CHARLES E.J. MOULTON has been a stage performer since age eleven. His trilingual, artistic upbringing, as the son of Gun Kronzell and Herbert Moulton, lead to a hundred stage productions, countless cross-over concerts, work as a bandleader and as an acting teacher. He is a regular contributor for Idea Gems, has written for Shadows Express, Cover of Darkness, Vocal Images and Pill Hill Press. He is a tourguide, a big-band-vocalist, a filmmaker, a painter, a voice-over-speaker, a translator, is married and has a daughter. Charles E.J. Moulton's passion is creative versatility. His short story collection, Aphrodite's Curse: 21 Tales of Love and Terror can be purchased by clicking the link. Homepages:http://www.reverbnation.com/charlesejmoulton/
All Because of Music
1. The Boogie Woogie
Let’s go, Big Mama!
Come on and put on your dancin’ shoes,
Board the Boogie Express.
The driver beats his drum,
The conductor carries a steel guitar,
The girls in the bar-car smash their tamborines,
The locomotive is a pure staccato,
The tracks are drumsticks,
The electricity is a keyboard,
That invites us to board the Boogie Express.
Well, Big Mama sits down and wails on a blues scale,
Sucking on musical eye candy,
Little Joe the Jumpster puts on his best Sunday suit,
Only to swirl down the aisle,
He throws the wigs off the seniors,
The ticket master doing the moonwalk
As we take a trip into the moonlight serenade,
We are getting down to groove
Boarding the bright beyond!
2. Country, Western or Both
Well, you come to the promised land now, Cowboy,
We thrive on slide guitars.
Hold on.
Say what?
You ain’t got your slide guitar with ya?
Get down to the barn,
They got plenty of guitars down there.
Ya got the rhythm,
The twang,
The straw,
The hat,
You got the beer, the staccato beat,
You got the faith, the glissando,
You got the gals, the groove,
And Jimmy playin’ his bass?
You got the horse you rode in?
Hear
Amy-Sue
boppin’
to
the
ding-
dang-
dong?
The good old boys are cruisin’ the square dance,
They’re Swinging,
Singing.
The South is gonna roll tonight!
3. Rock ‘n Roll
You’re there in your midst
I hear you.
Beyond all those doubters,
Beyond all the people,
Who all said you wouldn’t make it.
They all doubted you,
Saying you didn’t have the guts.
But I knew you did.
You’re a comet.
So I hear you,
You’re there, right at the centre of attraction.
The express train
On a stage as big as the universe.
In the midst of all that attraction,
In the spotlight,
Above the crowd.
You’re in heaven.
I hear your lead guitar,
Your wailing voice,
The wailing keyboards,
Your excellent drummer,
Vain as Narcissus,
Your cool bassplayer,
The intellectual,
Your guitarist,
Brilliant,
Your swinging chords,
Groovy,
Your frantic audience,
Ingenius.
I hear you,
And I like what I hear.
4. World Music
The desert has a secret,
It speaks the language taught to him by the beduins.
The water loves your splash,
And the Cherokee knew how to interpret that splash as love.
The wind goes home to dance before he sings,
And the aborigine plucks out his digeridoo
just to play tunes that are a 1000 years old.
The fire sparkles when Amor Brujo throws his sparks on the water,
And the Flamenco Queen throws her skirt to the side,
Throwing sparks,
Filled with Passion.
The secret, the splash, the dance, the spark,
The four elements,
All of the magic is there inside the dance,
Inside your love of music,
Inside the lullaby sung to the baby,
Inside the fire that is the love you carry inside you,
Inside the great things people do,
Inside the hopes inside a first kiss,
Inside the surpising harmony of a diminished chord,
Inside the sunrise of augmentation,
Inside a minor chord that turns into a major chord,
Inside the simplicity of a complex and ancient tune,
A tune never written down,
Because it was passed on from generation to generation,
From father to son,
From mother to daughter.
The magic,
It’s inside the fear of loneliness
Transformed into eternal passion,
Inside any embrace.
Four words that matter to the World,
Matter to music,
Four words that matter to Music,
Matter to the world,
Four words that tell us why art matters,
Matter to us in the end,
Four words that give us a hint
Telling us that creativity is the soul of the World.
Love
is
Expression
and
Communication
is
Excellence
There’s hope in the world,
When art thrives and music matters to spiritual beings.
5. Classical Music
The echoes of excellence thrive inside a sonata,
Variations on a scale of love,
The wonders of a toccata,
Climbing four stairways toward heaven,
Inspiring the braincells to dance a menuet within the heart,
The symphony of communcation
Turns into a dance of fire
Within every single heart,
There is a genius inside everyone,
And the musician,
Thrives on hard work,
After years of practice,
After years of hard work,
Broken fingernails breeding hope,
Bleeding fingertips transformed into applause,
Scarves for the singers,
Endless scales for the brave,
Grey hairs for the proud,
All so that the listener can sit there in his chair
And turn into a legend in his own time,
If only for a moment,
He is free,
Feeling the one entity that is his or her identity,
Reminding him or her of who he or she is,
Why he or she is here,
Music reminds him or her of his or her truth:
He or she is a soul.
Music is the stuff of life.
It leads us back home,
Spreads light to where darkness rules,
Changes the heart,
Turns the darkest and shadiest corner into a paradise of flying colors.
It gives us living proof of God’s existance.
6. The Piano Bar
Rudy sits there at the bar,
His Marlboro fuming,
One last tobacco leaf smouldering,
The rocks inside the Scotch long since melted,
Scott wiping the bar,
In the background
Billy, the man with the magic fingers,
Playing “As Time Goes By”,
A man who used to be famous listens to Hupfield’s tune,
Lifting the glass to his lips,
Looking out across the Hudson River,
Sighing.
Rudy laughs,
For that melancholy baby that used to laugh at his jokes,
Proudly wore the necklace of a praying lark,
Now living on Long Island,
Feeling twee about her yaught.
And the diminished chord cries out
To a lonely bird
Inside Rudy’s soul.
As Billy tickles the ivories,
Rudy is reminded of times gone by
And it reminds Scott
Of frantic fraternities
Inside a whiskey glass.
But the ice is melting.
For in the doorway stands a girl from Long Island
Wearing a necklace with the medallion of a praying lark.
The nostalgic soundwaves inside the piano bar
They lead us home
Back to ourselves
All because of music.
© Charles E.J. Moulton
