Where-oh-where did the summer go???

It is gone toooooooo fast.  There were so many more little pool parties and popsicle treats to enjoy with the grandbebes.  Of the 8, the first 5 are all in school now, again (or for the first time).

Hunter walking in to 3rd grade…Tara posted this, she has homeschooled him until now.  Big change!

Gavin is a 5th grader, which makes him a full-fledged “middle-schooler” with a locker!  My little man is growing up on me!  Guinivere and Hunter are in third grade this year and Gemma goes all day now, a first grader.  Averi is an official school girl, she is in Kindergarten and I sure miss having pre-school with her!

Hearing my daughters plan and talk about all the school supplies lists and routines and buying new clothes and uniforms and having to get kids to bed because it’s a school night now got me thinking of all the music that has been written about school over the years.  There must be thousands of songs, but I thought I’d pick my favorites for a BACK-TO-SCHOOL TOP TEN playlist  (not in order of my love for them, just as they came to me)~

1. To Sir with Love, Lulu // This song is from a movie with the same name (starring Sidney Poitier in 1967) and I have loved it since I saw it as a child.  It’s pouffy hair and frosted lipstick, dark eyeliner and blue-eyeshadow.  It is all the strong feelings a young girl has, poured out in song.  LOVE!
2. My Eyes Adored You, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons // If you could have known the 1974 me, the one who was in love with love, for whom each and every song had profound meaning…well, yea.  Then you’d know that the junior-high me was in love with this song and daydreaming about some boy who would someday say, “I loved you way back when….”  Haha.  Such a pretty and sweet song, though, really.
3. Coat of Many Colors, Dottie Parton // You have to listen to this one to see how many words that woman can get into a song.  And it actually charted, in part, I think, because everyone can relate to being made fun of in school over something or another.  Kids at school can be cruel.  My mom made me a dress from old kitchen curtains once.  I still haven’t written a song about it, though.
4. I Wish, Stevie Wonder // Part of my Hammond High School, fish-out-of-water, Iowa girl in Louisiana story soundtrack, is characterized by the Songs in the Key of Life 2-album set by Stevie Wonder.  Still one of my favorites, this song was fun. to. sing!  I was going to school with the boy in the song, I am certain of it!
5. Harper Valley PTA, Jeanne C. Riley // As story songs go, this has got to be one of the best!  I was in 3rd grade and couldn’t get enough of hearing it.  That was one sexy mama!
6. Spiders and Snakes, Jim Stafford // Um, yes – the boys I knew during junior high were at about this level.
7. Check Yes or No, George Strait // Do you like me?  Check yes, or no….Aw, sweet.  A little country tune about 3rd grade love that lasts!
8. Crayola Doesn’t Make a Color for Your Eyes, Kristen Andreassen // I just happened across this one a few years ago and like to sing it to my grandbebes.  The video takes place in a 2nd grade school room.  It is a happy tune and so appropriate for going back to school!
9. Teacher’s Pet  (Doris Day) // So, in light of all the weird student-teacher relationships that hit the news these days, a bit of the innocence of this song is gone, long gone!  And while the original movie (Teacher’s Pet, 1958) with Doris Day and Clark Gable was sweet, the Waiting for Guffman movie (1996) audition scene with Parker Posie hilariously takes this song down the slippery slope of ickiness.  But it sure is memorable.  I have included Doris, whose uprightness and purity in the singing are unquestionable!
10. ABC, The Jackson 5 // The very first song on my iTunes song list, I can actually remember where I was sitting in my 4th grade class on bring-a-record day at Wallace Elementary School in Des Moines the first time I heard this glory.  The sun was shining through the windows, a whole new world was opening up to me – this Michael Jackson had dawned – oh my goodness, it was historic – LOVE!!!

8 Songs that didn’t quite make my cut:  Back to School Again, from Grease 2 because I really liked Grease, the first movie, better;  Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd because even as a teenager when it was charting, I felt a pang of weirdness at the blatant rebelliousness of it.  I was trying to conquer rebellion, conquer it!;  Getting Better, The Beatles, and again, a little rebellious and also that psychedelic sound that I think you had to be high to really appreciate, and I wasn’t; See You in September by The Happenings is a very classic song, but it didn’t make the list because it’s a little too easy listening for even me, :) ; Graduation Day, The Beach Boys because it is about graduating from school, not going back to school;  Class of ’57 by The Statler Brothers which I have actually always loved because it is the year my mom graduated, but it is more about graduation, too;  Schoolboy Crush, Cliff Richard and the Drifters because even though I love Cliff Richard, doo-wop isn’t my thing; Teach Me Tonight by Etta James or lots of other artists who have recorded it because I have pictures of my grandbebes in this post!  Too sultry!  School of Rock by Jack Black is an awesome song, but had to get cut because I was keeping my list at 10!  I love watching the movie with my grands, though because he is cute and hilarious and kids get him – I guess because he is a big kid.  The giggling is contagious!

The K-kids, first day of school

There you have it.  GET SPOTIFY to hear them all!!!

There are SO many songs.  Which school-themed songs did I miss?  Which ones belonged on my list?  Is everyone back to school at your house?

