The Man Who Didn't Like Music

Once I asked my father what kind of music he listened to.

I expected an answer.

Everyone had music, I thought. Everyone had songs they loved, records they returned to, singers who belonged to them somehow. Even if the answer was old country or polka or classical or whatever fathers were supposed to like, I expected there to be something.

Instead he said that he didn’t really like music.

This appalled me.

Not mildly.

It confounded my whole understanding of human life.

How could someone not like music?

It seemed like saying you did not like sunlight, or food, or stories. Music was one of the obvious goods of the world. Even as a kid, I felt this. I could not imagine a person without songs in his head.

And yet there was my father, apparently claiming silence.

Except he was always singing.

Not songs exactly.

Fragments.

One-liners.

Little chorus bits that appeared at the appropriate moment like verbal tools pulled from a pocket.

If the day was long or the work was hard, there might come, in his half-sung way:

“Another day older and deeper in debt.”

If food was being made, or someone was near the stove:

“Hey, good lookin’, what you got cookin’?”

If something uncertain happened, if plans shifted, if fate shrugged:

“Que sera, sera.”

He had dozens of these. Maybe more. They surfaced constantly, but never as performance. He was not trying to entertain us in any obvious way. The songs simply came up out of him, perfectly timed, as if each phrase had been filed away for practical use.

That was his music.

Not albums.

Not concerts.

Not fandom.

A working archive of choruses.

He did not seem to “listen to music” in the way I understood it. He did not talk about favorite bands or put on records to feel a certain way. The radio, when he turned it on, was sports talk — which I absolutely did not inherit from him. The drone of stats, callers, announcers, predictions — that was his chosen background sound far more than songs were.

I could not understand it then.

Sports radio felt like all the parts of radio with the magic removed.

Where was the melody?

Where was the ache?

Where was the strange spell of a song taking over a room?

But now I wonder if he simply related to sound differently.

Music, for him, may not have been something you consumed. It was something that clung to language. Something inherited from kitchens, workplaces, radio fragments, old movies, church suppers, dinner theaters, and passing cultural weather. He carried hooks, not discographies.

And he deployed them with comic precision.

There was a kind of folk intelligence in it.

The right line for the right occasion.

A little Hank Williams at the stove.

A little Tennessee Ernie Ford in the middle of drudgery.

Doris Day as philosophy.

He had a lyric for nearly every ordinary human condition, though rarely more than one line of it.

Maybe that was all he needed.

And I think, too, of the French fragments. The Edith Piaf bits. The little chorus lines he would sing without explanation. Those were music as memory, not taste — songs lodged in him from study, travel, youth, language, some earlier self that still surfaced now and then through melody.

So perhaps he did like music.

He just did not like it as a category.

He did not organize himself around it.

He did not make identity from it.

He let it arrive when useful.

A phrase here.

A whistle there.

The musical equivalent of a pocketknife.

This seems very like him.

Practical even in song.

A whole tune would have been excessive.

One line did the job.

And maybe that is why I remember those fragments so vividly. They were attached to moments. They had context. They were not floating songs from a stereo; they were stitched into life.

A chore.

A meal.

A joke.

A sigh.

A shrug at fate.

When I hear some of those lines now, I do not first think of the original singers. I think of him.

His timing.

His dry delivery.

The way the song would appear and vanish before anyone could make too much of it.

I did not inherit sports radio.

Not even a little.

But I may have inherited something else from him: the sense that language can be sung into a moment, that a single line can hold a whole mood, that scraps of old songs can become family shorthand.

He said he didn’t really like music.

I still don’t believe him.

I think he kept it in a different cupboard.