A Life of Words

It has become a treasured, tear-inducing holiday tradition for me to listen to my birth mother Betty, whom I sadly never met, beautifully crooning Christmas songs. When I found my three older full siblings in 2005, one of the many early gifts I received in our discovery of one another was hearing Betty’s voice during my family’s first trip to meet my brother Crys and sister Terry in the Denver area that July.

In Crys’s living room in Lakewood, our mother’s beautiful singing flowed through a cassette tape she recorded late in her life at home in Huntington, West Virginia, for her children before she died of lung cancer at age 71, just five days before Christmas 1992. I’ve posted some of the songs here in recent years, and many of you have been gracious in indulging me and honoring Betty by taking a few minutes to enjoy her music and express how talented she was. And I’m not saying she was a remarkable vocalist just because she gave birth to me.

From all I’ve learned about her from my sibs and others, Betty had many admirable qualities, but her flair for lifting her voice in song was near the top. Over the decades after getting her start as a young girl, Betty sang with bands in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and at various special events. That includes for several months in 1960 while she was pregnant with me, when Betty performed with a small dance band at the Sandbar at the upscale Marting Hotel in Ironton, Ohio, just over the Ohio River from Huntington.

From her academic records I was able to acquire, Betty dropped out of high school to start working halfway through her sophomore year at Huntington High in 1937, and guess what one of her classes that semester was? Glee Club, of course!

Betty was a guest in the mid-1950s on the “Saturday Night Jamboree,” a beloved country music television show out of Huntington that had a 12-year run with incredibly talented musicians (including Connie Smith as she was on the verge of making it big) and built a national audience. I visited a few years ago with Ralph Shannon, one of those Jamboree musicians (who has since passed away), and with the show’s director, Fritz Leichner, who’s now 96 and who I plan to see when I visit Huntington after Christmas for Dr. Gil Ratcliff’s funeral, and both vividly remembered Betty singing on the show.

We’re also blessed to have some old tapes from about 1950 that my birth father Bob, Betty’s first husband, saved for posterity of Betty singing with a small band in Logan, West Virginia, with Bob playing standup bass with the group. At the time, my brothers Crys and Robin, born in 1944 and ’47, were very young.

So I’m sharing some of Betty’s Christmas music again to keep up the tradition. Kay has suggested we play Betty’s songs on Christmas Eve at home when we’re with our kids – a grand idea, don’t you think? Just click on the links below to listen.

The last link is to the track at the end of Betty’s cassette, as she speaks wistfully to her children, who rarely made it home for Christmas from Colorado and Florida. Her sense of humor was so wonderful, as you hear her making up a band name and calling herself “Bette Cazadler” in deference to Bette Midler. (Betty’s name after she married her second husband in 1971, a country musician named Ronnie Cazad who was 17 years her junior, became Betty Cazad.)

From the first moment I heard Betty’s voice on the cassette 18 years ago, we all knew that when she says, “I love you – I love ALL of you – very, very much,” she was including me. I know she never stopped missing and loving me, and for her to include me on that tape – perhaps in hopes that someday I would find my siblings – means everything.

Please enjoy Betty’s music, and may you and your families have the most joyful and blessed of holidays. ❤

The Christmas Song: https://clyp.it/dskvbmec

Silent Night with Willie Nelson: https://clyp.it/sevr1qtu

I’ll Be Home for Christmas: https://clyp.it/k1kpayo5

Betty Talking to Her Kids: https://clyp.it/5hwclvrq