“We’ll Listen to Music Together across the Skies”: A Musical Tribute to My Grandmother
With a top 10 list and a college essay.
I wish I could call her every time something great happens: a new job, recognition, any kind of healing. Then again, my grandmother, Anna Nessy Perlberg, was such an integral part of my life for twenty-nine years that I can hear her sweet voice of surprise—“Oh, Josh, I’m so proud of you . . .”—every day of my life.
But I still wish I could call her, maybe even go out to eat somewhere to celebrate. And there was a lot to celebrate for me in the years leading up to her death—graduate school, work, awards, publications, conferences. I still see her blowing me a kiss across the table in 2016 after I gave an emotional speech winning an award from my graduate department at school.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her victories during those years, especially getting her memoirs of life as a Holocaust refugee published at eighty-eight years old. One of my fondest memories with her was shortly before that got published, and I gathered with her and two of her friends in her apartment, where we each read a unique piece of writing we were working on—memoir, fiction, poetry, or an academic presentation, in my case.
She was also active with a local organization for older adults and with the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. God bless her, though she didn’t believe in God; she did, however, believe in angels.
She’s my guardian angel, I think now, with the Judds’ song, “Guardian Angels” playing in my head. Music was always a big part of our relationship, from talking about folk music I listened to as a kid to our final conversation together, where she said, despite being mostly incoherent, “We’ll listen to music together across the skies.”
And so, we do.
Last year, I got a very special essay published during Pride Month at the Good Men Project website. This year, with the anniversary of her death soon, I wanted to write a little more about how music brought us together.
My grandmother and I could disagree about many things, including about the importance of lyrics in contemporary music, but as I wrote in the Pride essay, music bonded us across several decades between us. Her mother was a professional harpist and opera singer before the family fled the Nazis in 1939.
I lived with my grandmother for six years before she died, moving in ten years ago this month. We butted heads sometimes, but it always came back to how much we loved each other. And I played her a lot of music on my turntable: jazz, folk, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, and country.
I’ll never forget how much we both loved certain jazz singers, especially Ella Fitzgerald—my favorite voice in the history of music, as I’ve realized more recently. We both paid rapt attention when I played Ella singing a slow ballad like Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” and melted with every note of vibrato that Ella made sound effortless.
A couple days after her death in 2017, I remember posting on social media, “Every song reminds me of her.” In that spirit, I wanted to name ten recordings, in no particular order, that most remind me of her.
10 Songs That Most Remind Me of My Grandmother
“His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” Mahalia Jackson
The most famous classic gospel singer brought a level of feeling to her singing that could make my atheist grandmother cry. Her brother once sent her a cassette of Mahalia Jackson singing this song, and every time she heard it, without fail, she would tear up. The depth of hope and joy—“I sing because I’m free,” Jackson sings, her voice fluttering into the stratosphere—I know that, whether or not it’s Jesus, someone’s eye is watching over my grandmother and me.
“The World Unseen,” Rosanne Cash
A tender, sparse, heartbreaking gem, this is maybe my favorite song by one of my favorite singer-songwriters of the past four decades-plus. When she sings about her late father, Johnny Cash, “And now that we must live apart, I have a lock of hair and one half of my heart,” I feel that. I always knew I would cherish that line once my grandmother died.
“Holes in the Floor of Heaven,” Steve Wariner
Wariner begins this song with, “One day shy of eight years old, my grandma passed away/ I was a brokenhearted little boy blowin’ out that birthday cake,” so this tale of sorrow and hope instantly had my attention. When I turned 30, my first birthday without my grandmother, this song provided a lot of comfort. I know there’s holes in the floor of heaven with or without rain, and she’s watching over you and me.
“Carrying Your Love with Me,” George Strait
My grandmother always made her love felt, intensely, and when I hear this song, I think of moments since her death when I know she’d be especially proud of me, like when I did my TEDx talk at my undergraduate alma mater, Earlham College. I carried her love with me across state lines, and I hope that as I paced that stage doing my talk, I carried a message of love—and hope. Her story was inordinately inspiring, and I got a lot of hope from her.
“Together Again,” Janet Jackson
This upbeat ode to loved ones who died of AIDS gives me hope: “Everywhere I go, every smile I see, I know you are there, smilin’ back at me/ Dancin’ in the moonlight, I know you are free, ‘cause I can see your star shinin’ down on me.” Janet Jackson has only gotten her due from the critical establishment in the last several years, including with an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the way this song has touched many thousands of people, it’s easy to hear why. Loss is one of the most common of human experiences, and I know that my grandmother and I will be together again someday.
