RIP Judith Durham

but please not her voice.

I put up a memory on Facebook yesterday - of hearing Judith Durham sing. It was just one short moment. I never went to a concert when the Seekers were at the height of their fame in the sixties. Our family didn't do that sort of thing. There was no money for anything like that and we would not even have thought of it. 

As a family though we liked the Seekers. We might not know or understand groups like the Beatles but we understood and appreciated the Seekers. In school J..., our maths and music teacher, taught us some of the songs. We sang them at a school concert one year.  (There was no charge for parents to attend so I assume the performance rights issue was covered.)

My siblings, all of whom were learning to play instruments, could all play versions of this song or that. The other students at the school would get Brother Cat to play them in lunch hours when it was raining too hard to be outside. It was that sort of rural school and that sort of music.

Forward a few years and I was at a conference for trainee teachers. It was being held in a building at a university which had a concert hall attached. I have forgotten exactly what was being discussed but tempers had become rather heated in one session. I know I was feeling rather uncomfortable about being around people who really were not getting along with one another. We broke for one of those inevitable tea breaks but the atmosphere was still rather tense among some of the group.  

Then, quite suddenly, there was a voice singing solo and unaccompanied in the concert hall. I can remember standing there quite still but watching the other people in the room. People stopped talking. They stopped drinking their tea and coffee.  Other people stopped walking across the university grounds as the sound soared out of the open windows of the concert hall.

All too soon the voice stopped and there was that brief silent moment of appreciation before people clapped. The person next to me said quietly, "What a voice!"

Even now I consider myself fortunate to have heard that moment. At the end of it the tension within the group I was with had almost gone. People were more prepared to be reasonable, to listen to one another. It was one of those times when music, just a small amount of music, can do so much. 

It was Judith Durham singing "Turn, turn, turn".