Mondays are washdays. In the kitchen, steam rises from the sink and my mother squeezes sopping wet clothes through the mangle. On the radio a man sings Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ from the musical Oklahoma. Later in my childhood other songs made their mark: Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better), Music, Music, Music, (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?. But the opening number in Oklahoma is the first music I can remember and put a name to: a memory preserved, possibly, via the song’s association with sunshine and sunshine’s importance to washdays.
Of course, I had no idea of the song’s origins or how songs in general came about; no idea of Rodgers and Hammerstein; wouldn’t know corn (“as high as an elephant’s eye” or otherwise) if I met it dancing in the street. Nor did I know what was old and what was new. Children, when they first encounter the world, imagine that what they hear and see has been there for ever. That was how, for many years, I thought of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ – as eternal – when in fact, first sung on Broadway in 1943, it was only a couple of years older than me.
