“Bluebird, bluebird, come through my window . . . Choose your partner; pat ’em on
the shoulder . . . Oh babies, what a day,” Melody “Alfi” Bell sang to her infant in a
rich contralto as the baby slowly relinquished awareness for slumber.
Children grow. Time passes. Memories fade, and the rhymes and rhythms of childhood
can easily be forgotten. But Ned Place -67 and Anita Gerlach ’66 hope to preserve some
of those lullaby memories before they’re lost to time.
The idea for recovering ancient lullabies, later named The Lullaby Project, was conceived when Place’s godchild announced her pregnancy. At first, he recorded lullabies on his clarinet, later deciding to record lullabies from other languages. He collected them casually for two years. Then, in the late fall of 2003, friend and colleague Gerlach, a teacher at Santa Fe High School in New Mexico, joined the Fort Worth concert piano teacher in his search.
Their catalog to date goes beyond the well-known Rock-a-bye Baby. The project has released the first CD of international lullabies. On one track, Nancy Jarmillo sings Baby Sleep Peacefully, in Native-American Iroquois. Her presentation for the recording included sweet tobacco burning to send the song on a good journey, and using her original drum for the mother’s heartbeat rhythm. Listeners can hear the squeak of her rocking chair.
When recording the lullabies, Place and Gerlach record caregivers singing in their native languages and in their own surroundings, capturing the sounds around an infant or small child who is being lulled to sleep. The child hears “the love in the voice, and I can truly say that we can also hear that love,” said Gerlach. “No professional singer can produce the passion in a lullaby that has meaning for the singer.”
Once songs and interviews are recorded, they are digitally separated, then, songs are selected to use on the project’s CDs. Once a CD is compiled, it is offered in exchange for a $20 donation plus $5 mailing costs.
Unfortunately, an uncountable number of lullabies has already been lost because few preservation efforts have been made, and, once gone, they can never be recaptured. “I can’t tell you how often people remember just a remnant of a lullaby their parents sang, but can’t remember the rest,” Gerlach said.
The project’s mission is to protect an oral tradition of culture and history that, without their help, will ultimately be lost, but their goal goes beyond preservation.
They hope these expressions of love will be used and played, rather than stacked in
museum collections.
The lullaby CDs are also distributed to children’s hospitals, hospices and Alzheimer treatment centers.
“The CDs enable children in long-term care to hear a lullaby from their own culture in their own language,” Gerlach explains.
One Arlington doctor sponsored placement of 100 CDs in children’s hospitals in the Dallas area. Grants and gifts also help pay for recording trips and special CDs focusing on certain languages or cultures. The lullaby compilations are also offered to parents who adopt children of a different culture, so they can maintain contact with their roots.
“The thought of my work helping an Alzheimer’s patient, a young person with cancer or simply bringing a little peace to a troubled life is truly overwhelming,” Place said. He and his wife, Liz, both from Port Neches, have been married 25 years. They have a son.
The great diversity of New Mexico’s culture led Place and Gerlach to the realization of how important it is to save the songs. Among those recorded are lullabies of several Native American tribes sung by their elders.
In only one year – with funding coming mainly from their own pockets – the lullaby trackers have recorded 500 lullabies in 75 languages, including Italian, French, English, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, Appalachian, Afro-American, African, several Indonesian languages, Chinese, Taiwanese, Hawaiian, Spanish, Yiddish, many Native-American tribes, Welsh, Romanian, Bulgarian, pre-Bolshevik Russian, Chilean, Japanese and Nepalese.
Gerlach says the stories behind the lullabies are just as important as the songs.
For example, a lullaby from a Spanish passion play had been lost for 400 years, before it was accidentally found while someone was cleaning out the museum in which it was located. Also recovered is a Turkish lullaby more than 600 years old.
“Many are ageless and we have no idea how old they are,” Gerlach says.
Not all of the lullabies are from past centuries, however.
“We also have some very new and modern ones, including a punk rock lullaby about a dirty diaper,” she said.
Gerlach and Place met while attending Thomas Jefferson High School in Port
Arthur. Later, they worked together for several years in the Beaumont Symphony
Orchestra, Beaumont Civic Opera and Lamar University Band.
Place was an Eagle Scout at 14 and second clarinetist for the symphony at 16. He attended Lamar for three years – and considers it his alma mater – before he was drafted into the Marines to serve two years in the Marine Corps Band. He eventually completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, North Ridge, and was accepted as a doctoral candidate at Eastman School of Music but opted instead to build a 50-foot ferrocement sailboat and become a piano technician. That launched a career beginning in 1970 and continuing today tuning for the stars: from film studios, the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Symphony and Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show to Tricia Yearwood, Burt Bacharach, Lyle Lovett, Lou Rawls and others. He is Van Cliburn’s personal piano technician and also handles his piano competition. Clients fly him to New York and Los Angeles, Omaha and San Diego.
“What’s exciting is that it’s never been done before. We’ve driven 21,000 miles in the last year,” Place said. “It’s been a joy. We’ve got between 75 and 85 languages and some that are nonexistent now.” Last month, they recorded in the Appalachians.
Gerlach, a Port Arthur native, and her husband, Paul, have been married for 38 years. They have a son and daughter and five grandchildren.
At Santa Fe High School, Gerlach teaches advanced-placement physics, physics and forensic science. She is also sponsor of the Science Club and has received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching.
When the lullaby team takes its digital recording equipment to the singer’s home to record both the songs and the stories behind them, their main purpose is to make the singer feel relaxed. It can often take up to two hours to get the singer relaxed enough to feel at ease. “One lady said that our recording session was more therapeutic to her than a two-hour session with a therapist,” Gerlach said.
To maintain the full essence of the lullabies, not all background noises are edited from the recordings. “We do not edit out extraneous sounds that are natural, for example a chicken crowing, or the surf,” Gerlach says.
The lullabies will be preserved in state archives and the archives of cultural
societies and Native-American tribes. The recorders want to prevent lullabies from
being forgotten. The shared avocation is one of continuing discovery.
“In a world in which we see so much hatred, it is comforting to know that love exists all over the world for children,” Gerlach said. Place adds, “It’s been a reaffirmation to be reminded that governments do not control how much people love their children. We have one in pre-Communist Chinese, and the lullaby from Ukraine is one of the sexiest and most beautiful I have ever heard.”
And Gerlach and Place say they are still searching for lullabies.
“We currently have no Cajun lullabies, no Greek lullabies and still need many more from all the cultures we have already recorded,” Gerlach said.
“What we really want is people’s songs,” Place said. “People say my song isn’t special, but it is. It’s touched someone’s life.”
