Over Easy:The Student Song
I was a broke songwriter. Go figure. My friend Nelson got me a job picking apples on his uncle’s farm near Thornberry, Ontario, and it was exhausting but satisfying work. My coworkers were Jamaican - strong, hard-working and much better apple pickers than I was. The guys were nice to me and were remarkably tolerant of how slow I was but I wasn’t really part of their crew at first. I slept in the guest room at the main house while they were lodged in a refurbished Quonset hut. One day while I was up a tree, I started singing Sam Cooke‘s “Wonderful World“ and the reaction from my fellow pickers was pure exuberance. They clapped and sang along and encouraged repeat performances, always wanting to hear Sam Cooke songs. After that day they invited me to hang out with them after work and we became friends. I attended marathon games of dominoes, raucous physical affairs, as the triumphant player slammed the winning tile down, bouncing the entire table in the air. I remember one night watching the Miss America pageant and it was a full-on viewer participation event with cheering and booing and colourful commentary as well as things being lobbed at the TV. Thank-you Sam Cooke!
Thinking back on this story, it reminded me of the way that music connects us. .
When my daughter Rachel was born, I sang to her every night from a menu of bedtime hits, including songs like “Sweet Baby James“, “My Girl“, “Cheek to Cheek“, and “In My Life“. A favorite of hers was “Wonderful World“, which she referred to as “the student song“, in reference to the “I don’t claim to be an A student“ Bridge. It’s 25 years later and I know those songs are in her DNA and likely will be passed down when she sings to her child.
When Stephen Stohn and I traveled through Europe in 1970 in a Volkswagen van, we stayed in campsites, wrote lots of songs and had a lifetime of random encounters, mostly good. We eventually hit a dead end in the Turkish city of Samsun, located on the Black Sea, when our van seemed to be on its last legs. We nursed it along until the clutch blew out on a lonely stretch of highway between Samsun and Ankara where entire villages were made of mud. We sat by the road until a couple of rescuers stopped and offered to take us to the next town to get help. They knew a few words of German, including miraculously, the German word for clutch. Based on my grade 11 class with Mr. Schultz, I was chosen to go with them to seek out a mechanic.
After a couple of harrowing hours I did return, although I left part of myself on that Turkish backroad. My transportation was the very loosely attached sidecar of an ancient motorcycle, driven at a wildly vibrating heart-stopping speed. I pulled up in a mighty cloud of dust with my rescuer and found my pal Stephen sitting in the back of the van with the doors open to all eternity, playing guitar and singing ”Mr. Spaceman” by The Byrds for one solitary young sheep herder who seemed mesmerized. A quick fix on the clutch got us on the road to Ankara, even if it was second gear all the way. I wonder if the aging shepherd still dines out on the story of the alien invasion that we must have represented. Or does he find himself humming the melody to “Mr. Spaceman”, wondering where it came from?
Since making a new record, I’ve been delighted by the invisible thread that connects me to people who know my music. Here’s Chuck Scott’s Facebook post.
”In July of 1991 I was DP on a doc about Romania 18 months after the fall of communism. We traveled the country in an old school bus designed for tiny kids. After 8 days with little hot water or food we arrived in Bran the home of one of Vlad the Impaler’s castles. As we got off the bus I heard “Black Velvet” blasting from speakers and all these young kids were dancing to the song at a camp next to our lodgings. Every time I hear that song I am right back there. Thanks Mr. Ward for cementing a memory.”
Thanks Chuck!
