Many, mostly involving my mother.
My eldest sister played piano and practiced faithfully ... right during Batman. We were allowed 1/2 hour of TV per day, and I picked Batman, which aired right after school. Just as soon as the episode would start, my sister would begin to practice her piano for 1/2 hour. This resulted in quite a few fights. I determined to fight fire with fire once I hit the fourth grade when I started to play trumpet, and I would practice trumpet in the same room as soon as she started to practice piano. She would then go complain to my mother, who responded, "Who taught him that, dear?" I was finally able to watch Batman in peace.
My second eldest sister played guitar, mountain dulcimer, and banjo. She loved to play the old folk songs and sing them, but my favorite of hers was her rendition of John Prine's "You Can't Rollerskate In a Buffalo Herd." She had a grand maul siezure some years ago and it damaged the musical part of her brain, so now she doesn't play anymore.
My elder brother played the radio, but he gave guitar a fair shake. It just wasn't his thing.
When I started to learn trombone, I learned that my father had been a trombone player in his high school and his regiment's band in the Army. That was cool.
I distinctly remember coming home one day from school to the utter amazement that my mother was sitting at the piano - playing and singing some hymns from memory. I had no idea my mother could play the piano. I was probably 14 or so years old then. She sang all the time. Everything. Radio jingles, Hank Williams songs, hymns, anything. She sang at bedtime, usually "The Garden" ...I walk through the garden alone, with the dew still on the roses.... Years later, my neighbor at work and I were working late, and Mac started to play some Patsy Cline. That song came on and I was suddenly an eight year crying over skinned knees being comforted by his mother in his bed by that song. It was so like my mother's voice.
Mother only liked Country music. That was a declaration. Therefore, any music she liked was Country. Some Country albums my mother liked: "Rust Never Sleeps" by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, "Innagaddadavida" by Iron Butterfly, "Tapestry" by Carol King, "Green River" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Summer Breeze" by Seals & Croft, "Swan Lake" by Tschaikovsky and just about everything by Jim Croce and James Taylor. Of course she liked music most of us would recognize as Country as well: Waylon & Willie, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gayle, John Anderson, The Hagg, Little Willie Dixon, Porter Wagoner, Eddie Arnold, etc.'
I have been told that Eddie Arnold was a cousin. My Gram was widowed when my mother was 14 and Uncle Gene was 16. So she had to finish raising those kids on her own in the depression. She was a teacher, so had summers free. She'd take in other kids over the summer and raise them as her own. Two of those young men grew up to be the Statler Brothers. So my mother - literally - grew up with country legends. Eddie Arnold as a second cousin or some such ("kin" in Appalachian Pennsylvania covered anything from brother or mother to third cousin twice removed) and the Statler Brothers in her house. Gram had commentary on everyone from Elvis (he ruined his life when he gave up Gospel music) to Roy Clark (there never was an instrument he couldn't play better than anyone else) to Grandpa Jones (his pipe tobacco smelled awful) - and had met them all. I met none of them. But I think it's cool that decades later I met Roscoe Jones who knew a lot of the same people as my Gram.
