Like many of our mothers, mine thinks I’m cleverer than I am. So when she lent me the CD sets pictured below …
… it was with the words “You probably know everything on there anyway.”
I did not. And sometimes I knew things, but Professor Bill Messenger put them in a different light and made me slap my forehead for not seeing them that way myself.
For instance, he points out, while covering the period beginning in the 1890s, that “in Tin Pan Alley, mother songs fell to the earth like ivory snow”, but that “to my knowledge not one mother song has been written during the past fifty years”.
So I thought I’d write one. A modern one. Yes, I’m aware that my own mother’s generosity has led me to writing the following. Like many of our mothers, I think she’ll forgive me:
Oh, you want the sheet music? For piano and voice? Right here.
major to minor 