March 26, 2003
Dear Mr. Moore,
I appreciated your article in the March 11th issue.
My family always loved our gatherings at the piano. Usually I played the piano and others sang. Later I lost my inhibitions and joined the throng. When my mother needed caretakers (she died at 101) the caretakers joined in and learned to love the older songs. When mother’s eyesight declined, she just sang from memory.
The reason why people don’t sing more today is that the current music is written to be looked at or listened to. Most is unsingable for the average person.
When we, as young adults, sat at the drive-in restaurant and harmonized on “Dream,” it was because it had m-e-l-o-d-y. Walter Donaldson, Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern, Nacio Herb Brown, are unknown to today’s young people. Try harmonizing to Andrew Lloyd Weber. Outside from a very few, like Michael Feinstein and now Rod Stewart, singable music is no longer sung.
Music feeds the soul. Keep it up.
Dorothy A. Presser, Charlotte