Music and Family

    For this assignment, I chose to interview my 79 year young grandma, who I call Mimi. She is one of the funniest and sweetest people I know and she always has stories to tell so I thought she would be fun to interview. She was the second oldest daughter in her family of 7 (she loves to tell stories of how it was growing up in a two bedroom house with 3 sisters and a brother.) She was born in 1946 right as World War II ended. Her father had just come home from deployment when she was born, so they had a unique bond. Her household was “ran like the Navy,” according to her. This was due to the conservative culture and religious expectations her family had. Because of this, music was only enjoyed at church while she was growing up. She told me she loved to sing the hymns at church even though she couldn’t carry a tune; she loved being able to praise with her friends and family. Her favorite hymn was “How Great Thou Art.”

https://youtu.be/Cc0QVWzCv9k?si=OLym5lJJCfJuXSCL

    When she began dating my grandpa is high school, she started to rebel a little bit and go skating and dancing (I know! So scandalous!) where she listened to music from the jukebox. She liked Elvis, The Beach Boys, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” which she taught me how to do when I was a toddler. 

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Her favorite song during her adolescence was “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison because this was the song my grandpa dedicated to her. I remember my grandpa playing this song for me and talking about how much he loved his brown eyed girl, referring to my grandma. When my grandpa was in hospice, Mimi colored pictures for him out of her coloring book and signed them “Your brown eyed girl.” This song is very difficult for me to listen to now because it reminds me of how much my grandpa loved Mimi. 

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Mimi told me this period of music was highly influential in her life. This was the first time she listened to music for enjoyment and let herself have fun with it. This music also reminds her of when she was dating my grandpa, which is why she still listens to it to this day; it is a way for her to hold onto memories of my grandpa. This was bittersweet to hear because grief is such a complex feeling. It made me happy she had this music to listen to but it also made me sad to realize how much she misses my grandpa. We got to bond over this habit of listening to music from different times of our lives because I like to listen to music I listened to when I was young to reminisce on my childhood. 

 Music and Traditions

October 4th. 2025

    Music has been a huge part of my life and major milestones. When I was very young, my parents separated leading me to have two completely different interactions with music depending on who I was living with. In this blog I will discuss two transitions and the role music had in them with both sides of my family. 

I. Big Girls Don’t Cry- Fergie 

https://youtu.be/agrXgrAgQ0U?si=Hj2BML9POL8BYkRx

    When my biological mom would pick me up for her weekends with me, she would always blast the radio with the windows rolled down. She usually brought me a Coke in a can to drink on the ride to her house. I remember feeling like the coolest kid ever with my Coke in the cupholder of my car seat. She drove a beat up red Honda she called “The Hoopty” and this song was always playing. I remember listening to the words and thinking “big girls should be allowed to cry” so I always thought it was a silly song and I felt bad for my mom whenever it came on. I didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t cry. But she sure did sing her heart out so I figured she just liked the tune.

    When I hear this song it makes me think of the little traditions I had with my biological mom. We were always limited with time so it was hard for us to do much together, but she never failed to pick me up and sing the songs on the radio with me. 

II. She’s Always a Woman to Me- Billy Joel

https://youtu.be/Cx3QmqV2pHg?si=r6oI3ZEvNU5A-b9U

    My adopted mom was a piano performance major so we always had pianos and sheet music readily available. When my sister and I were little, we liked to pretend to play the piano. We would pull out my mom’s songs and put them up and sing them even though we had no idea how the songs were supposed to sound and we didn’t know how to play the piano. I remember finding this song and barely being able to read the lyrics because I was so little. My sister helped me figure out what the lyrics were and we thought this was the funniest song ever. This became our favorite song to sing together. My mom would hear us but she thought it was a song we made up because we weren’t singing the right tune, pitch, or words, and she finally figured out what we were singing when we asked her to play it for us. I remember all three of us sitting on the piano bench together watching my moms fingers float up and down the piano (the fluidity on pianists movements still fascinates me today) and listening to her sing the song completely different from anything we ever imagined. In that moment I realized how talented my mom was and felt bad because she never played the piano anymore. After that day, my sister and I would find songs for her and we would all sit and listen to her play while singing.

    To me, this song symbolizes the little routines I had with my family and the ways we got to bond through music.