Notes of Sadness (Ohlson)

My siblings and cousins and I grew up crooning and crying about death. My mother and aunt had done the same, my grandmother gathering them close to sing of mothers who lost babies, babies who lost mothers, and sickly children who were snatched from their beds by kindly angels. I know we sang these songs often—and we all know the words, every one, and have gathered over the years to sing them together, pulling in our children, whom we schooled in these notes of sadness—but my memories are sharpest of doing this on long car trips. Our mother had a voice that was true if not strong. She’d sing us through the California countryside from the front seat, fenceposts passing in a blur, coronas of smashed bugs veiling the windshield. We’d sing along from the back, sobbing. At least, my sisters and I sobbed. It only occurs to me now that the songs were all about women and girls trying to breach their sorrow. A girl who calls the telephone operators to see if they can connect her to her dead mother. Another mother who tries to convince a neighbor child to become her little girl, as her own has died. 

If it was a scam to stop sibling car squabbles, it worked. 

In later years, we asked her why? Why did these maudlin, morbid tunes comprise most of the family repertoire? Why so few like “You Are My Sunshine” and so many like “Will the Angels Let Me Play?” She didn’t really seem to be interested in the source, just shrugged and said, “Lots of sickness, I guess.” She would have been four years old when the 1918 flu pandemic commenced, and I always assumed the songs came from that time. But Indiana University has a database of sheet music, and I nosed around there a few years ago to check that theory. It turned out that our saddest songs preceded the epidemic. “Hello Central, Give Me Heaven” was published in 1901, “Won’t You Come Over to My House?’ in 1906, and “Will the Angles Let Me Play” in 1912. I think I concluded that this cluster of mournful songs spoke to the terrible uncertainty of life back then, in the olden days, before we had figured out so many ways to avoid death. And after all, a loss is a loss, I thought so foolishly; does it really matter if they come one at a time or in a wave?

I haven’t sung those songs to my grandchildren yet. I haven’t been on many long car trips with them, but I already know they’re as susceptible to the allure of sad songs as we were. Last year, my daughter and I took them to visit a dahlia farm about an hour outside of Portland. It was a gorgeous crazy quilt of blooms with mountains glowering in the background, and the kids raced around and saw goats. On the way back home, my daughter and I were talking and the kids were in the back seat, sleepily listening to the Beatles. All of a sudden, my daughter noticed that her six-year old was sobbing. Why, we asked, what’s wrong? She wailed, “I don’t want to wait a lonely lifetime! I don’t want us to be apart!” She only started to smile again when we played Lizzo’s “Phone.”

Kristin Ohlson is the author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet. Based in Portland, Oregon, she has published articles in the New York Times, Discover, Gourmet, and others. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing.