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Ballad of Emma Virginia Alderman

uploaded: Thu, Jun 18, 2020 @ 10:43 AM

by	Victoria Melfi
length	3:37
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This is an original piece written in 1997. It was intended to be a narrative performed as a contemporary Art-Song. (An art song is most often a musical setting of an independent poem or text,intended for the concert repertory as part of a recital).
Lyric:

Emma Virginia Alderman is the most overprotective mother in the world.
I believe in many ways the changes our country is going through have influenced her life and caused her to be an overprotective mother.
She reminds me of a mother hen protecting her baby chicks from all the unnatural elements.
Yet occasionally she exposes her children to the forgotten ways of life, telling them of the struggles she went through.
Born July Twenty-second Nineteen thirty-two during the Great Depression. The thirties were the worst time for growing up.
She remembered at six years old her mother being too proud to stand in government bread lines to receive bags of rice and meat. As a child she knew how tough times affected her family. Her father once employed by Western Union as a telegrapher, lost his job. Then her family moved from several apartments struggling through the Depression.
At nine years old she raised her brother and two sisters because her parents were out looking for jobs that were scarce.
In Nineteen-forty-one while living in a government project a newspaper boy came running through the neighborhood shouting “extra, extra, Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor!”
Later, not sure what was happening she sensed that a transition from hard times to a more promising time began with a promise from Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying:
“Two chickens in every pot,
Two chickens in every pot”.
She thought the president saved the world.