Nana sent me a CD.  It’s of the family-compiled variety, and the first track on it is “The Dream Man’s Train,” a song with a provenance unlike any other I know.  My great-grandmother (Granny Pat) used to sing it to us kids as kind of a lullaby, and Nana tells me that Granny’s mother passed it down to her, but that’s where our information stops.  It’s a robust tune with multiple verses, but beyond our family’s history with the song we don’t know where it originated.  It’s a treasured part of the family history, and Granny died in the early 1980s, so it’s significant for us to have this recording of her singing.

Also on the CD are many other tunes and spoken word pieces of the “children get a hold of a tape recorder” variety.  My sisters and I used to love to sing into a tape recorder – I’ve written before on the musical nature of my childhood; we sang all the time!  While I don’t remember ever really having rock star ambitions, this disc would have you believe otherwise.  Once I got past the initial blush – similar to the embarrassment faced by teenagers as bathtub pics come out when they begin dating – I began to be so happy to have some musical memories from the distant past preserved for posterity.

The CD is a quite a stroll down memory lane, and I’m grateful to Nana for going to the trouble to send it to me.  I think we might owe the creation of the CD at least in part to my brother-in-law, who likely served as the audio engineer for the project probably ten or more years ago.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan