How Has Music Affected My Life

As a child it was music and music alone that could bring my sisters and me together without fighting. We'd sit in the back seat of our car on those long Sunday night drives back from the beach and sing. Mainly camp songs like "Tell Me Why" and "The Ash Grove", but also the songs my Dad liked to sing like "Stormy Weather" and "Sweet Georgia Brown." The only problem came when my older sister Carolyn would insist we sing rounds and expected me to hold my own part. Even having my little sister Miss Em sing along with me didn't help. I always lost it and slid into Carolyn's part. Very symbolic, actually, as she had great power over me in those early years, or so I thought.

My father had wanted to be a singer. He had a beautiful tenor voice, but in the years I knew him, Jimmy Lay only sang for his family. According to the family story, when he was in college my Dad had gone up to the famous singer Perry Como after a concert and asked him if he thought my Dad should try to become a professional singer. Mr. Como said no, it was too hard a life. Besides, he said, so few ever make it. So Dad gave up his dream and got his degree in electrical engineering instead. But he always had an appreciative audience in my sisters and me, especially when he'd sing "Stormy Weather" accompanying himself on the ukulele.

So music--singing in particular--was at the heart of my life at the beginning. But through one thing and another, I lost it for a long while. Part of that was the result of a sixth grade music teacher who made me leave the soprano section in our school choir when my voice changed. I don't remember the particulars except I do remember the feelings this "demotion" engendered: I was mortified. So much so that I stopped singing, in public anyway, for the next 30 years.

In the mid-80s I joined a black inner-city church and almost immediately joined the choir. Except for one nun, I was the only white member of this small gospel choir. They used to tease me and say I'd better take off my shoes and grab hold with my toes or else I was going to levitate right off the ground. That gospel music really did something to me. Actually it touched such a deep chord that I finally figured out it must have gone back to the first six months of my life when we had a black nanny and I was her baby. It was as if I already knew all these songs in my heart because she had sung them to me as I rested in her arms. It was music that brought back these memories.

In the early 90s I left the world of church and entered the world of women. Feminism was no longer a concept; it was an undeniable force. And then a woman named Carolyn McDade came into my life. A singer/songwriter from Cape Cod who sang of, to and for women. I "happened" to attend a concert given by this gentle-spoken, power-filled woman on a Friday evening in Windsor, Ontario in March 1993, and awoke at 4 AM the next morning knowing that I just HAD to be at the workshop she was giving that day. Through the graciousness of the Universe, I found the workshop and spent much of the day in tears. Her song that starts, "No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself," opened floodgates in my woman-soul. And those open floodgates ushered in a totally new way of being in the world.

For ten years now I have sung with Carolyn McDade and women who love her music...in Notable Women chorus, in annual retreats, and for the past year in the O Beautiful Gaia CD project. Singing with Carolyn led me on a path of song, a path that took me to San Francisco for six winters, during three of which I sang with the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco. Then back I came to Detroit for the winter of 2002-2003 during which I co-founded a group called the Raging Grannies Without Borders.

Singing with this gaggle--one of eighty around the world--of older women activists who create their own satirical, often humorous, politically-inspired lyrics to old familiar tunes has allowed me to bring together so much of who I am: an activist who must take to the streets in pursuit of peace and justice; a songwriter whose love is writing lyrics to someone else's tunes; a woman who feels more comfortable singing than doing almost anything else; a "ham" who loves to dress up and be the center of attention (the Grannies dress in flamboyant hats, aprons and shawls); and a woman who loves to be in community with other women.

So have I answered the question,"How has music affected my life?" In a nutshell I'd say that music--singing, in particular--is who I am. I cannot imagine life without it; nor would I want to live a life without it. It is the language of my soul.

Patricia Lay-Dorsey
Detroit, Michigan, USA
October 2, 2003