Chords of Strength Read online

  The first time I ever met my mom

  My parents say that I started walking when I was seven months old. I also supposedly started speaking more in Spanish than English at first. I know I spent a lot of time with my grandma, my abuelita, and I remember the comforting smell of homemade chicken soup simmering in the kitchen, or fresh homemade flour tortillas being grilled for one of our many family get-togethers—the scents mingling with sounds and rhythms of all kinds of pop, dance, salsa or classic jazz. It’s fun to think about this stuff again now, because for the last few years all I’ve ever been asked about was my “music past.” It’s nice to try to remember what it was like before everything changed.

  Like I said, I believe family is so important, especially in Latin culture. When we lived in Florida, my cousins were the center of my universe. My sister Claudia and our cousins were essentially my social life. Without family, we feel empty. They’re the ones who carry you, support you, raise you and love you unconditionally. To me, family is the center of everything. The people on both sides of my family have been really important in my life. They’ve taught me so much about what matters in life and they’ve been my strength throughout mine. I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything without them. So let me tell you about my family.

  My mom, Lupe, was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the youngest of four close-knit sisters, who, like us, loved singing and dancing and would put on all kinds of local shows and performances when they were little kids. She’s really beautiful, my mom. She’s looked the same my whole life. She doesn’t age. Maybe it was all the salsa and merengue, basketball and singing. She’s had six kids (one, a little brother, was stillborn), and she still looks like she’s twenty-five. My mother wasn’t known only for her great personality, but also for her beautiful singing voice, which everyone always says has a beautiful, full sound and tone and a natural sense of expression. She was usually the lead vocal in all the shows she would do with her sisters, and her own mother, my grandma, always had the dream of her youngest daughter becoming a famous singer like Selena or Gloria Estefan. My mother and aunts got plenty of local exposure because in addition to being wonderful performers, they were also skilled basketball players in a town where high school athletics were part of the community’s culture, morale and everyday life. My mom played on the national basketball team and was regularly written about in the local press. My grandfather, her father, was a well-respected journalist in his own right who was known for writing editorials for the town paper. The whole family was well known and liked by the La Ceiba community. But they were extremely poor. My grandparents had always wanted more opportunities for their daughters than what they had growing up in La Ceiba.

  When my mom was twelve, her sisters and mom all met some missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which changed their lives forever. It soon became the center of their lives and they devoted their time to helping the missionaries share their message. When my mother was fourteen, the family decided to move to the United States, where they could participate more actively in their new church and hopefully have more opportunities than they could find in their beloved Honduras. My grandparents also hoped the girls would have more prospects in the United States to meet the right kinds of guys. The family arrived in Florida with big hopes to continue working on their musical goals, especially for my mom, whom they all believed showed real promise as a performer. My grandma would take her youngest daughter to various small venues in Miami, where she would sing and dance in front of crowds that seemed to love her. The small local audiences would respond really well, and some also expressed interest in producing and possibly managing her. My mom and grandma even moved to New York for a while to see if they could figure out what to do with my mother’s talents, but nothing really materialized and they soon returned to Miami. A short time later, my mom would meet my dad, and after a four-month courtship, they were married. Over the next ten years, four of my siblings and I would later be born.

  The Archuleta kids: Claudia, Daniel, Jazzy, Amber and myself

  I was always especially close with my older sister, Claudia, probably because we were only about fifteen months apart and always looked like we were about the same age. We were so imaginative back then, and sometimes I wish I could still access those parts of my creativity today. My younger brother, Daniel, and I were quite opposites. When he was really young, we would have him play different parts in the games or whatever we were playing. He had a LOT of energy and loved to play team sports like baseball and football. I tried T-ball but was more interested in the feeling of just being in the outfield in a sunny day than in who was actually winning. Being so outgoing, Daniel had a lot of friends and spent most of his time with them, and he loved playing team sports like baseball and football, which were never really my thing. I’ve always loved my brother, and although he was Mr. Jock on the outside, he has a very sensitive heart on the inside. He’s also become quite a talented singer/songwriter—all self-taught. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even know that he was learning to play the guitar by downloading tabs off the Internet. But it wasn’t until I was away from home a lot that I really started to realize how much I appreciated him.

  If it’s true what they say about the apple not falling far from the tree, well, we had two trees that were equally passionate about music, because just like my mom, my dad, Jeff, was also born into a family that was deeply rooted in the magic of sound. On his mother’s side, there was my grandma Claudia who had a strong connection to music.

  It began with her dad, “Gramps,” my great-grandpa, who I knew and listened to as he played jazz standards whenever we would go visit him and “Gram.” He was a teacher and also at night was a professional jazz piano player in the late forties, fifties and sixties during the “Big Band” era. His style was very much like Erroll Garner and Nat King Cole. He loved to play and listen to what they call “the standards,” which were songs that jazz musicians liked to play and improvise over the chord progressions of the many wonderful songs of that era. So my grandma Claudia and her sisters were all influenced by these songs as well as many of the classic musicals of that period. They would always perform little skits with choreography and singing for special events or during the holidays.

