Death of a Younger Brother #

It just occurred to me when I was trying to track down my timeline of when I started writing music and it wasn’t until I heard the story from a Songwriting Coach who talked about losing her Father at age eleven. Not having the words to express this grief for such a young person to experience this level of trauma, she turned to music to get those emotions out. That’s when it struck me I was about eleven when my two-and-a-half-year-old brother died of a weak heart. I was completely broken as we had been very close as Mom and Dad went on a nine-week European vacation and left us under the care of my Aunt and Uncle. I took care of my little brother Lyndon as my other brother was busy being upset that relatives were living in our house and using it like it was their own. I don’t know what he expected them to do but he for some reason just could not let it go.

Lyndon and I would take bike rides together, he would sit on the bar of my bike side saddle and we would go up and down the street. When it was time for me to go back to school, I always came home for lunch as that was our dinner and in the evening we would have a lighter supper. He would always be waiting at the end of the driveway waiting for me with my bike ready for our ride up and down the street before we had dinner. I often think that life would have been very different had he lived and grown into adulthood. I might not have been all into my music as I have always been.

Anyway, shortly after his death, I found the connection between the chords that I practiced every day and how they related to modern music. These were the same chords that I was trying to learn on the Guitar. I started experimenting with these chords and flipped them around and doodled with them until I wrote my first song. I was so excited that I had made up my song. It wasn’t much but I felt better after I completed it and taught my brother that could sing, how to sing it we were at the start of the Schulz Brothers.

This connection with the chords that I discovered also created a renewed interest in the guitar once again and this time, no raised neck and Hawaiian music I was going to learn how I could make this guitar play those chords. I practiced and worked it and even came up with different fingering than what they suggested to make those extra hard chords work. For a long time after that, the guitar became my main instrument and I found it easy to write songs with it. Our Dad set my brother and me up with several engagements. I remember playing at the German Church in Edmonton, our church several times, some political rally at some country hall. Most of the time we were doing original songs that I had written. I play the guitar and my brother sings. Once in a while, I would play the piano and he would sing.