My Music: The Art of Movement 🎵🎶

There was much local pride in Manchester when I was growing up. Self-organized music-making was vibrant. There were church choirs, brass bands, fife and drum bands and operatic societies. Singing linked me to the music-making traditions of my class and region. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ On Sunday evenings, I joined Dad and my two aunts, with Uncle Albert giving a strong lead at the piano. We would sing hymns, psalms, arias, spirituals, pop songs, nursery rhymes – anything and everything. Church was a main focus for organized singing. I had a good voice and once sang ‘The holly and the ivy’ solo on BBC radio. But my exposure to music went beyond this. Dad couldn’t go to work without a dose of classical music from the BBC Third Programme. We would compete to identify the music first. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ He also had a box full of 78s, collected in the 1930s. We had no gramophone; but Grandma did across the street – a standing cabinet wound manually. I played Dad’s records there. They featured singers like Beniamino Gigli, Paul Robeson and Deanna Durbin. I sang along with La donna è mobile, Nessun dorma, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves. But I was obsessed with Dvořák’s New World Symphony conducted by Arturo Toscanini. It never failed to sweep me away, embedding America deeply in my imagination. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Rock ’n’ roll was invented just for me. At 14, I preferred black singers coming out of rhythm ’n’ blues to Elvis Presley and the white pop stars. At 16 I found Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; it hooked me for life. At the millennium I was in a car going to a beach in Brazil. The century’s top hundred pop songs were on the radio. I was singing along when the driver said ‘He knows all the words!’ I did, at least for the 1950s to the 70s. One daughter kept me in touch with the 80s and the other with millennial pop. I feel blessed that my teens were when rock ‘n’ roll was born. We thought we owed nothing to older generations. That was our biggest mistake. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I woke up one day in October 2017 and found that Tom Petty had died in Los Angeles from a cardiac arrest aged 66. Tom Petty, leader of the Heartbreakers, died of a broken heart. For months I had immersed myself in his music, lyrics, live performances, biographies and documentaries while trying to launch a book, Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes (Berghahn, Spring 2022). I thought I could approach writing my life story through his example. The New York Times said that his lyrics spoke for underdogs and The Guardian wrote: "Petty was a music fan as much as he was a musician, aware that the style that had made him successful was based at least in part on borrowing and paying homage, smartly synthesizing the sound of artists he loved into something entirely his own". Tom Petty never lost sight of where he came from, of where rock ‘n’ roll came from (the US South). _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ He fought the corporate private property system twice and won both times. I too hate private property in the mind’s products. I join the long human conversation about a better world that sustains us all. T. S. Eliot once wrote: "The great poet immerses himself in his tradition and then writes the poem that is necessary to move it along". Bob Dylan and, not far behind, Tom Petty are the great poets of my lifetime. I am not a notable poet, but I am a fan of poetry, especially of songs produced in that great social crucible that is America. The chorus of Tom Petty’s Learning to fly’ goes ‘I’m learning to fly but I ain’t got wings/Coming down is the hardest thing’. I understand this. Mine is not a huge success story. I have not sold 80,000 albums. But I do know about wanting to fly. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ When my mother was dying, I sat in the hospital car park listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland with tears streaming down my face and shouted ‘I am a singer!’ All we have against death is song. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Soon after the millennium, I was on an American Airlines plane taking off from Paris to Chicago. I tuned to a TV news channel, but soon lost interest and read my book. Later I noticed that my foot was tapping. There was an ad break on the screen. This cheered me up: I was going to the land whose popular music is always going somewhere. Chicago is my favourite city for this reason. London hijacked Manchester’s industrial revolution for the dead end of colonial empire. Chicago took up markets on a grander scale. AA frequent flyers were called ‘roadrunners’. One compilation was ‘road music for roadrunners’. In my American decade, I absorbed ‘freedom’ as a synthesis of idea and practice rooted in forward movement, especially in rock ‘n’ roll. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I found in the chorus of Tom Petty's ‘Runnin’ down a dream’ the poetry that launched my book. "Yeah runnin' down a dream": We are driving down a road, our life journey, chasing an elusive dream. Writing the book might help me understand what I have been running after. "That never comes to me": We are not authors of our own destiny or even of our dreams. In one recurrent dream, I am in a wilderness: a ravine with rocks and trees above, a fast-flowing mountain stream below and a narrow path ahead. A brown bear blocks my way. I can smell its damp fur; it opens its mouth and I shield my face with my arm which is clamped in immensely strong teeth. But I am not afraid and the dream ends. The wilderness is nature and the bear my nature, my unconscious mind. It is more powerful than my conscious self, but that’s OK. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ “Workin’ on a mystery, goin’ wherever it leads”: The mystery is death. Murder mysteries are my favourite fiction genre. I have one on the back burner. I spent two years in a West African slum. I thought I became a better fieldworker with time. But when I wrote it up, I only used my notes from the first year. These read like a detective story – I was asking big questions then, but later I drowned in the trivia of parish pump politics.