“In the Islands, when I was very young, the main entertainment for everyone in the community was visiting. And the main component of visiting was conversation. This was never called conversation, or chatting or a having a talk. It was called, in the insular, intercultural vernacular of the time, “talk story.”

“Talk story” is a pidgin phrase that, to me, is many layered and highly evocative. This is exactly what people did — they both talked out their stories and talked a story into being — they shared anecdotes, events, tales, adventures, daily activities, and sometimes recounted older, grander, traditional stories with each other — some told the iconic stories of the tribe, and others told the stories of cultures from which they came — and those stories, woven together, became the backdrop of my later experience.

The uncles who married my aunties brought tales from backgrounds in Scotland, Italy, Spain and the American Heartland. The aunties who married my uncles brought traditions from Japan, Portugal, China, Scandinavia and from their own multicultural families of origin in the Islands. A mini United Nations, they would talk for hours, taking great pleasure in the repetition of oft-told tales.

They didn’t analyse these stories; they didn’t interpret them. They recreated their life in oral tales and let listeners make of them what they would. And sometimes, because any number of people sitting on the porch or in the living room or around the table might have been involved in the same story, they brought a rainbow of perspectives to a single incident — each could add his or her voice to the narration and it became a crafted, collective tale — it took its place in the history of the family and the small community.

These were the voices that surrounded me in very early childhood. And later, when most of the family moved to California where I grew up, this tradition was maintained: each week, the standard mainland English of the weekday melted into the warmth of Island speech at the weekend gathering at the grandparents house, when once again, family and close friends would talk story — giving the voice of the Islands to their history and their current experience.

Other factors contributed to the music of these voices: many of my relatives spoke other languages and those multilingual nuances were present. One of my grandmothers spoke five languages. My paternal grandfather played three or four instruments and — something I don’t actually remember, but I was told — he had a beautiful singing voice.

But my father was the best storyteller of all. He had a gift for mimicry, timing, dialogue and perfect recall. He also had the material — a huge repertoire, gleaned from a habit of risk-taking and a kind of physical fearlessness (as did the company he kept) that constantly put him in almost unbelievable but well documented situations that would of course eventuate in highly entertaining stories. Everyone loved his stories. My friends (even in high school, when it is customary for teens to be interested in other pursuits) used to love to come to my house to listen to him recount exploits and adventures from his youth — and not a few from his current life.

What I am able to recall from my own memory and not from family stories about my early life, mostly derives from experience beginning after we had moved from that tiny town in Hawaii to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was able to participate in the storytelling, the arguments, the music, the great rolling laughter, and the multi ethnic meals that were so much a part of our lives…

Added to that colourful tapestry is the mesmerizing, beautiful, reverberant solemnity of the Latin Mass, which was a huge influence on me from infancy onward — the beauty of the ancient language punctuated with the oratorical English prowess of urban priests — as well as the great grand music of the Catholic Church, encompassing as it did the music of some of the world’s greatest composers — Bach, Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Handel, Schutz, Mozart, Haydn… and the liturgical year with its seasonal rituals and breathtaking beauty.

This is what I was born into. This is what I grew up with.”

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~ Excerpt from an interview with writer, Harrison Solow.

See the entire interview at: https://barbarafroman.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/music-and-prose-dr-harrison-solow/