Musicians Without Mothers Made Music Theirs

Mozart's parents lived to see him succeed as a musician. So did Michael Jackson's parents, and Prince's parents and Joni Mitchell's parents. You can make it in the music industry without dead parents. But...

But ... particularly if your mother dies or abandons you or is sent away when you're young, like:

Johann Sebastian Bach, whose mother died in 1694 when he was 9 years old and father died in 1695 when Bach was 10:

"He [Bach] lost his parents at the age of ten. And I think that drama, that shattering experience, formed his outlook on the world for the rest of his life. He felt abandoned. He felt the world would be a deceitful, untrustworthy place. This worked very well with his religious understanding as a Lutheren where the same attitue towards the world was preached.

"In many ways what he was going to do with his music was to create his own world, his own better world, the perfect world. In a sense he himself was going to become a creator."

...if you have no mother, you may take comfort and refuge in music creation. If you're like Bach, or if you're like...

John Lennon, who was given up by his mother when he was 5 years old, then reconnected with her as a teen, then lost her permanently when she was in a car crash when he was just 17, or

Paul McCartney, or

Aretha Franklin, or

Debbie Harry (Blondie), or

Madonna, or

Eric Clapton, or

Beethoven, or

Jimi Hendrix, or

James Brown, or

B.B. King, or

Quincy Jones, or

Willie Nelson, or

to be continued ...





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.