SNGF-Favorite Song

My apologies to Randy, but I'm not going to play by the rules this time.  It would just be too difficult to try and come up with a favorite song.  To put this into perspective, I have over a thousand songs in my iTunes and just about all of them are favorites.  Name a genre, a decade, an era, and so on, and I'll name a favorite song.  In fact, it would be much easier if the challenge were to name your LEAST favorite song.

But what I can do is name the songs or groups that I have associated with different family members.

My grandmother is a classical pianist and organist and former singer (she even sang at the Geary) and choir director so obviously music is a huge part of her life.  The song I always associate with her would be Rhapsody on a Theme on Paganini (18th variation to be precise) by Rachmaninoff:

I remember hearing her play it vividly, though my mother has no recollection of listening to her ever play that.  Whenever I hear organ music it also makes me think of her, if only because she was an organist and it is one of her favorite instruments. 

For my great-grandmother, it isn't so much a song that I associate with her as a bandleader, John Philip Sousa.  In one of the only interviews anyone ever did of her when asked what he favorite music was, she said "Sousa's band" and I never forgot that. 



For my other grandmother (this time paternal) bluegrass always makes me think of her.  For a tiny Italian woman from Michigan, she LOVED bluegrass and country music.  Since she was the only one in the family who was really a fan of that type of music, I don't think anyone really paid attention to what her favorite musicians or songs were. She went to the Grand Ole Opry at least once that I remember though I honestly couldn't say what her favorite songs were. 

For my father, I always associated The Who and The Animals with him, though he was and is a fan of a lot of genres of music, like my mother.  This song in particular reminds me of him and I know it was one of his favorites from his youth:



My mother is little harder to pin down and I frankly can't think of any songs I associated strictly with her.  But both of my parents are HUGE fans of Puccini and I grew up listening to a lot of his work (which I think is why I have such a love/hate relationship with opera...) so I always associate him with my parents and childhood:



Since there are a lot of servicemen in my family (past and present), I always associate Taps with a lot of the men in my tree, especially my grandfathers who were both veterans.



Oh, and since it is Saturday, I just had to include a favorite of my father's which now is also a favorite of mine:



Thanks for the Saturday night fun, Randy (even if I didn't follow the challenge exactly this week)!