Singing the same tune

It started with a click of the remote control.

One second we were watching Purdue pull away from Illinois, the next we were watching a challenger on Iron Chef America trying to put away the insufferable Bobby Flay.

The secret ingredient was some sort of fish I'd never heard of, and the challenger was trying to improve upon it by adding some shellfish.

He was adding cockles and mussels.

And without missing a beat, my wife and I turned to one another and sang, "Alive, alive oh!"

Over nearly 39 years of marriage, we've been struck more than once by the similarities in our family backgrounds. There were plenty of differences, to be sure. My father was in the garment industry, then the newspaper business, and finally was a college administrator; hers was a professor of English literature.

But there were similarities as well. Our fathers were born in the same year. Both families camped when we were kids. The two families had traveled to many of the same places and had even eaten in the same restaurants.

But on Saturday, we realized we sang from the same songbook. Literally.

Those of you with an ear for folk tunes will have recognized the lyric from the old Irish song "Molly Malone."

"In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty," it begins before telling Molly's sad tale. The chorus has her selling "cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh" through the streets of Dublin town.

I couldn't tell you for sure what the heck a cockle is, and I swore off shellfish a couple of years ago after receiving some unmistakable signals from my aging body.

But we both knew the song, and as we started talking (both the Boilermakers and Bobby Flay forgotten) we traded childhood memories of the songbook we learned it from.

The book was rich in Americana: "Bicycle Built for Two," "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze," "The Streets of Laredo."

But it also reached into the American melting pot to bring us songs like "Over the Sea to Skye" and "Loch Lomond" and, of course, "Molly Malone."

And there were labor songs as well: "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night."

It was possible, of course, that we were talking about two different books.

But then we started comparing notes on the illustrations. They were highly stylized, like woodcuts, and many of them were in vivid color.

It was, in fact, the same book: The Fireside Book of Folk Songs.

Quaint as it sounds, it wasn't all that unusual at my house when I was a kid to gather around the piano and sing together. It's not something we did often or on a regular basis, but we did sing together.

By doing so, in the middle of the 20th century, we were reaching back to my parents' childhood and my grandparents' lives, to the era before radio, before TV, before computers, before video games, before the Internet, and before Americans were - in the words of Neil Postman - "amusing ourselves to death."

My wife's family probably used their songbook less often. They didn't have a pianist of my mother's caliber available. The songbook was known for its piano arrangements of classic folk songs, and my mother liked nothing better than to throw in some boogie-woogie bass line while we sang "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey."

In many ways, that songbook was simultaneously a link between our two families, our two childhoods, and a link to prior generations.

So, Saturday night I did the logical 21st century thing: I looked for it on eBay.

It should be arriving any day now. If you hear me humming "Molly Malone," you'll know it got here.[[In-content Ad]]