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Graduation is in the air and my cousin Cindy’s daughter follows her brother by crossing the stage at Union College in Tennessee in her own right earning a Bachelor’s degree in Music.

Now, for as long as I can remember, Miss Courtney was aiming for her spot amongst the many teachers the McClerren side of my family has produced through the generations which would include her mother who recently retired from teaching (well, at least day-to-day…I’m sure there are lessons being imparted even if there’s not a captive audience in a classroom…once you’ve been a teacher, it never truly leaves you).

So…graduation and then off to a classroom at some point in the future to teach her love of music which is another huge McClerren and Williams tradition that has touched us all through the ages.

Or so we thought.

According to Cindy, a funny thing happened when Courtney was sitting a final examination in “musicology”.

Musicology is the academic, research-based study of music, as opposed to musical composition or performance. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.

Wikipedia

I’ll confess that I honestly had no clue what musicology is and had to look up the definition to see that it’s something I’ve known and loved all my life but never had a term for it.

But Courtney was hooked by the musicology bug and after a bit of a scramble that involved a college much closer to the family farm in Illinois and then one left turn in the general direction of Albuquerque later, she’s been accepted to study for a Master’s in Musicology at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Lord knows she’s going to have a target rich environment to study just about any sort of music she’s of a mind to examine in the immediate vicinity…what with Elvis’ old stomping grounds in Tupelo just next door, Nashville, Memphis, St Louis, the Delta Blues region surrounding Clarksdale, and the home of jazz an easy drive down I-55 through Jackson and on to New Orleans.

I gave a reply to Cindy’s announcement where she’d expressed a bit of surprise in the change of plans but trusts the higher power that’s always guided Courtney…it was a tale of eagles flying where the winds will take them and trusting that it is good (which is a much nicer version of the mama eagle story Dad liked to tell me to encourage me to fly off but find my own nest!).

And that’s how out of the big list of songs I started with that I ended up spinning these tracks encompassing the thoughts of flying as an eagle, dealing with unexpected change, and a play on the Ole Miss mascot!

Congratulations and all the best in your new studies and stomping grounds which ironically is the one part of the state I never visited when Dad and I were stationed at his final posting in Jackson as the regular Army liason to the Mississippi Army National Guard which meant when they wanted to get all of the toys for their monthly weekend training and the two weeks at Camp Shelby, he was their guy to pick up the phone to the Pentagon and order up all of the goodies to be flown down on C-5A Galaxy aircraft to Keesler AFB for the good old boys to put to good use in the bush.

Game 1 Warm-Ups

Post-Game

In the gallery below, you can see that I had a huge selection of tracks to choose from and there’s at least six ways I could spin the tunes and tell the story I wanted to tell. What was kind of amazing is that the entire playlist came together in about fifteen minutes once I knew the theme… 🙂