* * *
Lynn Snyder
* * *
June is on leave.
My earliest musical memory is being a toddler playing under the baby grand piano in my living room while my dad played it. He had taken classical piano lessons as a boy, but he loved jazz. As a young man, he even played a little piano and trombone in the night spots of Quincy, Illinois which at the time had the most taverns per capita of any town in the country.
At some point, my dad sold the baby grand and bought a Hammond organ and some Leslie speakers. I missed the piano. They decided I needed to take organ lessons. I didn't like it much, but I did learn how to read music in the treble clef and how to build chords, so I am thankful for that.
My dad really loved music. He listened to Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. These are the names that I remember, but my dad knew all the players on all the records. When he played the organ, he didn't sound great to me, but I'm sure that in his head he was hearing those jazz greats.
My parents loved to entertain. If they found a guest who played the organ, we usually had an impromptu concert in our living room. My parents prefered jazz and those intensly beautiful songs like "Misty" by Earl Garner and "September Song" by Maxwell Anderson & Kurt Weill, and they were disappointed if the player only knew church music. If a guest could really belt out a song, my parents were in heaven.
My mother was my Brownie Scout troup leader, and in those days Girl Scouts sang. My mother did not feel confident about singing, singing in front of anyone, even little girls, nor teaching songs, but she rose to the occasion. I loved it. We started singing on car trips and anywhere. It drove my dad nuts, but we didn't care.
I stayed in Girl Scouting through 7th grade, and looked forward to my summer trip to Camp Chipewa Bay. There we would sing constantly. We sang all night on the bus trip to camp. At camp we sang when gathering at the lodge for meals, and after meals if we weren't on dish duty. We sang while canoeing, and we sang at campfires. After we were snug in our sleeping bags and tents, the counselors walked around and sang to us. It was magical.
Have you ever sung a round? You know, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" or "White Coral Bells"... That kind of song. Rounds can be beautiful and they can be funny. It can be so lovely with many voices as the music swells from a homely, simple melody into many layers of rhythm and harmony, and then subsides to a single line. Your whole body vibrates.
When much later I joined the San Francisco Folk Music Club and went to the Camp Harmony Rounds workshop, I learned that not all rounds are for children. Some are very tricky and satisfying for adults to sing, like " Nero's Expedition".
During my college summers, I became a camp counselor in New Hampshire and then New Jersey. I noticed that some of the songs were the same and some were different from those at my previous camps. I loved camp music so much that I did my Senior Thesis in college on camps as a folk culture. And I collected and notated songs from camps across the country. I got an "A" too!
During high school, I decided that I wanted to play the guitar. My dad got me a Goya steel string. I would spend hours in my room learning songs from books by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan. My dad found a teacher for me nearby who liked the jazz songs, but I would have nothing to do with it. I wanted to go to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, probably because I was listening to the a radio show called The Midnight Special at night when my parents were already asleep.
In those days, a lesson at the Old Town School of Folk Music lasted all afternoon. First, everyone would go to a breakout room for your instrument and level of play, for example, Guitar-Beginner. Then, we'd come together in a big room for group sings. The Old Town School had "The Book," a loose-leaf binder with a few pages of reference information such as chord charts, bass runs in various keys and then the rest of the stuffed binder was songs. Words and music with chord symbols for both guitar and banjo. I still use these song sheets today, but I hear that copyright problems prevent the school from using a binder these days.
The Old Town School of Folk Music included a music store. I fell in love with my second guitar there. A 1967 Guild Mark V classical guitar. My parents said that they'd pay for half of the guitar, if I could come up with the other half. I did and I still have this rich sounding, bassy guitar. This is the guitar you see in most of the old pictures of me on this site.
When I lived in California, I took group guitar lessons from Carol McComb at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, where I got the Martin 000-16 that I still play today. I always liked playing music with other people, even for lessons. Carol's Songwriting class was my first shot at that kind of writing.
I also started driving over the hill to Santa Cruz to take group voice lessons from Robert Fenwick. I always learned something from what the other students were grappling with.
I've sung at a few weddings.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The promise of redesigning the future brought me to Kansas City.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
That's me in the "Clearly Nature's Own" t-shirt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Proof of a checkered past???. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I design with beads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I design with beads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
