Why every family needs a summer song that stands the test of time

By Walter Hesford | FāVS News Columnist

Around a campfire this summer I entertained — or bewildered — grandsons and their wives, great grandkids and assorted friends with a melodramatic rendition of what I consider to be the Hesford family ballad. This was a song my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins always sang watching the sun set over a pond in southeastern Massachusetts as we sat outside my great uncle’s cottage.

This is certainly my favorite summer song. If you google “favorite summer song,” you’ll find lots of lists with popular tunes. On one list, the Beatles’ “Here comes the sun” is No. 1. Beach Boy songs are also high on the list. One might assume, however, that every generation has its own favorite summer song. 

Often radio stations and local newspapers ask listeners and readers to name the song they think captures the essence of summer they are currently experiencing. As I write, Inland 360 is asking readers to nominate songs that say summer to them.

Songs Around the Campfire: A Tradition Worth Keeping

I wonder how many of these songs are learned well enough so that they can be shared around a campfire or by folks of various ages watching the sun set. Many of the songs that might be shared during summer or anytime used to be learned by children: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”; “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”; “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”; “On Top of Old Smokey (or Spaghetti),” etc. Such old songs cut across political lines. I hope children are still being raised on them.

I realize, however, that my song repertoire doubtless reflects my ethnicity and class. Other songs I grew up reflect my experience in vacation Bible schools and Boy Scout camps. I fondly remember “Softly falls the light of day, As our campfire fades away. Silently each Scout should ask, Have I done my daily task? Have I done and have I dared, Everything to Be Prepare?”

Lyrics like these are dear to my heart, but why would those without similar experiences relish them? Perhaps the existence of a common song culture is an illusion. 

Even if this is the case, I think it a good thing for families and other groups of people to get together and share summer songs, summer sounds, including the sounds of nature.

If sitting outside at twilight, one might hear some lovely tunes from frogs, bugs and birds. Back east, the faint buzz of mosquitoes was ubiquitous. Around our Chatcolet cabin, if my ears were sharp enough, I’d hear the high pitches of bats catching insects. Also catching insects overhead are twittering swifts. Higher up, night hawks may be streaming and screeching across the skies. If I’m lucky, I might be haunted by the faraway call of the loon.

Late at night, the barred owl may be heard hooting. One of my grandson’s claims that a hooting owl guided him and his friends from their campsite down to the lake to go skinning dipping at midnight.

Nature’s songs of summer are available to all who can get outside. The close of summer is heralded by the chirping of crickets, mating and dying into autumn. 

A Tragic Ballad and a Family Legacy

The song sung by the Hesford family mentioned at the outset of this column is “The Child’s Beacon Light.” It offers a melancholy tale of a lighthouse-keeping family who, against the pleading of the daughter, little May, took from the window a light she had placed there, causing a ship to crash into rocks. It has a great chorus, sung by little May: “Oh papa, dear papa, don’t take it away. Remember the sailors far out on the bay. If he had foreseen what would happen that night, He’d have left in the window the child’s beacon light.”

According to the website of the English Folk and Dance Society, this traditional ballad came from Newfoundland. How it migrated down to Boston by 1900, why it became a favorite of my grandmother recently immigrated from Gotland, why she taught it to her eight kids around a piano … all this is a mystery. 

All I know is that I feel very fortunate to have a family song that held us together through many summers. Now most of my old Boston family is gone. What I have is memories of our song.

I wish for your family a good song that sticks with you down through time.