RIP: Andy Williams

Andy Williams passed away this week at the age of 84. Williams was a charming crooner with a velvet voice and a ready smile. He was not exactly a voice of my generation’s and I was not even aware that he was the voice behind so many songs like the classic “Moon River” (the theme song from Breakfast at Tiffany’s), for instance.

Yet I feel compelled to honour him in my own very small way with this post on my blog because Andy Williams is very much part of my memory and conscience as a very young boy. When my family and I lived in Luanda, Angola back in the early 1970s I was barely at an age to have conscious memory. I do have very fleeting memories of those days in Luanda of which some of my family members speak so fondly. Slivers of reminiscence flit through my mind of playing with my Matchbox dinky cars at the front of our house, watching my brothers play football in a vacant field behind our house, sitting on the beach and eating clams opened right there or going on the breezy ferry ride across to the island of Moussulo.

But memory can play tricks on us. What we think is our memory can sometimes be the vivid reminiscences of others who were older or could better recall at the time, in the case of my life in Luanda the recollections of mostly my mother and, to a lesser extent, my brothers. Photographs also bear witness to what I sometimes think may be my own recollections when they are nothing more than that – witness to what occurred, not to what I remember.

Yet music has a funny, subliminal way of seeping into our sub-conscious and indeed being the means by which we do recollect, we do remember. At least for me it does, as I am sure it does for many others. A voice, a song, an album, a soundtrack – these are my aural memory collectors, especially of my youth. That much I do know.

And for all the music that I no doubt heard during our years in Luanda, there are only two songs that have stuck in my aural memory as being synonymous with our happy, lucky time in that humid, sub-tropical colonial Portuguese city of the early 70s – and they are “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack and “Solitaire” by Andy Williams.

I even to this day remember so well the album cover to Andy Williams’ “Solitaire,” which I no doubt must have seen and even stared many times during that time, and which is as moody and perfect as any album cover of the 1970s:

So, Mr Williams, I may not have grown up with all your music or even known all of your hits. I may not even have bought any of your records. But forever more your smooth, rich voice will forever be etched in my memory of when I was very young boy and my family was intact and we lived in a grand house in a beautiful colonial African city. For that alone I am forever in debt, as no doubt are many millions for having had the privilege of hearing your sublime voice that defined entire eras.

RIP Andy Williams.