Things are pretty quiet around here right now.   I've been fighting allergies now for 2+ months (this is my worst year in a a long time and Fall is my worst season in general).     This leaves little energy to do much that is exciting.   I have however started a new adventure to mark off another item on my bucket list.  Do you have a "bucket list"?   Does it continue to grow?  Mine does.  I think I add twice as many items as I mark off but I do mark things off.   So in my cleaning venture this past week I found the flute that I learned to play a few years ago just because it was something I wanted to do.   Since I really didn't feel I was going to continue with it I took it in and sold it back to the music store.  That money then went towards this:

Something I've always wanted to do was learn piano.  I can plunk along on it but have never really mastered any of it and really am bad at the left hand.  I so love music in general and also hop that maybe my Mom will enjoy it while she is here in the summers.  She can actually play piano (and organ) ... me not so much.  But I love it anyway and hey, it is better than sitting playing computer games.

Not having any music and being generally cheap, I've ordered some beginner books from my favorite Abebooks.com and decided today to stop down at the local used book store and see if there was any music there.   I love that store!!!   I sorted through music and books for piano, saxophone, flute, accordion and harmonica.   Who knew!   I got a couple books then looked over in the hardbacks (mostly books about music and musicians) and found this:

A 105 year old book of songs (published in 1909) and is no less than 500 pages!!!  How super cool is that!   Reading the forward apparently this publisher decided to collect songs via a sort of 4 year contest way back in 1900 from all over.  While they received music from all over North America as well as other countries most was from the US and I am really loving looking through the songs.   Contributions came from 20,000 people.  Now thing of that - this wasn't the electronic age people, it was when mail was a lot harder and slower to move.    It is in fairly good condition and I think I will likely take it to a book binder and get the binding fixed so it will last another 100 years.

Not only  that but it is local.  Inside is an inscription elegantly written in calligraphy 

Mrs. C. W. Frisbee

Warren Hotel

Helena, Montana

Jan 21st '15

I might just have to do some digging around to see who that was.   The other cool thing about this is that there are indeed portraits and descriptions of many of the popular entertainers/singers of those days and the songs in the book that were important to them.

Part of the forward reads:

"Heart Songs is more than a collection of music--it is a book compiled directly by twenty thousand people, who not only sent in their favorite songs, but in accompanying letters told how these songs had been interwoven with the story of their own lives.  All have been sent in by men and women who loved them; who cared little for the prizes, but desired to add a truly worthy contribution to the collection of Heart Songs.  The personal associations of these melodies add to the familiar words a new thrill of heart interest."

I wonder if those letters are somewhere in a vault and wouldn't it be fabulous to read some of them?