by Zaharoula
Meraklou
My very first public performance
occurred when I was four years old. I sang a Viennese Folk song in German “a
capella” before several hundred people in a crowded auditorium, for an
International Girl Scouts Jamboree. I had never heard my voice amplified before
and I thought I had entered another world where every-thing that I was familiar
with was now different but in a special, wonderful way. It became for me a
“magic world” that I loved visiting as often as possible.
I grew up as
a Christian, a Catholic, and in my childhood, Latin was the language used in
the Missa services we attended in Church or chapel. I began to learn to sing
these Latin Hymns when I was five years old, as part of the children’s choir in
my school. When I was nine years old, I was sent away from my home – three and
a half hours by Greyhound Bus - to live and study in a convent of Franciscan
nuns. There, I began my serious musical training.
We studied hard under the stern hand of Mother Callista – now I think of
her as “Caligula” remembering the hard raps on my knuckles whenever I didn’t
project powerfully enough or enunciate well or any one of a number of other
“grievous sins” against the music – and I received not only my daily musical
and vocal training with her, but in a short time I was also receiving piano
lessons as well. My practice was to be several hours a day and often, in the
silence between pieces of music, the voices of the other convent children could
be heard beyond the walls of my practice room laughing and playing happily. My
practice hours were bittersweet: I loved my music but I longed for the fresh
outdoors and the company of the other children. So I put this longing into my
music and this was the beginning of why the only music I have ever preferred to
perform or to listen to are tragic stories of longing and sadness and nearly
all in the Minor Key. Tragic Opera is one of my favourite genres, for example
and when I was living and pregnant in
In our
convent, once again a member of our school’s children’s choir, I sang at all
the special services in the enormous, old, village church. We sang in a “choir
loft” high up near the roof of the church and faced towards the altar which
seemed very distant from where we were. As it was essential for us to sing to
and respond to the verses which the priest serving at the Missa sang, we needed
to build powerful voices. To this day, whenever I sing, I imagine myself at a
point very distant from where I stand that my voice needs to reach out to. I
particularly love singing to the ocean or across a waterfall, or deep in the
valley to a mountain peak.
The Latin
Missa was glorious when I was a child. It was filled with mysticism and wonder
and the miraculous transformation of bread and wine into the sacred body and
blood of Christ. The warm fragrance of the beeswax candles, the waves of
Frankincense and Myrrh, drifted up towards the lofty area where we sang. I felt
like an angel there, singing with the priest to honour the God I had come to
love as my Father in Heaven. The Gregorian Chants we studied and sang added
much to the entire atmosphere of the sacred, mystical world which then existed
for me. Because of their special tonal qualities, those were the notes that
moved me the most deeply. It wasn’t until much later that I learned we were
using a form of ancient Middle Eastern Makkam in those chants.
When I was
eleven years old, as a child who been living a very restricted and secluded
life, I became attracted to the emerging Folk Music scene which I heard in a
Coffee House in St. Paul, Minnesota, the city where I was born in the United
States. The simplicity of the guitar yet all the things that could be done with
it made me eager to try and play it myself. I longed to express all the
feelings inside of me which were too complex to speak about. It looked so easy
to do it through the Folk Music I heard from Bob Dylan and others at that time.
He was also born in
There, I
drank my very first cup of Turkish Coffee and listened
to the guitarists who performed live on a special stage that seemed to float
somehow in the center of the round interior of the coffee house. I was able to
go to St. Paul on special vacations two or three times a year from the convent
and always managed to elude my parents and go to the “Unicorn” to hear the
latest singers there and drink the strong coffee I had grown to love.
I remember
thinking one afternoon, as I sat listening to yet another of the male folksingers, that it was a terrible pity that there weren’t
any girls doing that too. I asked for a guitar from my family who immediately
rejected the idea and who were never very keen on anything I wanted to do
outside of school anyway, and so – and I blush when I say this – I gradually
stole the money from my mother’s handbag, fifty cents or a dollar at a time so
that I could buy my own guitar for twenty-seven dollars. After I bought it, I
had to hide it away and so I practiced in the basement of our home, where no
one ever went, until I could manage to coax some sounds out of it.
