Music Monday/Lyric Lundi

The soundtrack to my childhood is rife with the likes of Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Three Dog Night, Steppenwolf... I could go on and on. It seems we always had music playing in our house. During the day, it was mostly what we kids played on the record players in our bedrooms. At night, it was the classical music that wafted upstairs from the stereo in the living room, which my parents still referred to as the "victrola" (one of those old console units I'm sure many of you remember that was a piece of furniture in and of itself). I didn't know this until we were all adults (I thought I was the only one who did it), but all my siblings and I used to lie awake listening to my father's music and conducting our own symphonies, imitating what we'd seen him do many times, before we drifted off to sleep at night.

My parents, especially my father, shared an enthusiasm for much of the pop/rock we kids enjoyed. We kids, however, often had violent disagreements over what was and wasn't good. To this day, my guess is that you could play anything that appeared in Billboard's "Top 40" from the 1970s, and we could all tell you who had and hadn't liked what. I'm sure that today, my siblings would tell you that my memory is all wrong, that there is no way we all liked one performer, one who often sang such "sappy" songs, but I can distinctly remember our all agreeing that we liked John Denver, or, at least, that we liked a good number of his songs. Even my mother, who was typically more of a show-tune-and-waltzes kind of a gal, liked John Denver.

Although I still love all of John Denver (call me sappy. I don't care), one song in particular brings back especially fond memories. For some reason, my father particularly liked this one, and I can still remember all of us singing to it on the car whenever it came on the radio. It's a classic love song. Do people still write such things as "Annie's Song" in this oh-so-cynical age?