How the ballads of our youth are, in memory, merged into the personality of those who sang them! How, as we recall the simple rhymes, the sweet voices of departed friends clothe them in melody. The songs of my early years come to me to-day with more freshness than the songs I heard yesterday, and with them come more vividly to mind the voices and faces of those long-gone friends than come the faces of those of to-day.
How many of us can recall “Blue-eyed Mary”? the little ballad with which my mother always quieted me to rest. The pitiful little song! And in my childhood days, too, mammy rocked me to sleep with “Ole Grimes is daid, dat good ole man.” I never hear “Blue-eyed Mary” or “Old Grimes” now, nor have I for more than threescore years and ten, they are both so buried in oblivion, though I can repeat every word of each, they were so nestled and rocked into my baby life.
When my father’s home was on Customhouse Street Duncan Hennen lived directly opposite. Mrs. Hennen was a dashing beauty. She had a sister from Tennessee visiting her, who had a powerful voice, and she sang “Old Rosin the Beau” and “Life on the Ocean Wave” with all the abandon of a professional. My father admired her style prodigiously, but my mother thought it too robust. “The Carrier Dove—fly away to my native land, sweet dove,” and “Twilight Dews,” she pronounced more ladylike. (How often we used that word “ladylike.” We rarely hear it now.) I must have been a very small “little girl” when I heard Wallace, in concert, sing “The Old Arm Chair.” No one since Wallace ever sung that touching, homely ballad so beautifully. Once having heard his sympathetic rendering, one always associates the song with William Wallace.
I think it has been full sixty years since that song and “Farewell to Tom Moore,” by Byron, have been heard. And “Twilight Dews,” oh, my! and “Shells of the Ocean”—“One summer’s day in pensive thought,” etc. Young girls played their accompaniments and tossed their ringlets and sang those ditties to enraptured swains, who often stood back of them, holding the candle at the proper angle and turning the leaves! How it all comes back to this dreaming old lady, who never sang, but who dearly loved to listen to her more gifted friends....
In the Cajin settlement on the border of which I occasionally visited there was a family of Lafitons—I boldly give the name, for the two sons, Lafiton fils and Pete, never married, and all the family died years and years ago, but there was a lovely sprig of a girl, Amenaide, who possessed a fine voice and no doubt would have made her mark if she had had the necessary training, but she was one of the flowers “born to blush unseen.” I don’t think she knew one note of music. Of course, a guitar, much more a piano, was beyond her reach. She sang the sweet old French melody, “Fleuve du Tage,” delightfully. I wonder now where she ever heard it. For years after when I heard the song Amenaide rose before me, and with her the impression that she was not equaled.
There was another touching little ballad, in the days that were, “We Have Been Friends Together,” and that tender “Good-by,” who ever sings them now? Nobody, unless it be some old lady with quavering voice, who sings them in her heart while she dreams of the sweet girls of “Long, long ago” who have vanished.
“I Cannot Sing the Old Songs,” and “When Stars Are in the Quiet Skies” were two of the songs we loved to hear in the days before “Dixie” and “The Volunteer” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” captured the voices of so many of our sweet singers.
Some of us remember Mollie Haynes, who became the wife of Col. Charles D. Dreux, and none can recall her charming personality without a thought of the superb voice she possessed. “Ave Maria, Ora Pro Nobis”—none that I knew could render that prayerful melody with the pathos of Mollie Dreux. We all remember that Col. Dreux was the first Confederate officer from Louisiana who fell in battle, and no subsequent funeral was more largely attended than was Charles Dreux’s. “Joys That We’ve Tasted” brings to mind a popular singer in the “Long Time Ago,” Mrs. George D. Prentice, of Kentucky. How the names and the very people come thronging my mind as I recall these old melodies in which they are associated.
A few years since, listening to the well-trained voice of a professional, as she rendered some intricate, superlative kind of music, that did not in the least appeal to me, I ventured to ask if she would favor us with “Ben Bolt.” She graciously consented. And she rendered that simple old ballad that every child whistled or hummed when I was a child, with so many trills and bravuras, and I don’t know what else in the vocal line, that I was lost in amazement. Svengali himself could not have idealized to the same extent. Poor “Sweet Alice” was buried under such an avalanche of sound that one could not recognize the “corner, obscure and alone,” where she was supposed to rest under a “slab of granite so gray.”