I was recently going through an old box of books and came across something I had bought many, many years ago and barely used.  It’s The Autobiography Box by Brian Bouldrey.  It comes with a little “Owner’s Manual” and a stack of cards designed to prompt you to help write your autobiography.  It’s cute, it’s fun, it’s a little kitschy – but as I was going through the box, I can across one card that immediately jumped out at me.

Is there a piece of music that reminds you of a particular time and place in your life?

It’s funny because my family is not a particularly musically inclined family, but there are certain songs, albums, bands that defined my childhood.  It’s also a rather odd collection of artists, which may account for my rather wide-ranging taste in music today.

1.  John Denver 

I can still sing every word of Take Me Home, Country Roads by heart.  My mother loved John Denver and she played his music all the time.  In fact she even had an album of duets by John Denver and Placido Domingo that met a very untimely death on a California freeway.  My father swears to this day it was an accident, but my mother always maintained that it was music homicide…  Hearing a John Denver song on the radio, or in a store, brings back such strong emotional memories of my mother that it will stop me in my tracks and bring me to tears.  Perhaps my personal favorite of John Denver’s songs was Grandma’s Feather Bed, because the image of a bed “nine feet high and six feet wide” filled with “eight kids, four hound dogs and a piggy we stole from the shed” made me giggle.

It was nine feet high and six feet wide
Soft as a downy chick
It was made from the feathers of forty’leven geese
Took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick
It’d hold eight kids, four hound dogs
And a piggy we stole from the shed
We didn’t get much sleep but we had a lot of fun
On Grandma’s feather bed

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