17. Roll Over, Beethoven in the Schoolyard: On First Witnessing Live Singers
I have this brief memory: I am quite young, small, but old enough to attend school. I am at school, at the end of the building and outside, walking past the entrance. Outside the doors there are four girls, all much older than I am. They may have been in senior public school, in grade seven or eight, and so twelve or thirteen years old. They seemed like adults to me--ancient. And they were singing as a group, with joy and with emotion and what I remember as a wild abandon, swaying and moving each to her own choreography. They were singing 'Roll Over, Beethoven.' And as I passed, they saw me watching, acknowledged my watching them, as they continued their performance. I remember this moment quite often.
It is a small, stray memory, except, of course, no memory is small or stray. Every part of this memory tells me about myself. Just to start:
I believe this was the first time I had ever seen a group of people singing outside, the reason this was so overwhelmingly impressive. As a very young boy, growing up on a farm in the late 1950s, there would have been no opportunity to experience public singing except in a church, and the church I attended had a very dubious attitude toward song as a part of faith. And anyway, that was indoors, and they were all terrible singers. These people, on that morning, were emotional, joyful, and just plain...well, it was a impressive.
Far more important, though--I remember this as the first time I had ever heard rock and roll. But can that be true? Of course it was in the airwaves and on the radio, and of course people were exchanging records. But I was not a part of that experience, not yet. To me, it was an alien music, sung in this case with evangelical fervour by people I knew, and who were beyond impressive to me--a couple of the Powell Sisters, perhaps, and perhaps a Coulson or a Colling or a Gunby. These were the older sisters of every one of my friends in those days.
But what were they introducing to me? I have looked at the release dates, for when this song was 'in the air' to inspire these young women to perform it. It might have been the Chuck Berry recording (1956), though I didn't start school until 1958. It might have been the Jerry Lee Lewis recording in the early 1960s, since this was Country and Western country. I have tried to reconcile my memory with these dates, but they don't work.
It is a part of my own understanding of this memory, and has been clear to me all my life, that I was witnessing early Beatlemania in Southern Ontario farm country--just a hint of how far popular music could travel in a short time. The Beatles released their version of 'Roll Over, Beethoven' in December 1963.
If this is true, then I could have heard them sing this no earlier than the spring of 1964, when I was nine years old and in Grade 4. My memory tells me that I was much younger than nine, and they were much older. But then, I was small for my age and immature, exposed to very little in my life. And the mind plays these tricks--perhaps they just impressed me so much I felt younger. But by that time, I had certainly heard this music on radio, seen it on television, even if I hadn't experienced it live.
So perhaps it was the performers who made it all seem so new to me, who made it visceral, who made me feel it. Who made me remember so vividly for 65 years. With a smile.