“Grandma’s Hands,” Bill Withers
In recent months, I’ve had dreams where I’ve felt my grandmother’s hands and hugs, but this song has always resonated. My grandmother didn’t want to admit she was old, but her hands showed a lifetime of love and struggle. Her hands did not clap in church on Sunday morning, but like Withers sings, if I ever get to anything like heaven, I sure will look for Grandma’s hands. She was one of a kind, and the simple, acoustic groove of this song captures how much she adored her loved ones.
I discovered this song on a streaming service while searching for “Grandma’s Hands,” and though my grandmother was not much of a gardener and never went to church during my lifetime—she was raised Catholic, though her father was Jewish—much of this song gets me choked up. When Brown sings, “And without her, I’d never had a prayer,” those words really get to me. Without her, who knows where I’d be.
“Poem for Erika/For Baby,” Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary recorded John Denver’s “For Baby (For Bobbie)” in their 1960s heyday, but this version, in a medley with a poem Mary Travers wrote for her daughter, is far more resonant and moving to me. Recorded at a 1990s children’s concert for PBS with Travers singing solo to her granddaughter on her lap, the group’s version of “For Baby” here reminds me so much of my grandmother when Travers sings, “I’ll love you more than anybody can.” (I wrote about my relationship with PP&M’s children’s albums here.)
“Kind and Generous,” Natalie Merchant
To me, my grandmother was nothing if not kind and generous. This comforting song, including a ‘70s-style electric piano, reminds me of the gratitude for everything I experienced with my grandmother. When Merchant sings, “I never could have come this far without you,” that line applies to several people in my life, but to her more than most. So, today want I sing to my grandmother, “I want to thank you, show my gratitude, my love and my respect for you, I want to thank you.”
This may sound like blasphemy, but as soon as I heard Adele’s version of “Lovesong” in 2011, I felt it way more than the Cure’s original. This slow-burning take, with bossa nova-style spare acoustic guitar, is one of the highlights of Adele’s acclaimed 21, and in the last few years, I can’t not think of my grandmother when I hear Adele sing, “However far away, I will always love you.” I remember buying a vinyl copy of the album and hearing this song and listening with my grandmother across the skies.
Lastly, this is my college applications essay that I wrote in 2005, including much about our relationship with music. I’ll never forget the difficulty that I had mulling over different brag-worthy accomplishments in multiple essay drafts until one day this poured out of me in one sitting.
My grandmother is one of the nicest, most caring, and most brilliant people I have ever met. I find our daily conversations stimulating because, from my perspective in the conversation, she always understands what I have to say. For instance, I recently played a rap song to her, and she listened to my comments without argument despite her admitted lack of knowledge about rap music. In fact, I believe she listened to me because of this curiosity and lack of knowledge. She has helped me understand the value of listening.
She has lived an incredible life. Her part-Jewish family lived a charmed life in Czechoslovakia until they barely escaped from the Nazi regime in 1939 and left everything behind. She seems determined to never forget where she came from, and recently she and her brothers won back their childhood home in the Czech Republic after a lawsuit. At age seventy-seven, her tenacity in pursuing this case and making her goals manifested is remarkable. Listening to her be so committed to social justice—not just with her Czech home, but also with her current role in the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Right—has made me admire her all the more. However, it is casual conversation that I most enjoy with her.
She listens to me talk about my passion for jazz singer Billie Holiday’s music, and I listen to her tell me about the poetry group that my grandfather leads. We know a good relationship consists of listening. And we appreciate each other’s honesty—we can freely admit to each other if we do not like to do a particular task, for example. We also appreciate each other’s knowledge—obviously she knows more at her stage in life than I do in mine; nevertheless, I know she thinks the world of me as much as I do of her. Little things like how she listens to me encourage me to learn more about others. She has set a wonderful example for me so that by now, we both love to learn from each other.
I have referred to relatives to the last couple of years as “The Year of Grandma” or “Another Year of Grandma,” and that is a simple way to express my gratitude for all the great times that we have had together, especially on the phone. I know that when I talk to her tonight, we will find something interesting to talk about—maybe this new CD box set of the pianist Bill Evans that I bought or maybe her adventures with the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. These conversations affirm that she is one of the most important people in my life not simply because of how much I admire her, but how much I love her.