I Remember With Songs - Some of My Favorite Songs and Memories

Isn’t it funny how music is tied to so many of our memories? A song can come on the radio and take you back to a different time…a different part of your life. Tonight, my husband and I were playing old songs and each and every one brought back a different memory….

When I was really little, I was sick all the time. I had chronic bronchitis, a serious milk allergy and kidney problems. Every winter, I had pneumonia and every time I started a new school (which was often) I had such a nervous stomach that I would be sick for days. When I was eight, we found out my father had cancer. It was one of the toughest times in my life. But during that time – especially when my dad and I were sick together and I got to stay home with him and he with me….wonderful memories built around music were born.

When we lived in California, my dad had won a radio with an eight track player on it, along with about ten or twelve eight track tapes. We listened to that radio and those tapes all day long when we were sick together. My dad absolutely loved Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline…but his favorite person to listen to was Red Sovine – mostly because of the trucker songs. My favorite Red Sovine song was “Teddy Bear” but I always made my Dad play “Gitty Up Go, Daddy.” He would sing along to the song and bounce me on his knee….even if I was much too old for it. Although I rarely hear that song anymore, when I do hear it I am reminded of those awesome times with my Dad…

In one of her lives, my mother was a waitress and bartender. After my father passed away, she dated a man who was in a country band. Every Sunday, Mom would take us kids to the bar where she worked to listen to the Sunday Jams and eat chicken dinner. I couldn’t wait for CC Ryder Band to play “Luckenbach, Texas.” We would dance and sing along in the back room with all the other kids. Later, that song would make my mom cry after her boyfriend left her for another woman.

The first time my mom heard the song "Prop Me Up (Beside The Jukebox)" by Joe Diffie, she told all of us kids that this song needed to be played at her funeral. For years we joked about it. When she was dying from COPD, she made me promise that it would be played. I had to fight my sisters and brothers a little for it, but it was played at her funeral.

We moved a lot when I was a kid. The song “On The Road Again” by Willie Nelson seemed to be written just for us. After it came out, it was always played in the car as we left for our next destination. Between Wichita and Springfield we played the song non-stop until the cassette tape broke, and then bought another one to make it the rest of the way. I remember riding on top of a pile of mattresses that were on top of boxes in the back of a VW van. And singing that song at the top of my lungs.

My first concert that I went to was The Oak Ridge Boys. I was madly in love with this group as a teenager in high school. I was surprised that my mom let me go with my friends – but then she didn’t know that we weren’t really going with my friends parents, as we had all told our parents – we were going with the older brother of another friend. He smoked marijuana and drank a six pack of beer on our way to the concert and we all sang “Elvira” as loud and as goofy as we could.

When I met my first husband, it should have been a clue when “our” song was Chicago’s “Hard To Say I’m Sorry.” “Sorry” was never a word I heard from him, even though there were many, many times that it would have been appropriate…

My first year of teaching was horrible. It was a bad situation and happened at a stressful time in my life. I had twenty something students all with some sort of behavioral issue to go along with the learning issues. I had a principal that was not supportive and teachers who didn’t want “those” children in their classrooms. I went home each night with Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” playing loudly on the radio.

At the worst part of my divorce, Rodney Atkins came out with the song, “If You’re Going Through Hell.” I would play that song every day, cranked up all the way on the radio. It helped a horrifying, horrible time just a little better and made me realize that if there were a song about it, I wasn’t alone.

When my oldest daughter was born, I introduced her to my favorite music. I remember sitting with her and crying as I put her to sleep the night of her first birthday. I was listening to “You’ll Never Be One Again” by Alabama. A few years later, I played it again for my younger daughter and crying just as hard.

As my girls grew, we were in the car a lot as we tried to stay out of the house and away from all the trials and tribulations associated with it. We didn’t always have a great radio to listen to, and many times made up our own songs. We listened a lot to Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Collin Raye, and many others as we drove the country roads around our town. One of our favorite songs to sing was “Amazing Grace.”

A song that always makes me think of my younger daughter is a song by Collin Raye, “I Think About You.” In the chorus of the song it talks about the “you” in the song as a person “eight years old and big blue eyes…” which described her perfectly at the time. The song “American Girl” by Trisha Yearwood was about my older daughter. Later, when the girls were older, it was “This One’s For The Girls” by Martina McBride.

On my first date with my now husband, he sang karaoke for me. The first song he sang did not really endear him to me…it was Rodney Carrington’s “Dear Penis.” He then sang Alabama’s “Mountain Music” which was a better choice, by far. (And, coincidentally, the “A” side of the “You’ll Never Be One Again…”)

The weekend of our fourth date, my husband came over and changed his clothes at my house after a hard day at work. He was also a DJ at the time, and that night we were going to a wedding that he was DJ-ing. He was getting all dressed up and kept asking me if he looked okay. I was also getting ready and kept asking him the same thing. That night, he sang Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” Every time I hear that song, I am reminded of that night again. It was played at our wedding reception.

There are many more songs that bring great memories…and I could write about them forever…but maybe another time…