My mother sang me strange lullabies. I was born in March after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, so now I understand why the songs about longing for a loved one to come home or a child crying in the night for a family to be reunited were on her mind. Some of her songs were probably popular on the radio in those years when I was an infant or toddler.
The songs I remember had what I call “rockin’ chair rhythms”, so were easily adapted to the times in which this beautiful young mother was rocking her child to sleep. And in the war years, everyone was waiting for someone to come home. Or not.
One of the songs that I can still remember verbatim was a reflection of the era as well as an unforgettable story. Like many great songs, the meaning between the lines was greater than what was in the lines. It reflected the importance of telephone switchboards and “party lines” that we now only get to know in movies.
When I researched this song, I found it was written not after World War II, but in 1901, by Charles K. Harris. The conflict then was the Philippine-American war, which took the lives of 4,200 Americans and an estimated 20,000 Filipino combatants, plus thousands of civilians who died of violence, famine, and diseases.
Charles Harris’s thoughtful lyric seems to have resurfaced whenever mothers waited for their soldier sons to come home. This song my mother sang to me was revived by the war of her generation, and though my father did not serve in World War II, his brother did. Many more in their circle of family and close friends were wounded or died.
So, as mother rocked me to sleep, these words embedded themselves in my mind. In this story, a young mother has died, evidently leaving a grieving young father and a little girl, who is trying to call her mother on the telephone, routed through the switchboard of operators called “central”. The song lyric my mother sang went like this:
“Hello central, give me heaven, for my mother’s there.
She’ll be waiting with the angels on the golden stair;
She’ll be glad it’s me who’s speaking; call her, won’t you, please...
For I surely want to tell her we are lonely here.
When the girls received the message o’er the telephone,
How their hearts grieved with sadness, and the wires began to moan;
We will answer just to please her—‘Yes, dear heart, I’ll soon be home.’
‘Kiss me, Mama, kiss your darling through the telephone.’”
The song would sometimes make me cry myself to sleep out of compassion for the little girl and her lonely father.
Another war song I remember my mother singing emerged later as a prayer song my sister and I sang as a duet at our state camp meeting. I was still so short I had to stand on a chair to sing with her. The church knew this song as “Search Me, O God”, but the song mother had sung to us was much different. Evidently, when I was six, it was recorded by Bing Crosby, and in 1948 it was one of the top ten pop songs in the nation. It was credited to Clement Scott, Maewa Kaihan, and Dorothy Stewart. It was sung to me like this:
Now is the hour when we must say good-bye,
Soon you’ll be sailing far across the sea;
While you’re away, oh, then remember me;
When you return, you’ll find me waiting here.
Another song mother sang to me was “When My Little Boy Blue Went to Sleep”. I found an old Jimmy Davis recording of the chorus. Another recording was by the Sons of Song.
“When my little boy blue closed his eyes and went to sleep,
He prayed ‘...the Lord my soul will keep,
And if I die before I wake, I know the Lord my soul will take;
Now, darling mother, do not weep.
God bless my daddy, too, for he’s been so kind and true,
His soul, dear Lord, I know you’ll keep.”
Then he closed his big blue eyes and sailed to away paradise,
When my little boy blue went to sleep.
Sometimes he comes back to our house in a dream
He sits on the rug on the floor,
He takes out his playthings, and plays once again,
And we live in our haven once more…
When my little boy blue, closed his eyes and went to sleep....”
She also read me a poem by Eugene Field titled “Little Boy Blue” and all the children’s poems by Robert Lewis Stevenson.
Often mother would tell me what a treasure I was to my daddy and her. She would say they knew God would protect me, because He had promised them that I would be a glory to His Kingdom. That, she’d say, was why they named me Gloria.
Looking back now, I believe it is important for a child to know that life isn’t perfect. People aren’t always happy, and things sometimes disappoint us and destroy our best plans. But the arms of our Lord will hold us secure and be present in all circumstances. No matter what happens, we are and always will be in good hands.
