With Gusto

Legend has it that when my Uncle Virgil was just a wee little lad, my grandfather would have him stand in a chair at church and sing with his brothers.

He was so small that this was the only way people could see and hear him.
And everybody wanted to hear him.

People came from miles around to see Little Virgil and his older brothers sing. So naturally, when they got old enough to drive around on their own (and not have to stand up in chairs) that’s what they did for a living.

My grandfather Luther was a singer. My grandmother Gladys was a singer.

My father and his brothers were singers.

Me and my brother and sister and my cousins were all singers.
And then… well it stopped.

When we all grew up and had families of our own, we just stopped singing together. Simple as that.

We didn’t teach our kids to sing. There were no lessons while sitting on the back porch or in the bathtub on how to sing harmony. No ‘baptism by fire’ like we had where our parents pushed us out front of a huge crowd of people and told us to sing.

I don’t remember when I learned to sing. It was probably before I learned to walk or talk.

All I remember was riding around on an old bus with my dad and his brothers and during their concerts, being called up to ‘do a number of two.’
That was their version of setting us up in a chair.

The most extreme example of this was when I was maybe 5 or 6 years old and the ‘brothers’ were booked to sing at a Billy Graham crusade. It wasn’t one of those huge televised events seen around the world but there were many thousands of people there.

When it came time for the kids to sing, my dad called me, my brother and my cousin up onto the stage to sing ‘Pablo.’

I still remember the chorus of that old song- the alto part.

That was one of the things that the crowds of people loved about seeing us little kids sing: we did it in perfect three-part harmony.

To them, it sounded natural. What they didn’t know about was all hours we had spent rehearsing that song, at home and on the bus, to make it sound like that.

I grew up singing all over America- literally. And I had hoped that maybe one of my own kids would inherit this love of singing.
But it didn’t happen.

We tried to get them to sing, but they just didn’t seem to show any interest. They said they were embarrassed.

That was strange to me. I was standing on a stage at five years old singing in front of 20,000 people. Being nervous or embarrassed about it was just foreign to me.

But we never could get them to open their mouths and let the heritage passed down from their ancestors tumble out.

They all were talented musically, playing various instruments, but none were singers.

I began to think that maybe the genes that my dad had passed to me and that had been passed to him by old Luther and Gladys, had died off.

Somehow, something had happened that had broken that part of my DNA off and flushed it down the toilet.

All hope for a great singer emerging from my clan was lost.

And then, my son had a daughter.

And she started to sing. And she has never stopped.

This past weekend, we took her to Tallahassee for an afternoon at the zoo and asked her what she wanted to listen to on the radio.

“Disney Princesses,” she yelled from the backseat.

That is apparently a very popular channel on Amazon music that features nothing but the music sung my various characters in Disney movies.
It’s heavy on Frozen, Moana and Little Mermaid. And apparently, she knew all of these songs by heart.

As we drove along and the songs blared from the car speakers, she joined in and sang at the top of her lungs.

She’s not a soprano. At least not yet.

And she is a little ‘pitchy’ which means she has a tendency to go pretty flat on those long notes.

Especially when singing along with Idina Menzel on ‘Let It Go.’

But she didn’t care.

She sang with feeling. She sang with gusto. And that’s all that mattered.
I imagined that when my grandfather lifted up my Uncle Virgil up onto that chair all those years ago and he opened his mouth to sing, Luther secretly had his fingers crossed that the young boy would do it with feeling.
With gusto.

He did. And my grandfather breathed a sigh of relief that his legacy would live on.

As my granddaughter tried to match Idina’s high E flat at the end of Let It go, I smiled.

Not because she hit it- she didn’t.

But I knew that the Lovett ‘singing gene’ was not dead yet.

There still is hope.