Our mentors are against singing. “Sing in the morning, you’ll sob before evening,” says one. “Sing on a Friday, you’ll weep on the Sunday,” says the Catholic. Children sing naturally and exuberantly on any and all occasions, but father and mother and elder brother and uncle and friend cannot bear it. Send them to the garden, send them to the nursery! We so dislike random singing that we pay street musicians—to go away, and they have learned that bad singing brings more coppers than their better efforts. They are professional irritants.
Yet singing is very natural, and when one takes to the road the singing impulse comes to the bosom. Light-heartedness begets song. We sing as we walk, we walk as we sing, and the kilometers fall behind. After a long spell of the forced habit of not singing one finds oneself accidentally singing, and there is surprise. Good Heavens! I’m singing. And singing what? Not the latest song, by any means, but something remembered from childhood and school days, the happy innocent strains of days gone by. Songs give birth to songs, memories to memories. The ear and the heart explore the lost repertoire of music. You sing all the old songs you ever knew, and snatches of this, snatches of that, still-remembered fragments of melody, tunes heard God knows where. The voice glides from one thing to another in a rhapsody of open-air happiness. It is singing of freedom, of escape, of absence of care and anxiety, of beauty. “Sing me a song of a lad that is gone”—it is singing that song over and over again on never-tiring ears. “Say, could that lad be I?”—it is asking the question, and your light heart is answering, “Yes, yes, that lad was I. The tiresome somber fellow who worked in a town was not I. I was imprisoned in him. Now I am free and I sing.”
At first it does not matter what you sing. You sing some old love song of the heart, some hymn by which your mother once sang you to sleep, some boy’s song, sung on the way to school or some “Promise of Life,” some learned song, once lisped over the shoulder of a young girl at the piano, some haunting ballad or lyric out of the Celtic twilight, or some lilting country air of an English countryside. Absurdly you stamp it out as you walk:
Oh, let the night be ever so dark
And never so wet and wine-dy,
I must have a will and turn back again
To the girl I left behind me.
And while you are going forward you are really going back, and there is a girl waiting for you ahead on your track—the playmate girl of Nature whom you did once leave behind. You sing as you go to her. You drift from old English songs to Negro minstrelsy, and still—it is some one waiting for you, praying for you. She is waiting for you “there by the door, in oh-old Singapore.” Somewhere there is a “corn-fed bride”—where the black-eyed Susans grow. You shift to operetta and to the reveries of opera, especially in the evenings, to serenades, to boat songs and songs about stars and fair women’s eyes.
“Sing in the morning and you will sing all day,” say I. “Sing on a Friday and you will sing better on Sunday.” You shall sing by the camp fire in the morning, and sing as you dip in the stream, sing as you climb the rugged mountain road, sing yourself to noontide and the pass, like a lark rising upward in sheer joy of living. You shall sing of home as you descend in the afternoon, and sing in the dark under the night sky by your fading fire. What is a tramping day if it does not liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky.
A slightly different temperament achieves the same happiness reciting poetry, repeating every verse ever conned for love of thought or sound. This is singing of a kind. Songs heard are sweet, but the unheard may be sweeter. The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by song. And the inner meaning and sense of a poem becomes one’s own on the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the hidden yearnings of one’s own being.