Foreword

Summary

When I first read the last draft of Judith Tick's biography of my mother, I was in tears—tears of compassion and rage: compassion for my mother's battle to combine music and motherhood, and anger because she had died so very soon, before I had grown up enough to regard her as my comrade. She died when I was 18 and even had we known each other better at that time it is possible that my youth would have made complete understanding impossible. Children have a way of avoiding knowing their parents until they have gone from home or had children themselves. So now, at age 65, with a life behind me that much resembles my mother's as regards combining children with a creative musical talent, I have come to understand how difficult it must have been for her even to find time (much less concentration) to write this magnificent dissertation. In financial straits and with four children, she spent most of her time mothering and teaching piano. The transcribing was, of course, paid work—but I doubt that those who commissioned her to do that work counted on such a production as this. They probably wanted a simple reduction of the tune, a suggestion, a soupçon—that was the way things were (and are) done in most songbooks. They didn't know that Ruth Crawford Seeger was a perfectionist and that her main goal was to write down the tune exactly as she heard it.

Our house was run like a military campaign but it echoed with love, clean clothes, good food, freedom, and evenings of singing. Music was always playing somewhere in the house. Dio (as we called her) was always busy, always busy—and whether it was mending, cleaning the refrigerator out, or transcribing Bad Bad Girl, it was done meticulously. She’d put the needle down on the record, play a phrase and then lift it up again. Scribble something. Then the same line again. And again. And again. Scribble scribble. Very frustrating if you’re six years old and want to hear the rest of the song. She’d sing Groundhog to us while we were running clothes through the old manual wringer or Hanging Out the Linen Clothes while pinning the sheets up on the big rack in the cellar.