  I believe family is so important . . .

  Interestingly, my gramps learned to play the trumpet too and during World War II, he was actually a gunner and “Bugler” on his battleship, the USS Pringle. As they were traveling toward Okinawa, they were attacked by a Japanese kamikaze plane, and his adored trumpet sank with the ship! The story goes that he was forced to swim to safety through shark-infested waters and literally had to fight off sharks as he swam. I know he received two Purple Hearts for his courage. When he returned, he never played the trumpet again, but he continued to play piano professionally to support his family and so music became a cornerstone of their lives.

  Anyway, my grandma Claudia was the oldest of her siblings and by far the most musical. That meant she was in charge of the performances that she and her sisters would perform and she loved to choreograph, sing and perform from a very young age. She developed a real passion for music as well as an amazing performance and acting talent. I’m told she had an amazing, powerful singing voice and that she was an accomplished musical theater actress. She performed regularly in musicals, plays and even did commercials, other television gigs, and acted in a few movies. She had the lead role in several theater productions and was well known throughout Salt Lake City as the “little lady with the big voice.” Anytime a film production would come through Utah, she was guaranteed to have some small part. She knew every song by Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby who were a few of her favorites. She also performed songs from the movies and musicals of her time like Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Girl, White Christmas, The Music Man, The Pajama Game, and A Chorus Line, to name a few. She carried on her tradition with my dad and his sisters, and every year during the holidays they would develop musi
cal numbers that the family would all perform, a tradition we continue to this day.

  My dad’s father, James Archuleta, also loved music and sang and performed in a barbershop quartet, which is a really difficult skill because you have to be able to harmonize and your pitch has to be just about perfect. In a barbershop quartet, it’s not only about being up there and singing on your own, but also about knowing how to make beautiful music as part of a group.

  Because of my grandma’s involvement in the theater, it was no surprise that my dad got into musical theater as a child. My grandma and my dad were actually both in a professional production of The Music Man. My grandma was one of the “pick a little, talk a little ladies” and my dad played one of the main roles, the little boy Winthrop, when he was only eleven years old. My dad grew up appearing in other plays too, and as hard as it is for me and my siblings to believe, he tells us that he really enjoyed singing when he was young. He sang and played piano but then, like his grandpa, he discovered the trumpet! I still have a hard time believing that my dad enjoyed singing because all I had really grown up knowing him to be is a jazz trumpet player. We always had a hard time getting him to sing with us, but he would sometimes, reluctantly.

  So my grandma Claudia was twenty when my dad was born and my great-grandma Violet Diehl was only twenty when his mom was born. Since they were both so young, and my dad was the first grandson, he was able to spend a lot of time around his mom’s siblings and grandparents who exposed him to a wide range of music from both generations. This is probably why he had an unusually broad understanding of music for someone his age. My dad grew up in the sixties and seventies, but he had influence from the fifties when jazz music was “pop” music. As he became older, he listened to his dad’s records of the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Everly Brothers, and most important, a few albums from various groups that changed his whole concept of music, Meet the Beatles, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He never looked back and ended up minoring in music in college and playing trumpet with some great bands after graduating. His broad music influences and love and appreciation of music are a big part of who he is today. It’s fun to see how it has literally been passed from generation to generation, and to understand and see how much it has come to influence me. If he had not loved musicals, he would never have recorded that PBS special one night of the tenth anniversary of Les Misérables, and I may not have ever realized how much music would mean to me. I grew up singing songs from musicals, great R & B classics, and many classic pop songs, and my dad often arranged the music just enough to make it different or more special. His influence on me, and the lessons I’ve learned from him about music, are definitely reflected through my own approach to singing.

  After college, he began hosting clinics to teach kids the concepts of improvisation in music, helping them understand how to take a melody and make it their own. He has taught me to think about those same things ever since I was young: the concept of building little surprises and moments into a song, and how important it is to change it up a bit so that it doesn’t always sound the way people are used to hearing it.

  During the time we were in Miami he was able to perform with some of the giants of Latin jazz and had the privilege of playing among many world-class, legendary musicians, such as Arturo Sandoval.