Dave hauled these in from the cassette graveyard-mausoleum, also known as the garage: two heavy-duty totes filled at least 2/3 the way up with old cassettes.  Yes, cassettes!

Why do we have them, you wonder?

I have no answer.  Except to say that when we moved to this house, we actually did still use some of them, along with our growing CD collection.  Most of our “players” at that time played both CD and cassette – remember that?  It was more than 10 years ago and honestly, we had already thinned it out when we moved – gotten rid of tons of soundtracks (from our church-performance singing days, haha) and many other cassettes.  We felt we had organized to the bare essentials…apparently not, though.

As one by one, cassette players broke down or got sold in a former car or two and as we started buying CDs exclusively, Dave just put them in these totes “for later.”

The other day he hauled them in, hooked up an old stereo cassette player he found hiding in the garage rafters to the surround sound and told me to have fun.

I have the Bee Gees and multiple Kenny Rogers tapes, Deniece Williams, The Rocky Soundtracks (“Eye of the Tiger”),  Michael Jackson, Elvis,1980s mixed tapes, 1970s mixed tapes, tons more performance soundtracks (everything from Sandi Patti to Brittany Spears and back, but mostly Christian or wedding-type), kid’s worship tapes and Sunday School songs, many Christian artists like Reba Rambo and Steven Curtis Chapman, Carmen (of course!) and lots of the old Hosannas! Integrity worship recordings from the 80s when they had that $4.99-each tape-of-the-month club deal.  I was a charter member!  :)

I have preaching tapes, oh boy, do I have preaching tapes.  There are tapes of my dad, my brother Tim, my brother, Joe, Coach McCartney and other Promise Keeper types, James Ryle, James Robison, my husband,  some sermon-of-the-month tapes including Jack Hayford’s (my all-time favorite) “Instructed in the Song of the Lord.”

There may even be tapes of me speaking.  I know there are some of me singing with a Catholic group I was in (Parousia) back in the day.  Dave was in the college group, Chara and before that here in Denver with The Gospel Lights and we have tape of them.

There are health and diet tapes, work-out tapes, Word of Faith tapes from the 1970s with people like Kenneth Hagin (Dave brought these to the marriage) and Marilyn Hickey before she was known around the world (kept them purely for the historical value).  We have books on tape (Louis L’Amor and O. Henry, to name a couple).  There are tapes that were taped over and crossed out so much I don’t know what is on them.  There are “keepsake” tapes like the recording I did for Sacred Heart Academy (my first studio experience), “In the Sacred Heart of Jesus” and a whole bunch of cassettes of my children when they were young.  Some I captured as they were babies, cooing and being sweet.  Others were them, as they got older and loved to tape over EVERTHING to create radio shows and do interviews and just them being silly. I cannot wait to dig into those and listen!

Oh but some…yikes, might have been better never found.  There is this one of Dave and I singing at the church in Kokomo and ya know – it was the day of Sandi Patti trilling all the way to an octave and half above high C.  I was a low-voiced girl, better suited to Karen Carpenter’s range, or Anne Murray, or even Amy Grant.  Oh, but Sandi was all the rage so I had to do it, didn’t I?  Oh-horrible, painful, awful to listen to.  Ugh!

What the heck will I do with all of these cassette tapes?

Oh my.  Well, I will get rid of many-many-many of them.  But I will also make sure that the ones I find with music I cannot live without is still available on iTunes.  If not, I will digitize them.  And of course, I will digitize all of the ones with my kids and other keepsake-types (a recording of my sister in her college touring group, let’s say).  I will digitize anything with my father’s voice and powerful words, of course.  I will sort and decide…sort and decide…at some point I will probably get overwhelmed and want to throw it all away all at once.  But instead, will place what stays for the time being back in the cassette-casket for another day.

But I do have some special plans for a lot of those old performance soundtracks (what we would now call “karaoke”).  Oh yes!

Before getting rid of them, I am calling the family together and we are going to hook up the sound system and sing!  Oh yes we are.  Do not try to argue with me about this, kiddos.   I found “Testify!”  Hahhahaha.  Early 90s…everytime we visited a different church, it was always requested for the Rhoades family to come up and sing.  :p  Can you imagine?  Dave and Jeanie (big, red, sparkly hair – to signify the “anointing,” I have to laugh at myself) and 5 little ones, ages 5-12 or 13 singing loudly:

I wanna testify, I wanna testify

What the Lord has done for me – He set my spirit free

He has made me whole, put joy down in my soul

I-I-I-I-I——–wanna testify!  Testify!!!

Omygoodness.  Yes, that is one of the things I will be doing with these historical relics, these compact little pieces of my history.

With so many hundreds of cassettes surrounding me, you’d probably be surprised to know there are some I remember that are gone, lost, and I can never replace.  These shown are only a fraction of all that Dave and I owned over our lifetimes (I got my first cassette recorder for Christmas when I was 14, for goodness’ sake) and only recently, I had been collecting cassette images for a new little thing for this very blog (yet to be unveiled).  The time is right to remember.

Do you know why these two things go together?

We used to listen to cassettes.  We did.   Remember?…