With a song in our hearts
At a recent party where my two siblings and I were asked to sing a couple of songs while the band was resting between sets, I overheard someone saying with some excitement, “I hear Jim is going to sing.” To which another replied, “And Lory too!”
What about me? I felt left out, invisible, like a house plant.
You see, Lory, Jim and I started performing at the same time as a folk singing trio. I was 18, Lory was 14, and Jim, who accompanied us on the guitar, was 13. We debuted in Baguio as The Paredes Sisters.
Long story. It was the Sixties and we blended pretty well singing songs from the Peter, Paul and Mary, and Kington Trio albums that our sister Tictac brought home and encouraged us to learn. Sonny Joaquin, a folk song aficionado, heard us singing as we usually do when we’re together, at his family’s beach resort in La Union and invited us to be special guest performers in “Sing Out Baguio,” a folk song concert. When we got off the bus in Baguio, we saw homemade posters plastered all over Session Road announcing the event that featured local folk song groups and – The Paredes Sisters!
Jim was upset. He wanted to take the first bus back to Manila. But the posters were quickly replaced and we were suddenly billed as “Meiling, Jim and Lory.” The show went on.
We had a short but interesting career as a trio doing campus showcases with other singing groups of the day from Manila schools. To our eternal embarrassment, our brother Ducky, who was then writing a regular column for Sentinel, the Catholic weekly newsletter distributed in all Catholic schools, wrote a very biased tongue-in-cheek review of one such concert where he said that only his siblings shone among all the performing groups! Thankfully, we survived that. We also guested on TV. If you remember the Lyn Madrigal show and Nineteeners, we performed there once upon a time.
It was fun while it lasted but we eventually formed our own groups: I, with two classmates from St. Scholastica’s, Lory with classmates in Stella Maris, and Jim with his class mates in Ateneo High School. Later, we made a name for ourselves individually. Lory went on to perform solo and in bands. Jim went on to compose and perform as one-third of the Apo Hiking Society. I joined the newspapers and had a byline.
The byline was great, but singing is in my DNA. I come from a family that sings when we’re together. It must have started in the Fifties when our two oldest siblings, Jesse and Ducky, were members of the Ateneo Glee Club. Their friends would hang out at home and spontaneously sing in harmony. We younger kids watched them in awe and absorbed it all through osmosis. Jesse was also part of what was probably the first college band in the country called “The Nightmares” that performed rock and roll and Harry Belafonte songs during intermission at Ateneo Glee Club concerts.
A collection of long playing albums of Broadway shows, themes from movies, torch and pop songs fed or musical appetites. We played them over and over, memorizing every word and dramatic pause, including the parts where the needle skipped on the scratched vinyl.
Mom sang every song like a march but dad was a whiz at the piano and they encouraged us to sing, especially when we were in the car with Mom at the wheel. It was either singing or praying the rosary, which is how we could spontaneously break into Oklahoma at the snap of a finger.
We grew up on the same diet of folk songs, Gershwin tunes, Elvis, the Beatles, Joan Baez, the Supremes, Mama and Papas, Bacharach and David, and even Haring Solomon — and when we’re together, we sing their songs. We could be in one of our houses where Jim picks up his guitar, strikes a familiar chord and we all begin to sing. Or it could be a small party with our sister Babsy’s older son, the jazz pianist Joey Quirino, accompanying us on the piano. We have sung in big parties where, together with cousins who are similarly inclined, we somehow managed to take over the microphones from the band and did our usual repertoire to our heart’s content — with the proper accompaniment.
On more than one occasion, in a restaurant, the singers who go from table to table approached us and, recognizing the celebrity in the family, started singing an APO Hiking Society song. But their chords were wrong and so Jim borrowed one of their guitars to show them how to do it. We ended up taking over the music for a while, to the delight of some and consternation of other diners.
We’re terrible that way.
Whatever it is we do in our day jobs, we are all singers at heart. Our youngest, Raffy, who runs a vocational school, does a mean Tom Jones imitation. Gabby who was a rock and blues singer in his band called “End” in the Sixties and Seventies, is now a successful business executive who hires bands he can sing his old tunes with. Jake, an agriculturist who lives in Florida has added his version of Old Man River to the family repertoire.
Jim has gone solo and sometimes performs with Boboy Garovillo, after the break-up of the APO. Lory has gone back to folk music singing in a trio with guitar master Lester Demetillo and lawyer Mario Andres. And I am still writing.
But at their regular monthly gigs in Balete@Kamias in QC, Lory sometimes calls Jim and me to the stage to perform our old raucous folk songs during intermission. For one brief shining moment, we are back as Meiling, Jim and Lory, our voices still blending nicely from sheer muscle memory — a reminder that this is where it all began. That once upon a time, we were three equal parts of a memorable whole.
