Heart and Soul....Maybe

This blog post is a trip down memory lane for us.  That trip, as it frequently is, concerns music from years ago that we remember...well.

A song that has great meaning to me (Dan) is Heart and Soul.  It's a song by Hoagy Carmichael, a great composer and performer of the 30s and 40s.  

Why, you may ask (probably not....that's OK) is this song so meaningful me?

Well, I'll answer that question.  Simply put it is the song that really got me playing the piano.

How, you may ask (probably not...that's OK too) did it do that?

Well, it happened at church camp in the early 1960s.  

Heart and Soul was a song that we kids played on the piano as a duet.  The chording was very simple--it was the do-wop Major, Minor, Fourth, Fifth that I mentioned in a previous blog post.  One kid would play the bass and the other would play the melody.

It was fun.  

Then one day, I don't remember when, but probably at home I got the absolutely brilliant idea that maybe I could play the duet by myself with my left hand playing the chording and the right hand the melody.  

And that's how I have played piano ever since.  Chords with the left.  Melody with the right.  It has brought me great pleasure and satisfaction over the years.

The rec center where we played Heart and Soul.  The basement had the dorms for boys:

 Right across the street was the "mess hall."

Up the road was the girls' dorm.  A photo with a friend of mine at the time, Eddie:

 

And the church, between these buildings:

 

So, with that, here is Heart and Soul, with me singing one of the verses.  I could remember it after all of these years--it was that important to me.  Besides, it's beautiful.  Hoagy Carmichael playing it on the piano (he does it better than I could.....ha ha):

 

 

Now, Vicky's song.  

 

It's called The Maybe Song.  The group that sang it was the Womenfolk.   They were a group from the early 1960s who had only one hit:  Little Boxes.  When Vicky was in a Sorority in her freshman year of college they learned and sang this song.

 

Here is a photo of Vicky's sorority.  We took it last summer:

 

 

Years later she sang this song as a lullaby to her children, and, years later, to Marina and Stella when they were babies.  So it obviously means a lot to her.

 

Miraculously, we have a photo of Vicky singing to her baby:

 

 

Here we are dancing to it, with Vicky singing along, like she did so many years ago.

Dancing is so very important to us.  What a thing to do to be able to dance to our memories and history.