Those Silly Love Songs

The summer of 1976. It was half a century ago – can you believe it? – but in some ways, it feels like only yesterday. The Montreal Olympics were underway, although 29 African countries boycotted that year’s games in protest because New Zealand’s rugby team had toured South Africa, which was still governed by the oppressive apartheid regime – and would be for another 18 years. Bruce Jenner won the gold medal in the men’s decathalon – and tabloid readers have been paying for it ever since. The Concorde had begun transatlantic flights at supersonic speed and, six years after landing on the moon, two NASA landers successfully touched down on Mars

The United States was celebrating its bicentennial – a much better celebration than this year’s sad spectacle – and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were the major party nominees in the presidential election that year. Along the way, while competing for the Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan announced that a liberal senator, Richard Schweiker, would have been his vice-presidential pick if he had claimed the nomination, a reminder that there was a quaint time when neither major party was captive to ideologues. Iceland and Britain had only recently reached a truce ending the Third Cod War over the extent of Iceland’s territorial limits and Sudan recorded the world’s first known Ebola outbreak and Legionaire’s disease made its first appearance, too. Here in Canada, the CN Tower opened in Toronto. The Eurovision Song Contest was won by the Brotherhood of Man, who had already achieved fame for the serious song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” (As I recall, my brother moved to the West Coast that year, and my sister played that song over and over and over again.) The Apple Computer Company was founded in March by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, while the Price Club, predecessor to Costco, launched operations – not in Seattle, but California – although few people really noticed either company. It was quite a year – and these are only the highlights.

And me? I was in love. A gangly, goofy sixteen-year-old with long, curly hair, I was dating an older women who would eventually become my wife, but who knew at the time? Cindy and I had been an item since March, when her twin sister had orchestrated a date for us, since I had been given not one, but two tickets to a Valdy concert on my birthday. My future sister-in-law didn’t want me to have to go alone, or worse yet, take someone she didn’t like. But Summer romances have a way of falling with the leaves of autumn, so we couldn’t have known – couldn’t even have imagined – that we would still be together all these years later. And in what may have been an omen for young lovers, Elton John and Kiki Dee released their duet, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” She didn’t, although she once came close before I reformed myself.

If we all had been sitting around together half a century ago, not here at church but lounging on the deck or sitting around a campfire in the summer of that year, listening to the radio, chances are we would have heard the band Wings with Paul and Linda McCartney singing “Silly Love Songs.” The song was released just after Cindy and I began dating, and it reached the top of the charts by summer, become Billboard’s number one song for the year. You remember it, don’t you? – If you were there?

        “You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs
        But I look around me and I see it isn't so
        Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs
        And what's wrong with that?
        I’d like to know.
        ’Cause here I go – again.”

McCartney later admitted that the song was a reaction to critics’ (and even John Lennon’s) dismissal of him as the creator of soppy, sentimental love songs. “I thought, well, I know what they mean, but, people have been doing love songs forever,” he said. “I like ’em, other people like ’em, and there’s a lot of people I love – I'm lucky enough to have that in my life. So the idea was that ‘you’ may call them silly, but what's wrong with that?” McCartney had the last laugh, though – “Silly Love Songs” was his 27th number one hit. As the song itself proclaims, “Love isn’t silly at all.”

Most people’s musical tastes evolve over the course of a lifetime, but love is a common theme in most, if not all genres of music. Our earliest musical memories are populated with playful, childhood melodies – lyrical fairy tales, counting songs, and songs meant to teach us. But love is there. After all, “Skinnamarink a dink a dink, / Skinnamarink a doo, / I love you.” As we grow towards maturity, whether or not we actually make it, our tastes become more refined and discriminating – or not! – and we embrace the music that speaks to our personal experiences. As teenagers, we may bop along to popular music, expressing our joy, or find ourselves drawn to punk, expressing our contempt for the status quo. As the punk band Chumbawamba sings in their hit, Tubthumbing:

        “Truth is, I thought it mattered,
        I thought that music mattered.
        But does it? Bollocks –
        Not compared to how people matter.”

