From the Relief Society Magazine, August 1949 –

Words and Music

By Bernice Brown

I like to sing. You like to sing. Everybody likes to sing. Yet how seldom we realize the power in the strains of an old refrain.

Songs can evoke half-forgotten memories and touch the emotions. But most of all they can heal old wounds between friends and perhaps between nations.

Let me tell you what happened to me and see if you don’t agree that people should talk less and sing more.

Shortly after the ink was dry on the documenting ending the last hostility, I found myself a somewhat unwilling guest in a German home, all because this particular family had a remote connection with friends of mine back home in America.

It was a raw, February night, damp, cold, and cheerless. Sad to relate, it was the same kind of night inside as it was outside.

There was more than a slight chill in the room, both in atmosphere and conversation. Fuel was at a premium then. Most of it was obtained by going to where it grew, cutting it down and dragging it back to the hearthside. As this was now a household of women, this was a far from simple procedure.

The mother, an intelligent, well-educated woman, had just returned from a day spent on hands and knees, scrubbing out certain United States army villas.

The sight of me, well-fed and resplendent in khaki, brought distaste, not welcome to her eyes.

Her teen-age daughter and young son extended to me the same warmth they would have to a coiled cobra. The good lady’s sister-in-law tried valiantly to be unaware of my presence.

The head of this household didn’t greet me either. He was still a prisoner of war in England.

I didn’t shower them with any pink tea manners! To my mind, they deserved their misery, and I was pleased to see they were not enjoying it.

With such a Christian attitude afloat in the room, aided by my inability to say more than the simplest sentence in German, it is small wonder the evening didn’t degenerate into a small hairpull, if not a large war.

It would have, too, except that the daughter, finding no solace in my company, walked over to the piano and began strumming idly on the keys.

By chance, she picked a melody as dear to me as it was to her, an ageless folk tune, hummed as much on my side of the Atlantic as it was on hers. Softly, she began singing the words in German.

Refusing to be daunted, I warmed up my vocal chords on the Yankee version of the same. From a technical standpoint, it wound horrible. But it broke a lot of ice. Soon, everyone was clustered around the piano. The two alien tongues.