ToonWare

Some years ago I opened an online shop called ToonWareHouse (check out the menu bar, thank you). During some down time I created a series of musicians just for the fun of it. I didn’t intend these to be for any particular purpose other than playing around. After compiling several instrumentalists, I looked them over and thought they might be suitable for T-shirts.

Music for Fun

I play guitar for fun. I’m not bad, but I think I’m a better artist and since I’ve enjoyed friendships with many serious musicians, I thought I’d be more useful creating kid’s art. I knew I could devote time and energy to only one discipline and I started drawing long before I played music.  Illustration won out and I’ve no regrets.

Anyway, I’ve had the pleasure of reconnecting with some old friends to play a couple basement gigs. We’ve had a blast and actually sound pretty good, if I may say so. Our small audience (wives, other friends, grandchild) pays no admission and there are no expectation but to have a rollicking good time.

Novelty Music

When I was very young, starting around Kindergarten I’ll say, I remember hearing a fair amount of music in the home. This was due to an older brother and sister building a record collection. Records, as in 45 rpm singles and 33 1/3 albums. About the time I started going to school, there was a fad of what were called Novelty Songs. Our family had quite a few records from this genre.

Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda.

If you’re of a certain age you might recall hearing Camp Granada, Alley Oop, She Can’t Find Her Keys, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. If you’re not of that certain age, bring them up on YouTube. I can’t promise anything other than a glimpse into a Cold War diversion likely intended to keep us Calm and Carrying On. They were immensely popular, but then again so were entertainers who spun plates on sticks. Bring that up on YouTube as well.

Seriously

Not all music is silly, funny, or gimmicky. I’d guess that most music is quite serious. Classical seems mostly serious, though some of the serious musicians I know have tried to explain classical music humor to me. I heard this explained on radio once, and the classical commentator was beside himself delighting over these musical rib-ticklers. They went over my head.

A good number of folk songs are serious. At the same time those Novelty Songs were all the rage, Protest Songs increased in popularity. They didn’t try to deny Cold War angst, they embraced it. Protest songs sought to change the times, and in many cases, rightly so. They became the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movements and that was, and is, serious business indeed.

Blues, Country, Ballads, bagpipe music, all can sound pretty serious to me. Well, maybe not Country, it shifts in and out of tragedy and comedy pretty easily.

Happily

Some styles can’t ever sound serious to my ears. Polkas always sound funny to me, but that may be because I associate them with elderly relatives dancing at weddings back when real musicians were hired for the affair. In my neighborhood, they had better have an accordion player who can keep 3/4 time. I’m not sure accordion can be played in any other time signature.

Dixieland sounds kind of funny. Here again it may be my association with straw hatted strummers who always looked happy.

Always Looking Happy was a requirement for another musical trend that played a large part of my developmental years, on into high school. About the same time Novelty and Protest Songs filled the airwaves, large singing chorales showed up on television. Mitch Miller was the most popular of this type of entertainment. These robust singers sang standards from the American Songbook and they Looked Happy! Shine On Harvest Moon, Camptown Racetrack, Sweet Adeline, and the like, were all sung with exuberance while we at home could follow along with the bouncing ball. Again, YouTube.

This Happy Looking singing style stayed on for some time and even culminated with a fairly hip (for the time) Coke commercial that became an icon. The gray suited singers of Mitch Miller were replaced with modified flower children (not those muddy Woodstock hippies) who joyously brought the world together with the healing nectar of cola. At least that was the suggested idea.

If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands

Whether happy, sad, angry, or blue, music seems a core necessity for expressing our human experience. I’ve mostly been exploring whimsy and visual art, but of course music is art, and I think it has been around as long. Just because we have ancient cave drawings doesn’t mean those artist weren’t whistling while they worked. Music isn’t just a whim without meaning. There is an ancient drive to take the spoken word beyond mere recitation to celebration, exaltation, mediation, and supplication.

For me the best music is the kind that moves from deeply serious to exuberant joy. There is a Randall Thompson composition called We Shall Have a Song based on a passage from Isaiah that tells of the redeemed going into “the mountain of the Lord”. It is a stirring work. It reminds me that the goal of all musical expression is eventual joy.

If there were no genuine dissatisfaction with the blues, discrimination, unmet longings, unrequited love, injustice, and death itself, there would be no reason, or right, to hope for anything better. The best music sings against hopelessness, even while it’s singers endure times of despair. This is why there are within the 150 Psalms of the Bible an admixture of praise, lament, cursing, crying, and healing. Those Psalms, John Calvin wrote, are “an anatomy of all parts of the soul”.

Such is music.

 

All Images ©2005 Ed Koehler