The Sound of Music – The Lonely Goatherd

Last year, a friend of mine took part in one of those album-a-day challenges on Instagram. It was 20 albums that had the most impact on your taste in music. One of the “rules” was that you would just post the album cover, no reviews or explanations offered, unless someone asks. What a waste of perfectly good blog topics! 

I had in mind to do it last year for part of NaBloPoMo but then the election happened and the world went to shit. Here we are a year later and, last week’s results aside, there is so much wreckage (including the East Wing) that I figure I might as well do it now because maybe next year will be too late.

I might post the actual album covers on Instagram and abide by those rules, but it would be so unsatisfying to not say why or how the albums influenced my musical tastes. So you’re going to get the backstory and I’m going to put them in order of when I remember first being aware/exposed to them.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. My family had the LP of the soundtrack from The Sound of Music, which came with a booklet full of pictures and details from the making of the movie. I took the booklet from my mom’s basement but left the album, which is pretty scratched up.

However, I mostly remember the 8-track tape of the soundtrack that my grandparents had. Obviously, the movie being shown on tv seasonally when I was growing up played a big part, but I have vivid memories of singing the songs in my grandparents living room with my sister when she and I were spending a week or so with them. I think I was about four years old.

How could this not have made a huge impression on me? I come from a similarly large Catholic family with nearly the same girl/boy split. My brother had a pair of lederhosen. I had two aunts who were nuns and we used to spend the occasional weekend or a couple of weeks in the summer at the convent. Nuns with guitars, it’s definitely a thing. And, when you are from a big Catholic family, there’s going to be at least a couple of variations of Mary in the girls’ names. Which one did I get? Maria.

I have seen it on the big screen twice, most recently just this past September when my daughter took me as a belated Mother’s Day present, and on TV/DVD countless times. I have been to Salzburg, where I rented a bike and took myself all over to see all the spots in the movie. I wouldn’t go on one of those sing-along bus tours because I can’t handle people spoiling my favorite things but I did take a small van tour of the surrounding countryside so I could see some of the scenery you see during the opening credits, plus the church where they filmed Maria and Captain von Trapp’s wedding. The younger sister of my best friend from high school was doing an internship with some agency that occupied the house they used as the back of the von Trapp’s house, you know the one, with the horse statues by the gate on the lake? Where Maria and the kids fall in the water in their drape playclothes in front of the Captain and the Baroness? So I finagled an invitation to be able to go and see it first hand. Ok, I did not go up into the mountains and spin around on a hill but I have been to every other location from the movie.

Not only did these songs completely set the stage for all things musical in my life but the story of this family standing up to the Nazis, and having to flee rather than agree to join them, was what I now see as a pretty strong moral guidepost. And those fantastic insults Captain von Trapp hurled at Herr Zeller. Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp was the first man I fell in love with. And Julie Andrews? She’s practically perfect in every way. Do you remember when they did that 50th anniversary tribute at the Oscars and Lady Gaga performed a medley of songs from the movie? Even she couldn’t help but copy Julie Andrews’ phrasing and pacing.

One of my sisters has a friend who said that you are either a fan of the Sound of Music or the Three Stooges. You can’t be both, they are diametrically opposed. I have to say, this feels more true today than ever. And in complete transparency, there’s definitely a tiny bit of my admiration for Elizabeth Warren that has to do with her rocking that Fräulein Maria haircut for so many years.

Sometime in the 90s when I was living at home in Maine, my mom and I took a trip up to Quebec City and on the way back we came through Vermont and stayed at the Trapp Family Lodge. My family had been there when I was a baby so I had no recollection of it and I really wanted to go. We saw one of the original seven Von Trapp children while we were there! She was a sweet little old lady who led some kind of class, if I remember correctly. They have a little family burial plot where Maria and Georg are buried. I bought a Christmas ornament and two CDs of the actual Trapp Family Singers singing traditional songs. Yes, there’s yodeling.

So there we have it. Rodgers and Hammerstein, full orchestra, the great Julie Andrews singing, kids just like me singing. A seminal and an enduring favorite.