Her Daughter’s Music by Goldie Robertson Funk

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 7, 1916

Her Daughter’s Music

By Goldie Robertson Funk

I HAVE often wondered at the patient unselfishness of fathers in regard to their daughters’ music.

When little Margery is eight years old, a mother says, “It’s time we had a piano. I don’t see how we’re going to get it while we’re still paying for the place, though; but if she’s ever going to learn to play, it’s time to begin.”

The very next time father comes home from work, he says, “I stopped in at Westermann’s on my way home. We can get a piano for ten dollars down and ten a month. I guess we’d better try it.”

Mother’s fear of debt comes to the front when she faces the possibility of undertaking a few hundreds more. “But I don’t see where it’s coming from. We’re living pretty close right now.”

Father fears debt, too, but his love for his little woman-child makes him determine to go without some new tools he needs, to work over hours for more pay, and to wear his old overcoat another winter.

That is how our American daughters mostly come by their pianos.

Father, who knows dozens of tunes, looks forward to the day when Margery will play for him evenings as he toasts his feet before the fire.

The stumbling little “pieces” and the endless scale work, the phrasings and the strivings after expression, the ceaseless din of practice, the constant strain of reminding Margery of practice time, are all in the background, against which stands out the day when Margery will play and sing for him. That playing and singing by his little girl becomes his secretly cherished dream.

As she advances, music costs more; lessons cost more, his pay remains the same, and the old overcoat sees another winter’s service.

Margery’s friends begin to come in evenings. Other girls play amazing pieces; they play duets with Margery; sometimes they sing; but the songs are not the songs he knows. His fifteen-year-old Margery and her friends flutter through a lot of “modern” music that makes her mother look uneasy and that he dislikes.

If he ventures to interrupt his daughter with, “Margie, play ‘Marching Through Georgia,’” or, “Margie, sing ‘Jerusalem the Golden,’” Margie blushes and looks uneasy for fear her friends will notice how old-fashioned father is.

I know a mother who kept it before her little girl from the time she began to take lessons that she was to learn to play to please and comfort her father. The father was not musical, but the mother knew he counted on his daughter’s playing and singing for him some day. He didn’t dream it could be otherwise, and the mother couldn’t bear to see him disappointed. She led him to make pleased comments about the child’s work, and then reported them to the little girl for her encouragement.

All through her young ladyhood this girl played and sang to her father. She hunted songs to please him. He liked march music, and though she preferred a beautiful study, she hunted up splendid marches for him. He liked old hymn tunes, and from the time she could play her first pieces, her mother had the teacher give her a hymn for each lesson in addition to her other work.

The father is a trembling old man now, and often through my window at night I hear the daughter break off from some exquisite study, and play a march for her father, or lift her voice in some old-fashioned hymn. She has never resented entertaining him with her music, or blushed before her friends because of her father’s choice of music. She was trained to respect his wish for her comforting music, and to respect his choice.

Sometimes she and her young friends take turns playing their favorites, and then the loyal daughter exclaims, “Now, daddy, this is for you. Listen, girls!” And a heavy cane keeps solemn time to Smith’s March. I have even known this girl, after an evening with her boy and

girl friends about the piano, to throw up the window and play a march for her father, who was resting on the porch.

It is all in the training. If mothers, who know the sacrifices fathers make to give their daughters an education in music, will quietly but persistently keep it before them that father must find pleasure and comfort in their music, it will be the natural thing to consider father rather than to accept his sacrifices and ignore his taste in music or be ashamed because it differs from the carefully educated taste of themselves or of their friends. Their own respect for their father will compel that of young friends who might perhaps think father’s choice “queer.”—Goldie Robertson Funk, in American Motherhood.