Letters from Grandma
Alexandra talks about the songs here: “I graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in Creative Writing in 2016. After graduation, my mother asked me to curate a cardboard box filled with dusty, creased and crumpled old papers she had stored away for 16 years. They were poetry of my grandmother, Adeline Rossi Parker, who passed away when I was six. They still smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
“The summer project turned into a 300 page binder preserving tattered bits of scribbles and multiple copies and revisions of unpublished brittle coffee-stained manuscripts (some 60 or 70+ years old) that had been rejected by publishers in her lifetime. Some of the rhymes typed on crinkly onionskin paper on an antique Royal typewriter that we still treasure seemed to me like they could have been written today,” Alexandra said.
Above is a song called On Dreams, inspired by her grandmother Adeline’s poetry.
“Fast forward to the pandemic, and I’ve been writing songs inspired by Grandma’s spirit and having them set to music. Her amazing creativity led to me writing my own music and melodies. Thank you, Grandma. I hope she’s listening from heaven. Her writing helped me heal and find my voice again, not to mention channeling her quirky sense of humor. I hope I am doing justice to her dreams. Mine are certainly coming true,” Alexandra said.
Authentic Americana from Grandma’s Old Royal Typewriter
“As I combed through the coffee-stained manuscripts and put them into a binder, I realized that Grandma wasn’t writing poetry, she was writing lyrics. And through her words, I started getting my voice back. I hired someone to set some of them to folk melodies, and started recording them.
“The first time we got one back remastered, my mother wept. It had been almost 20 years since she lost her mother, but she never forgot her promise to publish the precious poems Grandma gave her. I had this song set to music during the pandemic, during a lot of social unrest and amidst border controversies and George Floyd protests. It’s called Barriers, but it’s really a love song.”
Royal inspiration
Grandma wrote “Billy Bear,” and my mother had it illustrated to create a book. Below is a video of the adorable story set to music.
Listen
This is a bit of a dark one from Grandma, so we hope it doesn’t scare the children. She was the mother of seven children—four rambunctious boys and three exuberant girls—who sometimes didn’t get along. Grandma Adeline channeled her thoughts and frustration, it seems, into a cautionary tale that maybe we should hold off telling the children too early. She kept the children. We LOVE it and hope it makes you laugh.