I shared my post
50’s (and some early 60’s) songs
with a friend from high school. This led to an exchange of emails between us.
I wrote the following:
There is something about music — this is often true of popular music — that it embeds itself in your brain so that you recall exactly how it sounded when you first heard it and what your state of mind was at the time.
It was a Saturday night in 1956 (I think), and my older brother and I were watching the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey show on TV. Elvis Presley, whom we had both never heard of, sings “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Johnny Cash sings “I Walk the Line” on another show.
The Diamonds “Litle Darlin’,” probably on American Bandstand; and “A Teenager in Love” (Dion and the Belmonts, who were — how would I have known it then? — from the Bronx, a place I never heard of.).
Richie Valens “Oh, Donna.” Such direct emotion, which I could only experience vicariously then
In junior high, in the lunchroom, there is dancing. Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder.” Kids dancing close.
I am in the sixth grade in our barbershop on Mass Ave. An Elvis song is playing on the radio: “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” If only I could be another Elvis.
I am transported back fully to my state of mind as a preteen at the Agassiz School in Cambridge, and our house near Harvard Square. My emotions, then, my “worldview” (such as it was), my yearnings.
When I went to a Pat Boone movie in Harvard Square and heard him sing the tacky song “April Love” and flip hamburgers in a cookout scene while wearing a chef’s hat (and crooning). Me in my bedroom in Cambridge hearing Pat Boone’s hit “I Almost Lost My Mind” on the radio over and over again. I was doing something like playing a card or board game with myself or flipping through magazines — Sport magazine (not to be confused with Sports Illustrated) was a favorite of mine. Also fan magazines about Elvis and other rock stars which I bought at the Montrose Spa on Mass Ave.
The teen (and preteen) emotions we had.
The things that excited us.
Music brings it all back.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
June 2025
Roger Smith, Cambridge, MA, 1957
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