If you were raised in the church – well, most churches, not necessarily this one – you will be familiar with the varied hymns of faith, hope, and love – yes, love – remembering that the apostle Paul noted that “the greatest of these is love,” and that the Bible itself proclaims that “God is love.” There’s nothing silly about either assertion. Indeed, they are among the most profound assertions of the Christian tradition, which has lost its way these days, as increasing numbers of so-called Christian nationalists proclaim a false gospel of hatred and indifference, prosperity and populism, when love was always meant to be the thing about the teachings of Jesus.

Country music is legendary for its love songs, of course, and it’s hard to name a country artist whose repertoire doesn’t lean heavily on songs of love and betrayal, romance and relationships. Some people may mock these songs, but countless more sing along, whether their hearts are bursting or broken. And they reveal more about everyday life than the volumes of supposedly more serious compositions.

My own tastes in music are eclectic – and they always have been. My strongest preference is towards folk music, even though it can be difficult to define exactly what qualifies as folk music, although I’m inclined to define it as music that tells a story about the common people. And I was raised on protest songs that have had a much stronger influence on my politics and ethics than I sometimes realize. I learned to sing my values before I was clear about what they even were – and when I feel the twinge of conscience, there’s often a folksong behind it.

I also love classical music – the great symphonies and sonatas – and choral music, both sacred and secular. These are genres that would typically be described as serious music, although there can be traces of silliness at times, especially when a choir is feeling playful. Most of the things I recall from the summer of 1976 lend themselves to serious tunes, although some might be better captured in folk, and the occasional love song. But love songs can be silly or serious.

When my mother died, I selected John Denver’s song, Perhaps Love, as one of the musical pieces for her memorial service, which was performed by a duet of my younger daughter’s classmates which included the grandson of a man whose butcher shop Mom had patronized since the 1940s, which added even more meaning to the selection. As the name declares, it is a love song – not a silly love song, perhaps, but a love song nonetheless.

        “Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm.
        It exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm,
        And in those times of trouble when you are most alone,
        The memory of love will bring you home.”

And, as it happens, a love song is better than a “love sermon.” (I’m aware of only one of the latter.) I suppose that’s probably true about everything concerning love – love stories, love poems, love letters – they all trump love sermons. But that didn’t stop me from preaching a love sermon, “Faithfully Ever After,” when Cindy’s and my 18th anniversary fell on the first Sunday in June many years ago. I’ve always feared that Cindy was more embarrassed than impressed, so I’ve never dared to do it again, but that’s the way it goes.

I was inspired by a song by Jim Crocé:

        “Well, I know it's kinda late,
        I hope I didn't wake you.
        But what I gotta say can't wait.
        I know you'd understand.
        Every time I tried to tell you,
        The words just came out wrong:
        So I'll have to say I love you in a song.

From medieval tales of chivalry to the latest romantic film, love (and its heartfelt songs) still makes the world go round. And the love song is arguably the most enduring music of all.

At the end of the musical drama Adam Rush, the story of an 11-year-old who was separated from his parents at birth, which leaves a hole in the heart of all three, and who proves to be a musical prodigy, reflects on how music enriched the lives of each of them, eventually reuniting them in a fantastic but moving scene:

“I believe in music the way that some people believe in fairy tales,” he says. “I like to imagine that what I hear came from my mother and father. Maybe the notes I hear are the same ones they heard the night they met. Maybe that's how they found each other. Maybe that’s how they’ll find me. I believe that once upon a time, long ago, they heard the music and followed it.”

As Peggy Noonan observes: “We’re locked in a funny arc ... When you are goony and fourteen years old you think the most important thing in life is love. Then you mature, become more sober and thoughtful … And then you get old and realize … the most important thing in life is love.” That truth is reflected in the songs we sing, for I believe that we sang like the birds before we learned to speak, that language was born in our hearts before it entered it minds, and that love songs – silly or otherwise – still represents the most meaningful music to human beings. We were born to love. We were born to sing. And our songs echo the gladness of our days.

A sermon delivered at the Gimli Unitarian Church.

Work Cited

Peggy Noonan, Simply Speaking (1998).