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I remember when I was little, at P.S. 188, once a week we had music. Every year, the same thing. We'd order our recorders the start of September, get them in October, rush through five or six badly-played songs to "Jingle Bells" (which we'd dubiously master just in time for Halloween), and then... stop. The whole rest of the book was untouched, and everybody would lose book and recorder by the next year, when the process would start all over again.
In order to fill up the rest of the year, we'd sing the same several songs over and over again, and run around in vaguely musical games. For the whole year. God, that was a waste of time. Music education in schools is a wonderful thing, but only if something approximating education is going on. But I digress.
Every year around this time, we'd "learn" (or relearn, rather) two songs: The first four lines of Lift Every Voice (which I'm quite fond of) and a few selected verses of He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. (We also sang Ten Little Indians, so the choice of music here really isn't surprising.) Oh, and we'd sing the first verse of "We Shall Overcome" ad nauseum.
As some of you may know, I grew up in a decidedly areligious (bordering on anti-religious) household. I had to be *told* there was Christian symbolism in the Narnia books in order to see any of it.
So, hearing that latter spiritual, and knowing that somehow it was related to Martin Luther King, I came up with the not entirely unreasonable idea that the He refered to in the song was, of course, the good reverend.
It's only much later in my life that I realized exactly how absurd that is, but I really thought that we were supposed to visualize Martin Luther King holding the earth in his hands. I still prefer this image to the one that surfaced a few years ago, when I saw an ad for a car dealership around this time saying we should "stop dreaming and start driving". A little tiny part of me died, but not much, because there's just not that much of me to kill anymore.
In order to fill up the rest of the year, we'd sing the same several songs over and over again, and run around in vaguely musical games. For the whole year. God, that was a waste of time. Music education in schools is a wonderful thing, but only if something approximating education is going on. But I digress.
Every year around this time, we'd "learn" (or relearn, rather) two songs: The first four lines of Lift Every Voice (which I'm quite fond of) and a few selected verses of He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. (We also sang Ten Little Indians, so the choice of music here really isn't surprising.) Oh, and we'd sing the first verse of "We Shall Overcome" ad nauseum.
As some of you may know, I grew up in a decidedly areligious (bordering on anti-religious) household. I had to be *told* there was Christian symbolism in the Narnia books in order to see any of it.
So, hearing that latter spiritual, and knowing that somehow it was related to Martin Luther King, I came up with the not entirely unreasonable idea that the He refered to in the song was, of course, the good reverend.
It's only much later in my life that I realized exactly how absurd that is, but I really thought that we were supposed to visualize Martin Luther King holding the earth in his hands. I still prefer this image to the one that surfaced a few years ago, when I saw an ad for a car dealership around this time saying we should "stop dreaming and start driving". A little tiny part of me died, but not much, because there's just not that much of me to kill anymore.
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