Memories

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re spending an episode with memory itself — twenty-five years on from September 11th, right at the point where a shared national memory starts becoming history for the people who never lived through it, even as it stays close and present for everyone who did — and we let three of the earliest recorded sound era’s own records do the talking: “Ben Bolt,” a mid-19th-century parlor ballad that’s really just a list of everyone the narrator has outlived, still popular enough in 1908 for Victor to cut a brand-new version sixty years after it was written; “Long, Long Ago,” a song so deliberately vague — no names, no place, no year — that it became one of the most popular songs in America a decade after it was written and kept getting recycled by every generation after (it eventually became Glenn Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” in 1942); and, closing somewhere unexpected, Paul Lincke’s “Birthday Serenade,” a lighthearted German instrumental with nothing to do with loss at all, picked on purpose because this episode happens to be recorded on my own daughter’s birthday — a reminder that in the middle of an episode about grief and history, new memories are still being made, today, right now.

Lyrics

Ben Bolt

Oh don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt

Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown

Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile

And trembled with fear at your frown.

In the old church yard in the valley, Ben Bolt

In a corner obscure and alone

They have fitted a slab of granite so gray

And sweet Alice lies under the stone

They have fitted a slab of granite so gray