Passing It On

Happy birthday, Buddy Holly!

Buddy Holly would have been 71 years old this Friday, September 7.

To celebrate his life and music, Rudy Sheptock at WILW-FM (94.3) in Wildwood, N.J., will be offering a tribute show during his 7 p.m. to midnight oldies show on Friday night.

I'm honored to be among Rudy's guests. I'll be discussing Buddy's last tour, the subject of my 5-star Amazon-rated book, "The Day the Music Died," from 8:30 to 9 p.m., Central Daylight Time. I'll be followed by Peggy Sue Gerron (yes, that Peggy Sue).

Be there or be square!

Flickr photo of Buddy Holly statue in Lubbock, Texas, courtesy of tentonbricks.

Remembering the soundtracks of our lives

One of my family duties is as musical director for car trips that take us at least one CD from our home. It'€™s one of my favorite jobs.

I get to pick the music that everyone in the car will hear over the course of our journey. I'€™m sure when any of our children accompany us, they might disagree with my choices but, hey, it'€™s my car. They can pick the music when they drive their cars.

Actually, I'€™m a bit more diplomatic than that and actually enjoy much of their music but it's an entertaining side trip down memory lane when I get to listen to the music I love. Although it'€™s a bit of a cliche, it truly is the soundtrack of my life.

Certain songs are irrevocably linked to certain memories from my past. This is especially true of my high school years. "€œHe'€™s a Rebel"€ by the Crystals never fails to bring forth memories of sock hops after football games. Whenever I hear €"Surf City,"€ I remember hours I sat in the sun mopping my hair with lemon juice while trying to create that surfer dude look.

Just about every song from that era evokes some sort of memory. That'€™s true for other years, too. It'€™s probably the same for you.

As you document your life story, don'€™t forget to incorporate the music. It's a great memory trigger. When I started work on a book about the Philadelphia history of American Bandstand a few years ago, I collected as much Philadelphia music from that era as I could find and played it whenever I needed a little inspiration.

Try it. It might give your own personal history project a jump start. Here's a good place to start.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family stories. Visit his web site or contact him by e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of  The Carrie Project.

Uh-oh, my musical roots are showing

I spent some time last week reconnecting with my past as I worked on my own memoir.

That included a visit to my hometown of Council Bluffs, Iowa, where I enjoyed the company of relatives, reconnected with an old friend or two, and toured the city, taking photos of homes I've lived in, visiting many familiar landmarks and catching up on a few I'd either missed or have been added since I moved away.

One element of the visit caught me off-guard, however. It was triggered by a CD my mother gave me of some songs recorded by a musically-gifted uncle, Rick Andersen, and his wife, Harriette. It reminded me of the role music has played in my life.

I have the musical equivalent of two left feet, not exactly tone deaf, but close. I sang in the church choir as a teenager but it was one of those just-move-your-lips-Larry kind of things. My mother, on the other hand, had a wonderful voice and often did solos.

Although I couldn't sing, I once tried seriously to play the guitar. I fancied myself as something of a hybrid of Bob Dylan and John Lennon lyrically, but I was more of a Soupy Sales  instrumentally. I did OK with the look and attitude, as the accompanying picture shows, but came up short at the actual musical end.

Still, I loved listening to music. Early in my writing career I wrote concert and record reviews, wrote a rock music column and met and interviewed people like Carl Perkins, Maybelle Carter, Waylon Jennings, Buddy Knox and Dion DiMucci.

Interestingly, there was a time many years ago when my uncle Rick and I were roughly equal in musical skills. But he stayed with it, adding the dobro and harmonica to his repertoire and regularly jamming with friends and relatives (including my fiddle-playing mother). He's even added a recording studio in his rural home and keeps busy recording others from the area. That's where he recorded the CD I was given.

Among the 17 songs he and Harriette put on their CD is a raucous number called "I Won't Go Huntin' With You Jake." Mom says my grandfather used to go around singing that song all the time, something I don't recall.

But, as I listen to my uncle offer his version of the number, it's easy to visualize grandpa enthusiastically spitting out the lyrics about wimmen-chasin' mountain men in his thick Danish accent, laughing loudly as my grandmother half-heartedly turns away in mock disgust.

That vision brings a smile to my face. Thanks, Rick, Harriette and mom.

Cemeteries: Where history lives

 

"Once More Around the Crypt"

That was the headline on a story I wrote in my sportswriting days about a high school track team which, since it didn't have an all-weather track at the school, did its early spring training in a couple of nearby cemeteries.

I found it ironic that young, healthy athletes would prepare their bodies for grueling athletic competitions by winding their way through the final resting places of many of their community's founders and civic leaders. Cemeteries truly are fascinating places.

When I was doing research for my book on the last tour of singers Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, I used cemetery records to track down the family of one of the long-lost musicians from that tour.

As I prepared to visit Holly's grave in Lubbock, Texas, I was told that fans often showed reverence for their fallen hero by leaving guitar picks stuck in the ground surrounding his modest grave marker. What I found instead were shards of broken beer bottles, which I had to carefully remove before shooting a photo of the site. Such is the nature of many celebrity graves.

For most of us, cemeteries are more than tributes to our personal pasts. They offer an enduring record of our collective histories as well.

It's possible to do some cemetery research online, but many of us prefer to stand on the ground of our ancestors. If a personal visit is in your future, here are a few tips from genealogist Annita Zalenski of Totowa, N.J.:

• Make your visit in the afternoon. Many cemetery staffers are busy with funerals in the morning.

• Bring a spray bottle to help you see fading inscriptions on tombstones.

• Bring garden clippers to remove overgrown weeds.

For more tips on how to do cemetery research, go here.

Flickr photo courtesy of RL Johnson.

What's shakin' in your family tree?

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the family history of two presidential candidates, one currently running and the other a candidate in 2004. The buzz is about slavery.

Genealogical researchers have uncovered allegations that ancestors of current Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama may have been slave owners. Other researchers claim that '04 candidate, the Rev. Al Sharpton, is descended from slaves who may have been owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, an avowed segregationist a half-decade ago. Some researchers even say there is a possibility that Sharpton is distantly related to Thurmond.

While it's unclear what the political implications of these discoveries are, it comes as no surprise to experienced genealogists that research of a family connection dating to the Civil War era may uncover details that look quite harsh when viewed through the prism of today's social climate.

One of the fascinations of delving into one's past is that, for better or worse,  you don't know where your path will lead.

In my own family, it is said that my maternal grandmother's bloodlines lead back to a pre-Civil War-era vice president, John C. Breckenridge. Another branch of the Breckenridge family tree is said to lead to one of my favorite singers of the rock 'n' roll era, Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane. That makes us distant cousins. Very distant.

On the darker side of family connections, Michael McKean of Youngstown, Ohio, writes in his blog, GeneaBabble, about the unsettling discovery two sisters made while researching their family's history using records that are centuries old.

One story making the rounds gives a tip on how to deal with the black sheep of your family. When a family historian discovered that a relative had been publicly hanged, he wrote about the incident: "He died during a public ceremony, when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed beneath him."

What about you? What surprises have you found in your family's history?