but who can say? All I know is that song opens the passageway to memories I may otherwise have never recovered. That is why I find it incredibly odd that music from the 1940’s, music recorded long before I was born, does the same thing.

Dorsey and Sinatra, The Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Andrews Sisters, Harry James, Les Brown & His Band of Renown, Benny Goodman, and on and on. Whenever I hear songs from the 40’s, especially from the first half of that decade, I am standing in a dimly lit USO Hall where war-bound soldiers cling to taxi dancers on a smoke-filled dance floor. Or I am seated in a plush booth of an exotically themed nightclub where big bands play into the wee hours and cigarette girls circle the floor pushing Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. Sometimes I am simply in a home I do not recognize filled with relatives I do not know listening to these songs pour forth from the radio console like a minor miracle.

I don’t suppose it is proper to call this phenomenon nostalgia, at least not the kind of nostalgia spun from things we have experienced. When I bother to analyze it I realize my associations with that era have been greatly influenced by movies and television. Also, both my parents lived through the 40’s. Indeed, the music which sparks my shadow memories was the music of their youth. Perhaps that has something to do with it. I don’t know. What I do know is when the Pied Pipers harmonize, “I’ll never smile again…” and a young Sinatra swoops in and croons “…until I smile at you” as the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra underlines the proceedings with smooth reassurance, I feel as if I am reliving a very real moment from my life, one which never actually happened. And that is pretty cool.