Bill Moeller Commentary: Keeping Myself Awake at Night

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Let me see a show of hands; how many of you ever heard of — or can remember — who Clara Edwards was?  

If you answered, “That’s easy, she was on nearly every episode of the Andy Griffith Show,” you’d be only partially correct ,because the Clara Edwards I’m thinking of was a songwriter born in 1880. Her real name was Clara Girlish and she lived until 1974.

I’m bringing this up because, recently, I laid awake most of the night trying to think of who recorded the song “With the Wind and the Rain in Your Hair” and what was the song’s history?  And no, even with that title, it wasn’t written about Washington state!  

Clara wrote the melody and Jack Lawrence provided the song’s words sometime around 1930, but it didn’t become popular until a recording by Pat Boone in 1959. I’m turning into a critic here, but while he was one of the most popular singers back then, I never thought he brought much emotion to a song. Find that out for yourself by entering his name on your computer. Boone sang songs nicely, but it’s the words — simple words — that placed this song in my memory and kept it there all these years. By the way, can you remember the last time you heard a quiet love song played on the radio?

While copyright restrictions keep me from writing all of the lyrics, the song begins with “Last night we met, and I think of you yet with the wind and the rain in your hair.”  

Simple words, but — to me — they’ve remained unforgettable. You don’t suppose I’m turning into a romantic old coot, do you?  

Oh, well, since I’ve been just about everything else in my lifetime, I might as well let my heart tell me where to go from here. Come to think of it, couldn’t that be good advice for anyone getting closer to the ribbon at the finish line of life?

Ms. Edwards wrote music in just about all of its forms and published at least 76 songs in her career. Some were popular songs, some were religious and some were classical. Her music was sung by such opera stars as Lily Pons and Ezio Pinza. Besides the aforementioned Pat Boone, the song I’m writing about was recorded by the Bob Crosby orchestra with Marion Mann singing the words, Kay Kyser’s orchestra, and jazz great Stan Getz, among others.



Clara grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, and studied music at the Cosmopolitan School of Music in Chicago. She married physician John Milton Edwards before finishing her degree, and the couple moved to Vienna where she continued her studies and had a daughter. They came back to New York where he died two years later, and she returned to Mankato. She left her daughter there with family members and began to try to make a living in music. 

Her early career was as a singer, touring in vaudeville. Somewhere around the “flapper” years of the 1920s she began writing music: sometimes with lyrics by Jack Lawrence and sometimes providing the words herself. 

The song will last forever in my mind — if my mind lasts forever, and the odds of that happening get shorter with each day.

And now it’s time again to pass along another way to tell if old age is showing. Adele Martin suggests, “You know you’re getting older when you remember when the clerk in the department store across from the old St. Helens hotel in Chehalis sent your purchase money up to the second floor to the cashier in a little container traveling like a cable car. She sent it back down with your change.”  

My goodness, I remember the same procedure being used by J. C. Penny’s in Centralia!

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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.