Monday, February 22, 2021

Music That Slays - Killing Me Softly

Humans need to feel not only joy but also sadness. I've written before about the need for melancholy. After all, the only real way to appreciate happiness is to know his flipside. For me, emotions are often connected to music, including feeling blue, but the only song that will turn me introspective immediately and almost always brings a tear to my eye is Killing Me Softly With His Song.  

I'd heard the song on the radio many times, but when I heard Sherry sing it, the emotion it made me feel changed forever. She and I were in the same guitar class and almost immediately we found harmony. Not just metaphorically; our voices harmonized well. My voice was somewhere between bass and baritone but pretty unremarkable. She had the range of Olivia Newton-John but with the power of Linda Ronstadt behind it. Here's a sample from the spring concert of 1977 when she performed Sam; give a listen. Beautiful, right?

While rehearsing for a show, out of the blue, she played Killing Me Softly. I'd never paid attention to the lyrics, but at the same time, I was paying attention to her as she played. I felt the song for the first time.

I heard he sang a good song, 
I heard he had a style 
And so I came to see him, 
To listen for a while 
And there he was, this young boy,
A stranger to my eyes

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

She finger-picked the guitar, which added more emphasis to her voice and the words. Unaware she was doing it, Sherry was fleshing out the way deep and meaningful songs had affected me my entire life. Music told my story, the secret way I felt about life and love. She was laying out all of the profound darkness of my teenage angst. That is pretty deep exposure for sixteen.

The song is not difficult to play on the guitar. After a few run-throughs, we played it together, taking turns singing the verses and harmonizing on the chorus.

I felt all flushed with fever, 
Embarrassed by the crowd
I felt he found my letters,
And read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish,
But he just kept right on

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

When I sang, I changed the lyrics a bit as needed, and by the end of the song, I was finding it hard to hold back the tears. It was an odd feeling. I've been affected emotionally by the music my entire life but never by a song that didn't have a specific event tied to it. This was a new and different feeling, and the song immediately had a heavy emotional weight for me. 

She sang as if he knew me,
In all my dark despair
And then she looked right through me As if I wasn't there
And she just kept on singing,
Singing clear and strong

The message I get from the lyrics is a simple one. A person is listening to a singer playing the guitar. Still, when she listens to the words, she is immediately slain by the fact that he knows her. Not just that he knows her, he knows her inside and out. He continues to expose even the darkest feelings as he sings and strums his guitar without concern for his effect on her. Her pain is the instrument he is playing, and her experiences have become his lyrics.


Strumming my pain with her fingers
Singing my life with her word
Killing me softly with her song
Killing me softly with her song
Telling my whole life with her words
Killing me softly with her song

I think we played the song two or three times during that session. I guess it is more significant that we never played the song together again, even though we dated off and on throughout high school and after. Not sure what Sherry is doing now, but I hope somewhere that voice still sings.

A bit of history... Lori Lieberman recorded and released the song in 1972 and it was included in an in-flight audio program that Roberta Flack heard and liked. Flack went to work on a cover arrangement injecting her own style. She first performed the cover publically at the Greek Theater in LA, where she was opening for Marvin Gaye. Gaye told her that she needed to go and record that thing right away. In 1973, Roberta Flack won the Grammy for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for Killing Me Softly With His Song

Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel are listed as the composer and lyricist for the song, but both acknowledged the contributions of Lori Lieberman for many years. In 1997, that changed and they began to dismiss her part in its creation. Realistically, I'm not sure how they could call what she did a contribution when in actuality, she wrote the first draft lyrics.  Lori Lieberman's recollection of who the song is for and why:

"Don McLean," she said simply. "I saw him at the Troubadour in LA last year. ("And there he was this young boy / A stranger to my eyes") I had heard about him from some friends but up to then all I knew about him really was what others had told me. But I was moved by his performance, by the way, he developed his numbers, he got right through to me. ("Strumming my pain with his fingers / Killing me softly with his song/ Telling my whole life with his words."

She wrote the draft on a napkin while still at the concert. Here is a clip where she performs both Empty Chairs and Killing Me Softly.


She was strumming my pain 
Yeah, she was singing my life
Killing me softly with her song
Killing me softly with her song
Telling my whole life with her words
Killing me softly with her song


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Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Pluribus Locis Nostrum -- Brat On!



I am proud to be a military brat. If you're not familiar with the term, it means that one of my parents served in the military. As a result, I grew up relocating for new assignments every few years. This mobile lifestyle had its challenges and as we moved from base to base I was forced to make new friends, learn new places, and adapt to new schools every few years. Like most military brats, I credit that style of growing up as beneficial because I learned how to adjust and gained a global view of the world that most people do not have.

Like many military brats, my years as a brat ended when I entered military service myself. In my view, this is no more unusual than the kid who takes over the family business from his parents. It's just that our family business was defending the nation. Those of us in the service who were prior brats walked in familiar with life on a military base. For us, it was just going home.

Now I've reached that place in life where the one downside of being a military brat is found, where are all of those friends I made over the years? For the person who grew up and lived their entire life in a single place, finding a person you went to sixth grade with is easy.  Not so for those of us who did sixth grade in an overseas school on a base that no longer exists. The Internet has made it easier to find people, and I've been able to find and get in touch with a few people I knew growing up. Of course, that doesn't work well for people I knew younger in life whose last name was never part of what I knew about them. Also, getting in touch with the girls I grew up with is more difficult because many of their names have changed due to marriage. 

One incident occurred my senior year of High School that keeps me hopeful that I will eventually run into more of the folks I grew up with as time goes on. My father was stationed at Fort Eustis, the last base he was assigned to before he retired, and I was working as a busboy at the Officer's Club. After we would finish our shift, the busboys would gather together and have and enjoy a few illegal beers while shooting pool. One night we talked about things that happened in our past and bases where we lived over the years. When I mentioned Fort Ord, Tom, one of my fellow busboys, commented that his dad was assigned there during Vietnam like mine.

A few days later, Tom brought in a picture from his second grade class at Fort Ord. As he handed it to me, he told me that he was in the front row. For some reason, the kids and background looked familiar to me, and I started to scan the faces in the picture.  Lo and behold, in the second row, three kids from the right, was me. Tom and I had gone to the second grade together.  Ten years later, in another state at the opposite end of the country, we were together again getting ready to graduate. Only a military brat has that kind of experience. Of course, after graduation, Tom and I went our separate ways, and I've never been able to locate him since.

Now, some mornings I enjoy my coffee while spending a bit of time with ghosts from the past. I wonder what they are up to today, from Mary Ellen Anderson, the first girl I ever kissed, to Tom Arnold, who I attended second grade and graduated high school with.  They are all out there somewhere. I hope they're all happy and doing fine. I also ponder the truth that at least three of the dozen or so bases I grew up on don't exist anymore. Not many non-brats can claim that their hometown vanished because of a BRAC.





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