One of the
boys at the coffeehouse reluctantly, after much impertinent pestering from me,
agreed to show me a few things on my “Montgomery Ward’s Special”. He introduced
me to a few chord patterns and a magazine called “Sing Out” that I could copy
chord charts and lyrics from. He taught me ways of picking and strumming and by
the end of that summer vacation from the convent, I had mastered enough of a
repertoire of my own to approach the “Unicorn’s” manager and ask him if I could
play there one evening.
I persuaded
my mother and her sister, my “Annie Fran” to take me there that night and
promised them a special treat if they would. Neither of them was remotely
interested but finally gave in and accompanied me. When my name was announced
and I went to the tiny stage in the middle of the coffeehouse and picked up my
guitar which had been waiting there for me, my mother and auntie reacted just
the way I had hoped for: with true shock on their faces. I let that pass and
slipped directly into my magical world of music as I poured out my heart
through the songs I had taught myself to play during the hours and hours of
practice in our basement at home.
After that, I
didn’t have to hide the guitar anymore, but I was still not allowed free access
to it and had to leave it behind when I returned to the convent. It didn’t
matter much as I was able to sing every day for the Missa and continued to
practice vocals and piano with “Caligula”.
Whenever I
was allowed out from the convent and able to return to
When I was
twelve years old, and away from the convent on holidays, I started to “tour”
alone, with just my guitar for company. I was ostensibly visiting friends from
the convent and their families, who lived in different cities across the
The times
after my piano practice at the convent were usually spent in the school
library, - which I seemed always to have all to myself, - poring over Greek
History and Mythology. As much as I loved imagining myself an angel, singing in
the high choir loft in the village church, now I entered the mythical world of
the Greek Goddesses in the books that I read. It was another way for me to
imbue what I was doing with that “magical” inner world which I was creating for
myself. I sang my heart out to thousands and thousands of strangers and grew to
adore the roar of applause from the darkened theatres where I sang. Most of the
time, because of the bright spotlights shining on me, I never saw anything but
a vast darkened space in front of me. It was very easy to just relax into my
music and sing my sad songs about love-gone-wrong or lives lost and families
torn apart by tragedy. I toured in this way until I left the convent at 14. By
then, my guitar had become my dearest companion with whom I shared all of my
secrets, my deepest longings and my little-girl sadness.
My parents
were divorced that year, and so I began a sort of gypsy’s life traveling from
my new step-father’s home, to my married sister’s home, or to my auntie’s home,
as there didn’t appear anywhere I was really wanted on anything but a
short-term basis.
I was now in high-school and by the time my high-school years were over,
I had been touring and performing in all the cities my family had sent me to
live with my various relatives. Some places, my guitar and my music were so
unwanted that I had to hide it away and slip out of a sleeping household late
at night to the familiar comfort of a coffeehouse or Hootenanny where I would
sit alone on the stage, so flooded with emotion from the stories which I told
in my songs that I learned to sing with tears in my eyes without actually
breaking down and crying even though I felt my heart breaking with empathy for
the pain in the lyrics.
Somehow, I
managed to go to seven different high schools in six different states and yet,
miraculously, graduated in the top 3% of my class. I was very proud of my
little triumph. Living at the time with my married sister, I was desperate to
go on to university and study drama and begged my family to agree to this. My
family, who ought to have understood me, as my father had been a Shakespearean
actor in his youth and my mother had been a Big Band Jazz singer during World
War II, once again gave me a negative answer.
Four months
after my high school graduation, I arranged for a friend to meet me on a quiet
street and whisk me away to freedom on the back of his motorcycle. Wearing a
pair of red jeans, a sky-blue tank-top, sandals and a pair of earrings from
To be continued...
E-mail: zaharroula@yahoo.com
