Childhood Musical Influences

I feel fortunate that my parents had good musical taste, hence I was exposed to a variety of musical styles as I was growing up.

• Mom sang me Brahm's Lullaby when I was a baby
  
• Dad had a hi-fi and made sure to tell me about Hank Williams, Andres Segovia and that Greensleeves actually had secret bawdy lyrics
  
• I remember discovering Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) when I was 6 and whirling in response to the music
• We got a black and white television and I was lucky enough to catch some of Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus music series in among the cartoons, ad jingles and movie theme songs
  
• Somewhat later Mom picked up a recording of Duke Ellington's Concert of Sacred Music, Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall and Alan Sherman's My Son the Folksinger (Which parodied many of the cuts on the Harry Belafonte album)
• I distinctly recall particular tunes coming out of jukeboxes. These included Maria, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Alley Oop, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini and the Theme from A Summer Place.
• I learned the usual spate of children's tunes in school but for some reason the only one that really stuck were O Tannenbaum and Edvard Grieg's Spring.

These recollections were from experiences in Wisconsin, where I was born. I was not yet a vagabond. When I was 10 I sat shotgun in my Dad's VW when he attended a convention in California. As we rolled past hundreds of miles of cornfields I buried my nose in science fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs, oblivious to the tunes on the radio. Shortly after my return, our downstairs neighbors told us about a cool new group on the Ed Sullivan show.

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