February Features
Continued: Patricia Lamb Conn: Connecting with Ragtime's Glory Days
Pat played ragtime surreptitiously anyway. Eventually, she had eight years of lessons and was able to play along with her father. She remembers, "I'd play up at the top with my one hand, and he'd play where he was supposed to with his two hands. Every once in a while a piece would jump up an octave, but where I was playing there was no octave to go up to. So, I stayed where I was, and he'd move up and he'd hit my hand. I'd say to him, 'Get down where you belong. This is my part.' But it was fun."
Pat recalls her father encouraging her pianistic efforts. "I remember one time," she said. "He was drying dishes, I think, and I was in playing the piano. I think I was playing 'Patricia Rag' at the time. [Joe Lamb composed "Patricia Rag" long before Pat's birth, and the similarity of names was purely coincidental.] I was sort of patting myself on the back, thinking I was doing such a good job with this thing. All of a sudden, he hollers in to me from the kitchen, 'Will you count that thing, Pat? One and two and one and two and-.'
"I said, 'Oh, gosh.' Of course, I never counted then, and I still don't count."
Pat recalls her father's playing the piano nightly after dinner, and the kids enjoying every minute of it. Although he would often play his rags, going from one to the other. At first Pat didn't realize the rags had names. In fact, some didn't. "He'd play something, and I'd say to him, 'What's that? That's nice.'
"He'd say that it had no name. I'd say to him, 'Have you got it written down some place?'
"He'd say, 'No.'
"I'd say, 'Why don't you write it down?'
"He'd say, 'No, nobody cares anything about it. Why should I bother?'"
"Sometimes he would bring home some of the popular songs of the day from the music store. I thought it was wonderful when he could get this music. He'd play them for awhile, and then he'd go back to playing his own stuff. All of us kids would sing along with the songs that he had written. It was just fun."
Pat was referring to the songs that Lamb had composed for the annual charity minstrel shows for his church that ran from 1929 through 1935. I asked her how she came to know the words to these songs. Apparently it wasn't difficult, because her bedroom was directly above the living room where Lamb held regular rehearsals for several months before the shows.
"I'm trying to sleep, and I'm thinking, 'I wish they'd stop.'
"But," she continued, "then they had a dress rehearsal, which was always on a Sunday afternoon, that the kids could go to. I'll never forget how it was. I had heard these songs for weeks before. When I went to the show and heard them, I was thinking, 'That's my father up there, leading all these people singing!' It was nice."
Pat's childhood summers were spent at a cabin in Vermont that Joe Lamb had purchased on the advice of a physician to benefit her brother's asthma. Lamb used the carpentry skills he had learned from his father to renovate the rather decrepit structure and to finish the second floor. Then Amelia and the kids would go there for the summer, and he would join them every other weekend.
Pat was sent to high school at St. Francis Xavier Academy for young ladies, where her schooling ended. She explained, "I never went to college. I was going to go, but when I got there it was too overwhelming for me -- too many people -- because I came from a very small high school."
Since college was no longer an option, Pat had to get a job. An employment agency sent her to a bank branch in midtown New York at Seventh Avenue and 39th Street. Her father worked at Madison Avenue and 40th Street, so they would ride the train together in the morning. Pat recalls, "When I told him where I was going to go to work, he says to me, 'Oh, you're going to be right near Holy Innocents Church. You can go to church on your lunch hour.'
"Well, maybe I did a couple of times, but more than likely I went up to Macy's to shop."
Pat continued to work at the bank, starting as a file clerk, then was promoted to payroll clerk, bookkeeper, and note teller until her marriage and subsequent pregnancy.
Pat and her husband, Bill Conn, who accompanies her to festivals, were childhood playmates dating back to when Pat was 10 years old. They met in Copake Lake, N.Y., where Bill's aunt and Pat's grandmother had summer homes.
Pat explained, "But I lived in Brooklyn, he lived in Queens, so we didn't see much of each other except in the summertime. Then, being that I went to a girls' high school, it was up to the girls to invite the boys to the prom. I didn't know any boys except Bill, so I asked him if he wanted to go with me, and he did, so we went together. Afterwards, I wrote a note thanking him for taking me, and I said I hope he had a good time. He sent me back a penny postcard and all he wrote on it was, 'I did -- WPC.' Just his initials -- he didn't even sign his name. So, I got very annoyed at that, and I thought, 'I'm not going to be bothered with him.'"
Pat and Bill lost track of each other for awhile. With the advent of World War II, Bill was drafted into the Army. "All of a sudden I got a letter from him. He had just returned to the Army from a furlough and was getting ready to go overseas."
February 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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