Latest news with #BeaverCamp

National Post

Senior Living: Summer tunes

Article content Summertime and the living is easy … especially if you're grooving to seasonal music. Article content It's light. Article content It's fun. Article content It's warm and fuzzy. Article content Summer music hopefully has you singing and dancing in the sunshine … even if you were a dorky teenager like me who sang badly and danced worse. Article content It was different times. There wasn't a pocket-sized telephone for every teen everywhere. Article content But no problem way back when. The sun was shining. And the songs on Top 40 radio were warm and happy. Article content Article content It was — and still is — the summer musical mood. Article content I'll dial back to some personal history: My single mother worked as a bookkeeper in what was then a thriving Montreal clothing industry. And since school was out for July and August, I got sent to summer camp. Article content Camp was, however, more musical than athletic. It's not like we learned to play instruments. But we did a lot of singing. Article content Beaver Camp had a way leftward leaning. One of my early camp songs was Solidarity Forever. We actually heard it performed live at camp by the great Pete Seeger: Article content 'When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run Article content 'There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun Article content 'Yet what force on Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one Article content 'But the union makes us strong.' Article content I doubt this is U.S. President Donald Trump's favourite Article content song. And it's not a summer hit these days. But Seeger was popular at the summer camp I attended. We didn't have any fancy facilities; the counsellors played guitars, the campers sang along. Article content Article content And we learned union songs. I loved them … even if those lyrics were a mystery to a little kid like me and my fellow campers. Article content Fast-forward to high school. And new tunes. Article content Although a hopeless dancer, I loved popular music, from Pat Boone (no relation) to Elvis. And my absolute favourites were the soul hits from Detroit and the southern Stax studio. Great harmonies. Super voices. Dancing tunes. Article content I played the hits on my transistor radio — a gorgeous Sony I acquired on a trip to New York City and stored carefully in its original box. My favourites: Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, Otis Redding. Article content I still love that music.