  My mom, my dad, Claudia, and me

  When my parents starting dating seriously, they used to go dancing almost every night at a different club or hotel mostly around Miami Beach. Once they were married and a few years later when Claudia and I were very young, we lived for a time with my grandma and her husband “Angel” for a while at her finca, which is the Spanish word for “farm” or “ranch.” They raised chickens, and my sister and I used to love to go there and play with them. I spent time out back watching the chickens and the new baby chicks for hours on end. When I was about three, we moved from Hialeah to Hollywood—yes, there is a Hollywood, Florida—between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. We moved into a three-bedroom townhome, the first home that our family actually owned. There were ten townhomes in our development, and my sister and I really enjoyed talking to our neighbors and spending time out by the duck pond in the backyard looking for duck eggs. The weather was always humid in the summer months so we spent a lot of time outside playing with the ducks and catching frogs and lizards and tadpoles that we’d find swimming around in the pond. The ducks would always come follow us looking for food, and my mom would give us bread to break into little pieces to feed them. We were happy there and thought it was so wonderful to have such a big house after living in the little one-bedroom apartment we had lived in before. This house had three bedrooms, and to us, it was gigantic! We even had a downstairs and upstairs and a separate room that became our playroom, where we started playing “Dinosaur Land,” which was basically the two of us assembling all our toys (most of which were dinosaur themed) in our own little made-up universe where anything could happen. And, oh boy, everything did happen—flying dinosaurs, and not just pterodactyls, in our Dinosaur Land. Whenever we got a new toy, we would find a way to make it part of Dinosaur Land. That’s about the time my little brother was born. Not Daniel, but the one who was stillborn. My mom went to the hospital to have a baby when I was about two years old and had a full term pregnancy that ended with a stillborn baby boy who looked perfect. It was sad, but our religious beliefs really helped our family to get through it, because we know we’ll get to see him and know him sometime in the future. But sometimes, I can’t help but wonder about him. I wonder if he likes to sing. He would have been in between Daniel and me so maybe he’d have bridged that gap of interests between the both of us. Maybe he’d like sports more than me and like duck safaris better than Daniel.

  Later, when we moved to Utah, my dad helped form a salsa band and he thought it would be great to have my mom as the vocalist and front person with him on trumpet. I remember my mom reminding me of a cross between Gloria Estefan and Selena. I don’t know how it can be that I can’t dance!

  Given our family’s love of music, my mom always treated our opportunities to perform seriously, working on teaching us harmonies to the songs and original choreography for each occasion. She would organize family talent shows including our cousins with different configurations of kids, and every holiday there would be a fun-filled variety show for all the relatives to enjoy. I remember at every Christmas, we’d dress up in playful Santa caps and learn carols in three-part harmony. Then we would go to all our neighbors and sing a few songs to them. My mom was such a whiz at coordinating these performances, and we happily went along with her because it was completely normal for us—it’s just how we grew up. Our mini-shows entailed more than just casually singing songs around the house; we took them very seriously, and everyone was enthusiastic and eager to participate. When we lived in Florida, we were able to get a piano in our house when I was about four years old. My mom wasn’t really a trained piano player, but she did know a few songs and the ones she knew, she played really well. My mom taught me how to play a few familiar Christmas songs including “The Little Drummer Boy.” When I started, I had a really hard time playing it with my hands so small. But I really liked the jumps in my right hand. I used to practice those chords at the beginning until I felt I had it just right!

  my mom always treated our opportunities to perform seriously

  Sometimes I’d sit there and peck out my own melodies. My dad tells me that one time, he asked me what I was playing and I was like “Oh, this is about my dreams.” It was like a chase scene in a movie, and a few days later, my dad said he heard me playing it again. I guess I was composing music without realizing what I was doing at the time.

  In Florida, I started kindergarten at Pasadena Lakes Elementary when I was five. My teacher was Ms. Cruz; the kids called her Ms. Cruel because sometimes she seemed really mean. After living in Hollywood for a few years, my dad had this feeling that we needed to move out of South Florida, so soon after my sister Jazzy
was born, we moved up to Deltona, which is in Central Florida about halfway between Orlando and Daytona Beach. I was almost six and was excited about the new adventure, moving to another new house with more space. My mom’s sister Miriam and her family lived there, and they had kids about the same age as us, so we were excited to go up there and had instant friends to play with.

  I started going to a new school, Friendship Elementary, and have some great memories even though I only attended there for few months. Come on, who wouldn’t be happy at a school named “Friendship”? Just puts a smile on your face.

  Our family moved around quite a bit in our early years as my dad was trying to figure out what kind of work would allow him to best take care of our family. Soon after we moved to Deltona, he came across a really great opportunity to work in Utah with one of his old friends, where he’d been longing to return to for years. He never really felt at home in Florida, and deep down he knew that we belonged in Utah and that this was the chance he finally had to get us all there. My mom didn’t want to leave her family, but she agreed that it would be a good opportunity for us, so off we went. We had a garage sale and sold practically all of what we had including our second car and all of our furniture and most of our toys and bikes, and packed up the family van with our stereo equipment and speakers. We had it transported to Utah and the remaining items we owned, all packed into fourteen boxes, were sent by truck, and all of the family flew from Orlando to Utah. My dad found a house for us to rent in Murray, and we moved into a wonderful neighborhood, the same one we moved back into several years later and where our family lives today.