Connections: Mood Music

Do you wander around with a song in your head?  Do you wake up in the middle of the night because your hippocampus offers up mood music appropriate for what you have been doing during the day? 

In the last few weeks, as a singer with the Choral Society of the Hamptons, I have been learning some swell music by three illustrious Baroque composers — Purcell, Bach, and Handel — for the society’s holiday concert on Dec. 9. We’ll also perform Hallelujah from Messiah, and lead the concertgoers in carols. But none of that excellent music comes forth in the middle of the night, while I am tucked up in bed. Instead, what I hear, to my dismay — and to the tickled funny bone of a colleague who I just told this story to — is “My Melancholy Baby.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with an old ditty. “My Melancholy Baby” was written in 1912, and you can hear versions by such greats as Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra on YouTube, if you like. But I hadn’t heard it in years, or even decades, before it started playing in my head while I was trying to sleep. The music and words reverberate:

“Come to me, my melancholy baby 

Cuddle up and don’t be blue 

All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe 

You know, dear, that I’m in love with you  

Every cloud must have a silver lining 

Wait until the sun shines through 

Smile, my honey dear

While I kiss away each tear 

Or else I shall be melancholy, too”

 I have begun to think I might have inherited this midnight-ditty syndrome from my father, who had a proclivity for catchy and somewhat silly melodies and would burst into totally surprising song at the most unexpected moments: “Yes, We Have No Bananas” while making toast or “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” on a city street corner.

Before I got married for the second time, I was somewhat worried about what my father and my new husband would think of each other when I introduced them, coming as they did from such different worlds, but before they had been in the same room for five minutes, they launched into a duet: “You Are My Sunshine.” I guess it was inevitable they would both start crooning: Chris, like me, is a singer from way back; his taste is primarily for the classical, but, like my father, he also takes delight in comic tunes.

It would have been nice if the first time they sang together they had chosen something a little more interesting than “You Are My Sunshine,” but I guess there wasn’t much overlap in their repertoire. Chris, an Ivy League preppie if ever there was one, probably wasn’t familiar with, for example, “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” one of my father’s favorite Laurel and Hardy gag tunes, which is about a cow “in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginny” who “stood on a railroad track” and got hit by the train, “smack!” By the same token, my father probably hadn’t committed to memory Chris’s favorite ridiculous numbers, which include a commercial jingle about a cereal called “Shredded Ralston,” which he sings in harmony with his sister when opportunity arises, or a crazy (and, if I am remembering correctly, extremely un-P.C.) one about bologna sung to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

In any case, I hope I can chase “Melancholy Baby” away from my brain’s auto-repeat and replace it with one of the fine traditional carols we’ll be singing with the audience on Dec. 9, during the holiday concert. Tickets are still available at the Choral Society’s website, should your music taste be more refined than “I Never Saw a Purple Cow and I Never Hope to See One.”