I grew up with music all around me.
The first music I remember was church music. The second source of music was the radio at home. The next source of music I remember was gospel singings at places like Shady Grove on Arkansas Highway 94 west or at Dug Hill Church over north of Bella Vista.
Then later on, after we got electricity at home in 1945 and a TV in 1953, we had lots of music on TV. Having electricity also made it possible for us to have a record player. Then, the other source of music was that which we made ourselves, with the old Ellington upright piano at home, and later a guitar and a mandolin which we were learning to play. I'm about to forget my Aunt Anna's old Edison record player. That old player came into the family sometime back in about 1920. The story was that several members of the family inherited $25 each. One decided to buy a player piano, and one decided on an Edison record player.
The family also had an old pump organ, but in my time very seldom was anyone allowed to play it. The player piano belonged to my Granddad and Grandmother, Scott and Ellen Nichols. As I recall the make, it was a Gulbransen. You could play it like a normal piano, of course, but it also had a pedal operated player unit that played music from rolls which were placed in the upright compartment. The rolls had slits in the paper, and as the paper passed over the pickup bar and its dozens of tiny holes, the slits in the paper would allow air to enter into those tiny holes, triggering the unit to pay a certain note on the piano. So,the result was that the piano could automatically play as though it had a great pianist at the keyboard. I say automatically -- actually you had to pedal like crazy to keep it going, and when the piece was done you had to put it in reverse and re-roll the music and then put in another roll. Plus, there were several adjustments to control the tone and the tempo. Those old player pianos, with vacuum operated action-powered by two foot pedals, were amazing units, very complex, but very effective. They were made from the late 1800s and into the later years. Most of the ones I have been familiar with were made in the 1920s.
The old Edison record player, which had first belonged to my great grandparents, John Wesley and Malinda Nichols, became Aunt Anna's unit when her parents passed away. The player was spring powered. There wasa handle on the side which you used to wind the spring to make the unit play. The records were very thick, about a half inch thick disks, and the sound mechanism was entirely non-electrical. The pickup unit had a diamond needle which tracked in the grooves of the record, picking up the sound, and then the speaker horn amplified the sound and delivered it out into the room. We kids were kind of supposed to keep hands off the old Edison, but with special permission we could wind it up, and as we got older we might even be permitted to put on a record and make it play ourselves.
Later in the 1950s, we had our own record player, one of the older kind which played the earlier 78 RPM records. When Dad bought the record player, probably at an estate sale, he also got quite a collection of older 78 RPM records. I don't remember very many of the songs on the records, some were fox-trot, some were Hawaiian guitar pieces, some were orchestra pieces. We never bought any of the contemporary music of the 1950s, such as the rock and roll. We got our contemporary music of the times by radio and TV, and on the juke box at the cafe.
Much of our music we made ourselves.
My mother was a pianist, and from the time we were very young she began teaching us to pick out tunes on the piano. We knew how to play many tunes even before we knew which note was middle C , or what do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti do was all about. We learned a little bit about reading music; for example, looking at the lines and spaces I knew where F and A and C and E were in the treble clef, and the lines, from bottom to top, were E, G, B, D, and F. We remembered those by the saying, "Every Good Boy Does Fine."
The bass clef was a mystery to me for a long time, but the way I initially learned to read music for singing was shaped note music. This was a system of notation that apparently looks confusing to many people who are trained in the usual round-note system. I'll include a bit of explanation here, just in case someone is a bit interested. In the shape-note notation, each note is at the normal position on the lines and spaces, so for those who read the letter notes, the notes are there as normal. But in shape-note notation, you are not so concerned with whether a note is an A or a B or a C as you are about its position in the scale in a given key. That position is shown by the shape of the note.
The first note in the scale, the "do," is shaped as an equilateral triangle with point at the top, the "re" (the second note in the scale) is shaped like a kettle drum. The "mi" is like a baseball diamond, the "fa" is a right triangle, the "so" is a circle, the "la" is a square, the "ti" is an ice cream cone, and of course the high "do" is again a triangle (like a pyramid). When you become familiar with the tone intervals for singing, the shapes help you "hear" how to go from "do" to "fa" (one to four), or from "do" to "so" (one to five) in the scale of pitches. When you have learned the tone positions in each key on the piano, shape notes make it simple to transpose the music into a lower or higher key, since you are not playing by the absolute values "D" or "E" or "F" but you are playing the scale tones relative to the key note for the key you have selected.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 11/13/2019