Music connects us from Sam Cooke to Billy Joel

            While shopping in the grocery store, I heard a Beatles song playing in the background. There weren't any vocals, but the melody from "Let It Be" was instantly recognizable.

            Who could've ever dreamed the revolutionary songs from our youth would be used as elevator music? Those songs motivated us to change the world and make life better for everyone around us.

            After dinner, still thinking about those songs, I clicked onto YouTube and started searching for meaningful songs from the past.

            Even though Frank Sinatra was before my time, he's my mom's favorite crooner from her teenage years, so I clicked on "When I Was Seventeen." By the end, I knew this was a song I could understand at any age but only appreciate at this stage in my life.

            One that caught my interest was a 1964 song "A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke. This song addressing social problems was a brave one in the days when people of color were lynched.

            Cooke risked his popularity with a song that had the potential to inflame a segregated country. Fifty years later, the lyrics are as brave as they were back in the sixties.

            That led me to Aretha Franklin's "Respect." I found myself rocking in my chair and tapping my feet on the floor. The Queen of Soul can still rock the joint almost 50 years later and, she's right. We all need a little respect.

            From there, I listened to "Fortunate Son" by Credence Clearwater Revival. Those drums and the strong solo guitar at the beginning are as thunderous as they were back in 1969. Fortunate sons are still sidestepping responsibility and those without connections are still paying the price.

            Eventually I moved on to the 1970s and the choices were pretty slim. After all, this was the "bubble-gum" and heavy rock era, two sounds I dislike. 

            So for the next 30 minutes, I listened to pitch perfect songs from The Temptations and musical poetry, courtesy of Billy Joel, and had my hope renewed. My imagination, as it did for The Temptations, still runs away with me, and the Piano Man can bring tears to my eyes with his song of lost love "And So It Goes."

            Surely the 1980s had a few songs that would cause me to duel it out with the Muzak windmills.  After skipping past Milli Vanilli and Simple Minds, I found Michael Jackson. His call-to-action song "Man in the Mirror" more than made up for some of the paper-thin acts from the 80s.

            About the time I was ready to call it a night, I came across "Poetry Man" by the incredible Phoebe Snow. She had a gentle voice that snuck into your heart, and the words to that song are still beautiful.

            And that brought me to the one timeless anthem for all young girls – "Seventeen" by Janis Ian. I remember hearing that song on the radio in high school and pulling the car over to the side of the road.
            Like her, I was always the last one chosen for basketball and the awkward one who watched the beauty queens get everything.

            Muzak can homogenize these songs all they want to anesthetize people in elevators and grocery stores, but if we remember that some of our song writers are our generation's most gifted poets, then maybe all's not lost.

            In the words of the late and superbly talented John Lennon, there are places and people I remember, and these songs about love, growing older and seeing the beauty in our souls connect them all.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.