While I may have considered Rush a glitch in Jeff's musical history, his overall taste was pretty much the same as mine. We even shared an enthusiasm for (Harry) Nilsson, whose early music, with its old-timey feel, unexpectedly impressed my father. So I guess my taste is terrible, too. Jeff wasn't there to defend himself and I let the matter pass, though I couldn't help but think, "This from a woman whose favorite group is The Lemonheads . . . "

But music, like politics and religion, is something you cannot debate. Each of us has different, often peculiar musical favorites for reasons even we might not understand. Everyone's favorites are valid. (I am suspicious, however, when I visit someone's Facebook and see listed under "favorite music" an obscure group – Tonawanda Toesuckers – most likely concocted in an effort to appear cool. The appearance of cool is often a factor is deciding what music we publicly admit to enjoying.)

Since that conversation with Elyse, I've given much thought to my musical taste and how I might account for it. Here's my story and I'm sticking to it . . . until additional information is jarred loose from my memory:

THE YEAR was 1942 when my mother and I teamed up to do something so incredibly foolish that I wonder if it scarred me for life. Mind you, my mother's heart, as always, was in the right place when she encouraged her four-year-old son to take his toy guitar out on the front porch and sing his two favorite Gene Autry songs, "You Are My Sunshine" and "Back in the Saddle Again."

Perhaps she, like a lot of moms, mistakenly thought her child was a prodigy, when, in fact, I was serving out my term as the Russet Lane dork. Waiting for me on the porch were a few children who lived on the street. They were older than I was, some of them by several years. To encourage their cooperation and their applause, my mother handed out cookies. (How and why they assembled on our front porch remains a mystery.)

I started to sing "You Are My Sunshine." Seconds later a cookie whooshed past me and crumbled against the four-foot wall that enclosed the porch. Then another cookie, and another. I don't think I made it past the second line of the song.

Someone shouted, "Cowboys always kiss a girl!" And I was urged to do just that. I lurched toward Patty Bagozzi, then seven or eight years old, but she fled the porch and raced home while the rest of the kids enjoyed a good laugh.

Thus my concert career ended in a chaotic scene that could have been used in a "Blues Brothers" prequel. Had I been less humiliated and more aware of what had just happened, I might have considered a career in comedy.

THE EXPERIENCE tested my allegiance to my first favorite singer who was a movie cowboy. I might have forgotten the debacle, except it had been such a neighborhood hit that I heard about it over and over and over for several years.

My parents may have taken me to at least one Gene Autry movie, though most likely I learned the music from his weekly radio show. At my age – and during this particular era – most of a child's waking hours were spent outdoors. There was no television to hold us indoors and feed us a stream of politically correct tunes sung by puppets or cartoon characters or soft-spoken men in cardigans. Something about Autry and his music – I don't recall what that something was – appealed to me. That may seem a strange starting point, but I say better Gene Autry than Barney the dinosaur.

No matter, I went through my Gene Autry phase as quickly as my younger daughter Meridith would abandon New Kids on the Block many years later.

At 7, I took a detour that eventually went nowhere. It began when my parents left my toddler sister with my grandmother and other relatives back at the Sandy Pond cottage we had rented and took me with them to nearby Pulaski, NY, to see "A Song to Remember," a movie about composer Frederic Chopin. I liked Cornel Wilde, the actor who played Chopin, and loved the composer's music that was featured in the film. My mother, whose maiden name was Smolinski, was Polish, so was Chopin, which meant, I guess, that his music was in my blood (duking it out with "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling").

My parents got carried away with the idea that I might be the next Chopin. Soon I found myself taking piano lessons. After an encouraging start, I ran into a brick wall. In less than a year I knew I'd never master the instrument, never even come close, but the lessons continued for five years, by which time my sister was taking them, too . . . eventually with the same result.

So for the first several years of my life my musical influences were Gene Autry and Frederic Chopin. Go figure.

Neither would exert influence later on. The one significant musical experience of my childhood may have taken place in our attic where my parents kept a huge Victor-Victrola that at one time must have belonged to my grandparents. It was not electric; you cranked a handle to start the turntable. There also were a few records, all but one was cracked and broken. That one survivor was a huge record, probably a couple of inches wider than most 78 rpm discs, and it contained two marches by John Philip Sousa. While never a huge fan of march music, I nonetheless was affected by it. That's what I concluded when I reviewed my life in music. (One day I gave that Victrola one crank too many. Something snapped and it stopped working. My father gave it away, probably to someone whose children later became rich after an appearance on "Antiques Roadshow.")

DURING the 1940s – and well into the early 1950s – there wasn't much of a generation gap in music. If you surveyed families, you'd likely find children, parents and grandparents often were fans of the same singers and songs. It's not like there was much choice. A handful of record labels controlled popular music. Each label had a stable of performers who were designated to sing certain songs. There was little opportunity for new composers or singers – or new record labels. The pop mainstream was very wide, though there were some music lovers who explored the fringes – jazz, folk, country (sometimes called Western or hillbilly) and rhythm and blues (which at the time was called race music.) So, yes, there was a cultural music gap out there somewhere, as well as a geographical music gap, but these were insignificant as far as the national radio networks were concerned. The US of A was one, big, happy musical family.

Music filled a much smaller niche on radio in those days, particularly on stations with a network affiliation. Those stations, always with the strongest signal in any city, carried quiz shows, mysteries, dramas, situation comedies, and kid-friendly adventures such as "Superman," "Jack Armstrong," "Captain Midnight" and "The Lone Ranger." The primetime gauge to current pop music was "Your Hit Parade," which featured the songs Americans of all ages were enjoying (though we might not enjoy the versions performed by this program's resident singers). Also, the most popular radio personalty of the day was Arthur Godfrey, who also had his own cast of musical regulars (Janette Davis, Frank Parker, The Mariners and others) through whom popular songs were filtered. So even when I was exposed to popular music, it often wasn't performed well.

If you've seen Woody Allen's "Radio Days," you have a good idea of how it was back then. I loved the movie; it brought back many memories of my youth. Had I made "Radio Days," I would have included the Major family's Sunday ritual which involved a few of my father's favorite programs. My father loved music – unlike me, he had a fine voice and sang in the village's annual minstrel show – but was hung up on songs and performers from the 1920s and early '30s. He also liked the steel guitar, which was featured on what he called "cowboy music." Al Jolson was his favorite singer, Buddy Clark a close second. (Regarding the latter, Clark might well have been the best pop singer of his time, even better than Bing Crosby and the young Frank Sinatra. To paraphrase the old Sara Lee slogan, nobody didn't like Buddy Clark, who, tragically, died in a plane crash in 1949 at the age of 38.)

Anyway, in the late '40s we had no record player. For my father, who went through World War II working five-and-a-half days a week at the Solvay Process Company, his best opportunity to relax and listen to his kind of music was on Sundays after we returned from Mass. A Syracuse radio station presented programs that featured some of my father's favorite bands – Sammy Kaye, Wayne King and Russ Morgan. One or the other provided background music for our Sunday afternoon dinners – except when the meal was delayed and we'd wind up doing our chewing to the sound of my mother's favorite program – an hour of polka music. Subconsciously, my sister and I must have plotted revenge.