The Music Of My Life

We’re going to attempt to post a series of articles focused on each member of the band in order to let you know more about where we all come from. We start it off with an article about keyboardist/vocalist Gayle Swenson and her musical past. This article was written by Gayle and published in NIST Connections as part her real life job as a Writer/Editor in the Public Affairs Office at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD. Enjoy!!!

To my surprise, the article “NISTers on Stage: The Many Musicians of NIST,” that I wrote and posted in NIST Connections in May 2019 turned out to be one of the most popular articles ever to appear in NIST Connections, having been viewed nearly 2,000 times by more than 1,500 NIST employees and associates. The only fiscal year 2019 article to beat it was about the NIST budget and a pay raise for employees. My group leader Jason Stoughton says, “When it comes to internal news, a pay raise is practically unbeatable,” and that makes sense to me.

When I wrote the article about NIST musicians, it was a topic near and dear to me, and I was asked by several people who read it, “Why didn’t you include yourself in the article?” Some had heard me sing the National Anthem at a few NIST awards ceremonies or performing an original arrangement of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with my husband accompanying on guitar at the Engineering Laboratory’s 2018 talent show to benefit the Combined Federal Campaign.

But with all the interesting and very talented musicians at NIST, I really didn’t need to add myself to the mix. And I didn’t want the story to be a shameless plug.

But since you asked…

My paternal family originated in Wales, a country traditionally referred to as “the land of song,” according to Wikipedia. So I suppose music was in our DNA, because my family members — the descendants of James S. Day (originally O’Day in Wales), who was our first ancestor in the Damascus, Maryland, area — have all been very musical. No rich and famous musicians, per se, just folks who love to play instruments and sing.

James played the cornet; my paternal grandfather, two uncles and an aunt played clarinet; another uncle played saxophone; and my father was a talented trombonist (a good choice for a man missing half a finger). Most of them played the piano and all of them sang in and directed choirs at one time or another. My father and one uncle were part of a dance band in the 1950s and all four of the Day male siblings sang in local quartets.

Even my mother, who couldn’t read a lick of music and never took a music lesson in her life, sang in our church choir, and sang well.

Like me, most of my cousins play instruments and/or sing, as do some of their children. My cousins include guitarist-singers in Southern California bands; a pianist in Wasilla, Alaska; and an accomplished composer who is manager of music and education for the Washington National Opera at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. My brother is a songwriter, singer, guitarist, trombonist and drummer who has played in Frederick-area bands since the ’70s, and whose plans include learning to play the banjo.

I’m not making this up — music IS my family. And this list doesn’t even include my musical extended family because they are just too numerous to mention!

It all started with a band

The roots of my family lie deep in a band that’s been around the Damascus area for more than 130 years, the Browningsville Cornet Band. Beginning in 1884 when it was founded, my relatives — starting with my great-grandfather, great uncles, and later some of those relatives listed in previous paragraphs — have performed in concert and marched in parades with the band.

In our corner of small-town America, music and the Day family were just about synonymous. Being a musician in my family wasn’t a choice, really, it was tradition. There wasn’t a house we visited in our family that didn’t have an instrument — most often a piano.  I loved to play my aunt’s pump organ (a great leg workout before exercise was a thing). Although whether or not my grandparents’ piano was a “player piano” that could play music on its own using rolls of perforated paper has been recently debated, someone we knew had one. And my grandparents’ beautiful, and very heavy piano was moved to my house when they left the farm.

I started piano lessons when I was 6 years old and began singing in the church choir at 9. At 14, I took a year of organ classes and by 16 was the primary pianist and organist for my church. You have to be fairly coordinated to play a keyboard with your feet while also playing one or two of them with your hands! A surprising benefit was how that coordination enabled me to become a motorcyclist a few years later.

In high school, I learned a little bit of guitar with a small folk group, but mostly played clarinet in the school’s marching and concert band, where I landed the sweet spot of “first chair.” In the Browningsville Cornet Band during those years, I played the glockenspiel (aka bells) for a time but settled into playing clarinet.

In my late teens and early 20s, I traded performing in choirs and marching bands for going to rock concerts. While my memory of those times is a bit hazy, they satisfied the musical need in my life, and along the way I got to know a few rock musicians in Baltimore and D.C. I even hung out backstage with a few of them at the historic Bayou club in Georgetown.

Changing directions

Then in 1977, due to some major changes in my personal life, I was inspired to begin playing guitar again, and I started writing music. But the only instrument I owned was an electric organ, until…

I began dating a lead guitarist in the Knight Brothers, a Frederick, Maryland-area band. Kris had been playing guitar and performing with bands since he was 14. I loaned him my car while I went off on a month-long backpacking trip to Europe, and when I returned, he had had a small automobile accident, which provided the insurance money that paid for my first guitar. A few months later, I married that lead guitarist, and after 42 years of listening to his amazing riffs, I’m still his biggest fan.

I discovered that I had a gift for guitar picking that I couldn’t explain, much less teach to those who asked me to show them how to play the way I did. With my new guitar in hand, I performed the first song I’d ever written at the beginning of a performance by my brother’s band. From there, I went on to play at home gatherings and eventually became the music minister at my church, where my songwriting career kicked into full gear and I recorded two albums with the church band, Dominion. I also played piano and sang at weddings, including one at Hood College for the daughter of NIST’s Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory Director Bill Anderson.

By 2007, though, I stopped playing and singing because I was “burned out” from raising a family and working a job while simultaneously keeping up musical obligations. Then my brother’s keyboardist left his band, and guess who was invited to replace her?

I’d done several cameo vocals on the band’s first two records, and although it took me a while to decide, I joined the band, as did Kris a month later. For the past decade we’ve written songs, sung, and played our instruments around Maryland and Pennsylvania as members of the Scott Day Band based in Jefferson, Maryland. For over a year, the band has been recording original songs at Tonal Park studio in Takoma Park, Maryland, that we hope will be available on Apple Music this year.

The music we perform may never be heard on your local Top-40 radio station. We like to say it’s music with a message of hope. While it’s probably best known as contemporary Christian music, others say it’s religious. All I know is that it’s a far cry from the hymns I once played in church, and the songs simply reflect how we get through everyday life. We’re a six-member cross-generational band of 30- to 60-somethings with a taste for rock, soul, jazz and blues, and — since four of us are songwriters — we perform mostly original music.

Our repertoire includes a medley of songs that Scott likes to call “the Boogie Woogie Rock Block” because it begins with a bluesy song written by my husband and ends with two New Orleans-style songs written by our lead singer (in which my brother, following in Dad’s footsteps, breaks out his trombone). And, of course, not only do I sing a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” similar to what we performed at NIST in 2018, but a few of my own originals as well.

Musicians love to play and singers love to sing, and I enjoy both, but for me it’s about more than just a catchy tune with a great hook. Music, like other arts, is a precious gift to humanity. Sometimes it just offers pure joy for both performer and listener. At other times, it is a container that opens the listener’s soul to grasp a lyrical message penned from the deepest emotions of a songwriter. Personally, my goal is to write songs that matter — the ones that might change someone’s life for the better.

Southern novelist Pat Conroy wrote that “without music, life is a journey through a desert.” I’m grateful to my ancestors for a life that has been anything but dry! So, there you have it — “NISTers on Stage—Part Deux.” As radio personality Paul Harvey used to say: “And now you know the rest of the story.”