Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Birthday boy and other stuff
The big day for Alexander has arrived and he has already declared it the best birthday ever. He came down to the decorations for the theme he requested. I’m pretty sure Jackie was up until the wee hours of the morning dressing up the dining room. Now the boys are off to school and it’s quiet here.
I’m listening to Tracy Chapman’s Greatest Hits album. I revived her memory when I watched her play the opening number at the Grammys. A country western star, Luke Combs, released his version of her song, “Fast Cars” last year and it climbed up the charts so far that Tracy Chapman was awarded a Country Music Association trophy for this iconic song. The two of them opened the 2024 Grammys singing “Fast Cars” together. Actually Luke Combs deferred to Tracy often during the performance. When they finished, no one in the audience was sitting down. I think everyone knew that she is the first Black woman to have written a number 1 country song.
To me, Tracy Chapman’s voice goes straight to my heart and soul center. I don’t know the right words to describe it, but “pitch”, “range” and “tenor” come to mind. I think different combinations of these qualities determine the sounds that our ears take in and then our brains analyze the information. When my brain is exposed to her voice I feel both sadness and hope. She is listed as a “Contralto”, a voice type that is somewhat rare. Contralto means the lowest female voice part, or for males, the highest voice part.
She writes her music to reflect life in an urban setting. In her own words, “I’ve been singing ever since I was a child…I just picked up a guitar because my mother had played it at some point. I started teaching myself things and writing my own songs.” By the time she was in college she was busking on street corners in Boston. A classmate of hers introduced her to his father, who became her manager and signed her to Elektra records. Listening to her prompted me to listen to her Greatest Hits album, which I promptly downloaded.
After dinner last night Ibrahim introduced us to yet another musical opportunity. He started playing a documentary about the making of the 1985 famous song, “We Are The World”, written to raise money to fight famine in Africa. The song itself was co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie in a very short time to bring attention to a project that Harry Belafonte was spearheading. In order to make the recording Quincy Jones gathered together musical royalty, among them Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Diana Ross, and a whole A list of others.
They all gathered in a big studio. Lionel Ritchie put up a sign at the entrance: ”Check you egos at the door.” He and Quincy Jones knew they would be working with mostly solo performers, not used to sharing the limelight with anyone else. Just the task of scheduling the performers was daunting enough. But in the 30 some years since the release of the biggest seller single in history, over $100,000,000 have been raised for hunger relief.
The documentary is available on Netflix. For people my age it is a wonderful nostalgic display of the people we grew up listening to. For much younger people it is an exposure to royalty. At the end of the documentary, they play the whole song. I was in tears.
While we elders were reliving our youths and realizing just how old we really are, the next two generations were having small arguments about if it really was bedtime. Finally, Xander was convinced that the sooner he went to sleep, the sooner his birthday would arrive. In honor of Xander’s almost birthday, Cameron declared that he could sleep in the upper bunk with him. Upstairs they went to the land of children’s dreams.