The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2009, Page 35

Vol. 62 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
177
Growing up with Music
A Riverton Inheritance
by Solli Sigurdson
PHOTO: BEN HOLYK
Riverton Hootenanny Rehearsal -1964
Left to right; Haraldur Bjornson, Lloyd Gudmundson, Dennis T. Olson, Wes Wilson,
Laura-Lynn Dahlman, Clifford Lindstrom, Roy Gudmundson and Solli Sigurdson.
Many of us will inherit something in
our lifetime: money, a plot of land, a reli-
gion, or even a dislike of tomatoes. We
often inherit something that we don’t
know we are getting. I, like many growing
up in Riverton, inherited a musical tradi-
tion. In telling only my personal story, I
hope the hundreds of others who partici-
pated in the experience are honored.
As a kid in the 1940s, my biggest mem-
ories of the war years are probably “The
White Cliffs of Dover” or “This Ain’t the
Army” as sung by my dad and my uncle,
SR. A cousin told me that one of her great-
est joys was Stebbi, my dad, picking her up
in the old truck in Gimli and the two of
them singing all the way to Riverton. My
dad and SR were not choir singers but
singers with a lot of words to a lot of songs
in both Icelandic and English. One of my
father’s earliest memories was as a six-year
old, standing on the counter of the store in
Hnausa around 1910 and being told by the
store clerk to sing, something he loved to
do.
By the time my sisters and I came
along Dad and SR were learning all kinds
of songs from the radio. For my family, the
1940s in Riverton was one big singing
party. Besides the war songs, we sang the
old songs - “Let Me Call you Sweetheart,”
“With Someone Like You;” the new songs
- “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Paper Doll;”
and even Al Jolson’s “Swanee” and “April
Showers.” The singing was at its best when
Daisy Jonasson or Sigurlin (Jonasson)
Bergen played the piano. Otherwise we’d
sing on our own and not from song sheets.
In the old Icelandic tradition, we learned
the words by listening to Dad and SR.