Music and Family

    I have shared many musical experiences with my family and friends during my life. Family and music go hand in hand in creating a person’s personal taste in music and culture. I believe that my family’s taste in music influenced my preferences on music from the enjoyment we shared while listening to different genres of music together. From my early childhood experiences through my teenage years, I have learned to explore and make social connections from the music I listened to growing up. During this blog I will explore an important member of my family’s relationship with music. I will explore their journey with music and ask questions about their personal musical influences and upbringings. 

The important family member that I interviewed and included in this blog is my mother. My mom and I have always listened to music together whether we were cleaning the house or going on a ride to the grocery store. My mom’s name is Harmony, and she is 45 years old. One main reason I chose her to be part of my blog is because she has had many experiences and relationships with music. During her middle school and high school years she played the trombone in the school band. I have heard her mention this before, but I had never taken the time to ask her about it. Growing up her parents, my grandparents, were really religious and still are. They mainly listened to christen music with the occasional blues music because my grandpa loves the banjo. He collects and plays them regularly which he taught my mom. With her parents having a strict and consistent genre of music my mother was not introduced to a diversity of music as a child. Because of this she had to learn to create her own taste in music without the influence of her parents and was called rebellious during her teenage years because of her taste in music.

So obviously this first question I asked my mom was why she joined the band and what did she liked most about it. My mom said “I started in the band because I had always thought that being in the band was imposable, so I wanted to try it for myself. So, me and a couple of my friends went to the first practice, and we fell in love with it the second we started.” My mom said she had always been fascinated with the trombone and wanted to play it for her school. She told me that she picked the trombone because of its unique sounds and that it can play both melodic lines and has harmonic support. Then I asked what did she experience while playing in the band? She said, “I loved the band because it allowed me to travel to many places I had never been to before. I remember my first pep rally in middle school where we had to perform while the football players ran into the gym, and it was amazing. In middle school I got to travel to Disney World and that is somewhere I would never have gotten to go as a kid if not for band.” The next thing I asked her was what were her favorite bands or singers when she was a teenager and what did her parents think about them. She said, “Don’t even get me started on that. My favorite people to listen to with my friends in the car with was Tupac and TLC. We sure thought we were something when we would rap to his music in the car on the way to school. In the 1900s he was the most popular rapper of my generation, and my parents had never heard anything like this before. They hated it! They said that it was not what a Christian were supposed to listen to, and I was never allowed to play Tupac in my house when they were there.”  I was not surprised that Tupac was her favorite singer back in the day, she still listens to them him today.  I did not know that my grandparents hated it so much. She told me this was the reason that she would try to like my music since her parents never gave hers a chance.

This is one of my mom favorite songs by Tupac.

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And here is an example of why my mom chose the trombone. I really love how they sound all together now wonder she wanted to learn to play this instrument!