A Trip Down a Musical Memory Lane
+ a writing prompt about the song you can't get out of your head
Welcome to Writing in Company. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points for you to write about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, take a look back through the archive for one that does. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.
I’ve had a snippet of an old spiritual in my head today.
“Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child….a long way from home…..”
I’m not a motherless child. I will see my mother later this week. The song swirls around in me anyway. It rises up and out through my lips as I take the dog out, trim the runaway basil in the pot on the porch, and move the laundry from washer to dryer.
“Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child….a long way from home…..”
I think back, wondering—why this song? Why now?
A few days ago, on a drive home from a week with old friends, I listened to a short radio piece1 about the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. It described some of the music of that day—Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mahalia Jackson—and played a few snippets of music—though not the song I ended up singing.
Days after I heard a little gospel on the radio, a different song bubbles up and out when I’m puttering around the house. Why? I know that music is a powerful tool, linking memory and meaning, but what makes a song phrase pop into our heads for seemingly no reason at all?
I did a little digging.
Scientists say that the auditory cortex is the part of the brain that processes sounds and stores musical memories. The term öhrwurm—earworm—was first used in Germany to describe the common experience of getting a song stuck in the brain. A 2023 study from Australia2 described how the chorus of a familiar song, recently heard, is most likely to become an earworm. If it happens just once, it’s called a “mind-pop.” But when it happens repeatedly (in a “non-psychotic” way), it’s called “involuntary musical imagery.”
My decidedly non-scientific (and potentially incorrect) reading of the study led me to a new idea about why I’m singing the song I’m singing. The study hypothesizes that musical memories get encoded through objects and events, and then later perception of those objects or events will activate the same parts of the brain that helped organize the music in the brain when it was first heard.
I don’t remember when I first heard someone sing “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child….” I’m guessing it was probably a recording of Mahalia Jackson. I do remember listening to her in seminary, thinking that if I could choose to be someone other than myself, it would be someone who could sing like her. And I listened to her a good bit one year. I used her recording of a song—I’m not even sure which one—as a soundtrack for a seminary project I put together with images and scripture, back when PowerPoint was still new.
Perhaps her version of Motherless Child was encoded in my brain then, 30 years ago, when I was hanging around and learning with my seminary friends. Then I spent a few days with those same friends last week, learning and telling old stories. On the drive home from our time together, I heard an NPR piece about Dr. King and the music of the March on Washington, and Mahalia Jackson singing a different song. The study would say that some old pathway in my brain—primed by distant encoded memories—lit up, and a tiny gospel earworm was birthed and prepared to emerge.
The study found that earworms show up when we are in a “low attentional state” and our minds are wandering. They sneak up on us when we aren’t trying to study or pay attention, when we aren’t distracted by other visual or auditory stimuli, or by other people. When our brains are relaxed enough to skip along our recently tickled neural pathways, a musical memory slips into our consciousness. We might think it is for no good reason, as in the delightful poem below. But maybe those old patterns have something to tell us about what and who mattered to us in the past, and how music can connect us to what and who matters now, in the present.
a writing prompt
Read the poem below, then write about a musical memory. Perhaps you’ve had an earworm of a song recently. Or perhaps a song comes to mind that connects you to a place and time and community that matters. See where your auditory cortex will take you when you connect it with your pen.
Edited to add: the poem is formatted incorrectly in some views of this post, but it generated good comments. Click through the poet’s name to see it correctly.
For No Good Reason —by Twyla Hansen As if you needed one, as if you could help it, for no good reason a tune out of nowhere pops into your head when you least expect, riffs effortlessly in the folds of your cerebrum— your own private jukebox, your personal music device on random minus the earbuds— drumming itself up to keep you company: here, a little Janis Joplin while you vacuum cat hair; there, a John Denver line as you peel potatoes at the sink. How can others not hear it, this frequent odd gift? Sometimes you forget and blurt the words to the chorus, which, after all, is all you can remember, those take me home, country roads, that feelin’ good was good enough for me, even conjuring the gas station in Colorado back where you, wearing those bell bottoms and that paisley, were about to fill a tank of freedom into the blue VW Bug when Carole King belted out and it’s too late baby, now it’s too late though we really did try to make it and you couldn’t move, couldn’t quit sobbing to the steering wheel that would not console those blues or say what you had left to lose, wouldn’t question why in hell you were going down that road where for no good reason you seemed to be heading. “For No Good Reason” by Twyla M. Hansen from Rock. Tree. Bird. © The Backwaters Press, 2017.
like | comment | share
Let me know what you think about the prompt, or come back and add some of what you write in the comments.
Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!
You can listen to Mahalia Jackson’s version of my musical memory here.
Such a great post, Julie. You've made me think thoughts that have given me goosepimples. I have work to do! 😘
So interesting to me that you’d write today about earworms, as I’ve had that topic on my mind for the last several days. I’ve found myself trying to “replace” an unwanted tune with something--almost anything--else, and it’s nigh impossible. As for “...Motherless Child,” Van Morrison’s version stays with me (no matter that I deplore his anti-Covid-vaccine stance; I’ll always love his music). On the differing visual presentations of the poem, I needed both to fully appreciate it, so I’m actually grateful that happened! Thanks, Julie. I’m looking forward to writing about all this. So, so many music memories...