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Hiding in plain sight
I’ve fallen for two ladies recently, a singer and a novelist. And the thing is, I’ve known of both of them for a long time, but ignored them. They were hiding in plain sight.
The singer is Dionne Warwick. I first heard her in the early 1960s, when I resented her appearance on the British television show Top of the Pops because her middle-of-the-road music—represented by tunes such as Walk On By—was taking away the time available to hear exciting musicians like Freddie and the Dreamers and Gerry and the Pacemakers. And her melodies weren’t very, well, melodic.
Fast forward some 50 years plus and you discover me working in an amateur band with a mixed pop music repertoire. And my favourite piece among them? None other than that self-same song, Walk on By: it’s fun to play, the tune stays in my head and I now find it quite melodic. In fact, I’ve taken to Dionne Warwick so much that we are currently in the process of learning Always Something There To Remind Me, originally sung by Warwick in 1963. Maybe the next song we’ll learn will be another Warwick piece—something like I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, or Do You Know The Way to San Jose?. At this rate, in another seven or eight years we’ll have transformed ourselves into a Dionne Warwick tribute band, although we haven’t got the chops to be able to match her standards, and we aren’t lookalikes.
I appreciate that this makes me something of a latecomer to the party; Warwick is the second most charted female singer after Aretha Franklin.
Of course, part and parcel of this new appreciation of Warwick are the songwriters, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who brought their quirky style to most of her hits as well as hits by other artists, such as Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head sung by B.J. Thomas. (Our band plays that one too). Did you know that in his early career, Bacharach was music director for Marlene Dietrich? And did you know that Warwick’s career took off after Bacharach heard her as a background singer as the Drifters recorded the song Mexican Divorce?
The novelist I’ve discovered recently is the American writer Anne Tyler. Again, this is not a personal accomplishment: the world has been reading her novels since the 1970s, and my wife has been singing her praises to me ever since the 1980s, when Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons and her novel The Accidental Tourist was made into a movie. She has amassed an output of some 22 novels, the most recent of which, Clock Dance, has just been published. One look at Tyler’s face on the dust jacket of the book—even though it has taken on some wrinkles and grey hairs over the years—is enough to convince you that the gentle and compassionate nature of her writing is genuine.
I have my work cut out for me. Six months have gone by and I’m still only about a third of the way through her output.
I had always pooh-poohed Tyler’s work because I had heard it dwelled in the gritty detail of domestic life. Now, I read it for that very reason. Whether the character is young or old, male or female, successful or unsuccessful, Tyler manages to get into what makes him or her tick. She also accepts family life as an assortment of imperfect people, who never reach the proverbial Happy Ending, but just cope with what life throws at them and who learn to savour small positive moments.
I read a little about Tyler and learned she was raised by a Quaker family, sent her children to a Quaker school, and lived for a time in Montreal. She is also a disciplined writer who plots out the details of every character’s personality and life history before sending him or her out to do battle with the other characters she has created.
So I sheepishly acknowledge the merits of two ladies who have been hiding in plain sight from me for decades. I suppose I could write off the experience as insignificant by saying simply that tastes change. But that would be too easy. What else have I been missing out on that I should have appreciated, but dismissed as unworthy of my attention? What am I missing right now that I might belatedly appreciate in years to come? Am I too arrogant to see it? Perish the thought. Besides, even the great Dionne Warwick would have to admit that if she were me, she would have wanted to hear Freddie and the Dreamers too.
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