‘The Growing Up Tape’: As America Nears Its 250th Birthday, a Collection of Songs To Tell the Nation’s Story

As parents, we all have ways to pass along not only our genes but our enthusiasms to our children. Think here of taking children to baseball games and comparing the pitcher to a retired favorite, or teaching them how to bait the hook before casting.My own enthusiasm to pass along was that for what has come to be called American “roots” music — the country, gospel, blues, and their rock ‘n roll progeny that changed popular music. I wanted to expose my three boys not only to the songs — but also to the history and appreciation for American regional culture that enriches a disparate nation as our 250th anniversary year approaches.It was to combine these goals that I came up with what I called “the growing up tape.” Yes, it was a literal cassette. Not songs for children, with simple tunes and verses. Rather, a compilation of autobiographical songs, some well-known, some obscure personal favorites, that told stories of childhoods set in distinctive places that disclosed aspects of American social history, one might say. Designed to pop into the car tape player on family trips. As I look back, I realize it’s a list of small masterpieces of story songs. Children like stories.There was Loretta Lynn’s signature hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” It epitomizes the genre, describing not just the poverty of life in Eastern Kentucky (Butcher Hollow) coal country but the triumph over it. “In the summer time, we didn’t have shoes to wear. But in the winter, we all got a brand new pair. Money made from selling the hogs, Daddy always managed to get the money somewhere.” Details make her story come to life. “Daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines,” while “Mama scrubbed our clothes on a washboard” and “read the Bible by the coal oil light.” Not everyone lives in a comfortable suburb. Coal keeps our own lights on, too.Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors”, tells the story of the Tennessee mountain girl whose parents could not afford a winter coat, leading her mother to stitch one together “from a box of rags that someone gave us”. “As she sewed she told a story, from the Bible she had read, about a coat of many colors Joseph wore.” When better-off classmates make fun of the homemade product, “I told them how my coat of many colors was worth more than all their clothes” — because of the love sewn in every stitch. “They didn’t understand it but I tried to make them see. One is only poor only if they choose to be.” A lesson still relevant beyond Sevierville, Tennessee, where the future superstar grew up.Then there were my obscure African-American gospel favorites, among them “Til We Meet” as sung by Willie Neal Johnson and the Gospel Keynotes. In a powerful introduction to the old hymn, Johnson recalls his youth in the small town of Galilee, Texas, not far from Tyler. There, he recites,“some of the people had cars, but my daddy didn’t have a car.” To get to the little sanctified church where neighboring small farmers would gather on Sundays, his family used “two mules and a wagon.” Mules, I explained, were long used to drag plows through fields before farming became mechanized. In “Poor Boy from Mississippi,” a gospel legend, Reverend Cleophus Robinson from the Delta town of Canton, recalls how he “used to walk two miles to school, with my books piled on my back”, and later used his last two dollars to take a bus to Jackson and on to Chicago. A blues harmonica wails as he thanks the Lord “who’s been so good to me.” It’s the occasion to discuss the Great Migration North of the descendants of slaves — and the life of sharecroppers.Although my own favorites were usually country, blues and gospel — emotional Southern music — the tape was not limited to those. Bob Seger’s “Making Thunderbirds” recalls his youth (maybe a summer job) on a Detroit assembly line — and the prosperity and confidence of the pre-Rust Belt era, circa 1955. “We filled conveyors, we met production. Foremen didn’t waste words. We met production. We were young and proud. We were makin’ Thunderbirds”There was even a song about growing up in a bland postwar suburb, like the one in which I uncomfortably came of age. “In my little town, we grew up believing God had his eyes on us all,” sang Paul Simon. “We pledged allegiance to the wall.” Mr. Simon denied the song was autobiographical but Art Garfunkel said it captured their childhoods in Queens, where they met in elementary school.Yet the songs that most engaged were set in near-exotic American locales. Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man” captures life in the bayous, where his family lived in a houseboat from which “it took every bit of a night and a day, to even reach a place where the people stay.” A life of fishing and trapping where the language is Cajun French. A chance to explain the history of the colonial battles between England and France.It had been my hope to produce a public television series based on the growing-up tape idea. There’d be long interviews with the singer/songwriters, set in the hometowns of the songs. Yet my employer at the time, WGBH at Boston, thought of children’s TV as limited to “Sesame Street” and such. The overtly educational. I think of the priceless interviews that we’d have today, with American originals no longer around. Not just the singers I’ve cited above but so many more: Clarence Carter (“Patches”), Merle Haggard (“Mama Tried”), Carl Perkins (“Family Circle”), Little Jimmy Dickens (“An Old Cold Tater and Wait”), and Chuck Berry, whose “Johnny B. Goode” was inspired by his childhood on Goode Street at St. Louis. Yet the songs made an impression on my family audience, to the point that one son grew up to be a successful roots music-style singer songwriter himself, bringing great American music to Europe and Japan. He even put together a “new growing up tape” for my grandchildren. As for the idea, it’s in the public domain, available, per the discography above, for any music-loving parent.Mr. Husock’s son is the singer and songwriter, Eli “Paperboy” Reed.

‘The Growing Up Tape’: As America Nears Its 250th Birthday, a Collection of Songs To Tell the Nation’s Story

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