Tuesday 3 May 2016

Music and Me

May is New Zealand Music Month and over on the Memories In Time blog I posted a list of questions about how has music played a part in your life.

By chance this week the Heritage New Zealand newsletter contained a link to a performance being put on at Alberton by Cathie Harrop. That name rang bells and so a quick Google search later and I found Cathie's website and confirmed that she was the television presenter that I'd remembered from the early 70's.

Wandering through the website I found a link to this album and the songs on it.

Cathie Harrop - Childrens Favourites

Instantly I was back in my childhood, where this album featured. I listened to the tracks on the website and knew before I heard them what they were going to sound like and what came next.

We played this record on the stereogram, lifting the lid to display the turntable (I'm trying to find a picture of what I think it was like on Google. It might be time to talk to my brother and get him on the task too). My memory has it in the lounge in our house against the internal wall and it's funny because as I think about this, that was also the wall where the piano was when I started to learn that. Did the piano replace the radiogram... did we get the newer stereo when we go the piano? I wonder if there are photos to show the furniture in the room.

I had forgotten the name of Cathie's TV show... Scribbles... but do remember the excitement of having one of my pictures shown on TV (a brown lion with a mane of gold wool).

When we had children I sang  "Horsey, Horsey" to them (actually I think I sang that a lot to them), But just the chorus, I'd forgotten the verses. I guess that's also true about our own history, unless we record it we will only remember parts of the story and not the details. I've got lots more music related stories to be told and one story leads to another.

So now you have a choice, if you remember Scribbles and Cathie's songs, go listen to them again on Cathie's website (and even if you don't they are classics to listen to). If not why not have a look at the questions on the Memories in Time blog and write down some of your own memories.