"My father, a mining engineer and colliery manager, gave his brood many advantages not least of which, for me, was his love of singing which gave music a central place in our lives"
About this Quote
A mining engineer teaching his household to sing is a quiet rebuke to the cliché that hard industry breeds hard lives. James W. Black frames his father with two titles that carry soot and authority - “mining engineer” and “colliery manager” - then pivots to something almost disarmingly tender: a “love of singing” that made music “central.” The sentence works because it stages a collision between worlds we’re trained to keep separate: extractive labor and aesthetic nourishment, managerial command and communal voice. It’s not sentimental; it’s strategic. Black is building an origin story in which culture isn’t a luxury item but a form of inheritance as real as education or money.
The word “brood” is doing sharp work, too. It’s faintly animal, faintly comic, a reminder that childhood can feel like being one of many mouths at the table. Against that crowdedness, music becomes both a technology of togetherness and a way to be singled out: “for me,” he writes, narrowing the lens to explain how a shared family practice turned into a personal compass.
Context matters: Black belongs to a 20th-century cohort whose scientific achievements are often narrated as solitary brilliance. He slips in a different engine for a scientific life - not genius, but atmosphere. Singing trains attention, pattern, breath, timing, listening to others. The subtext is a corrective to the myth that science springs from pure rationality. His father’s mine may have paid the bills, but the songs stocked the house with a different kind of resource: a disciplined joy that could travel anywhere, even into a lab.
The word “brood” is doing sharp work, too. It’s faintly animal, faintly comic, a reminder that childhood can feel like being one of many mouths at the table. Against that crowdedness, music becomes both a technology of togetherness and a way to be singled out: “for me,” he writes, narrowing the lens to explain how a shared family practice turned into a personal compass.
Context matters: Black belongs to a 20th-century cohort whose scientific achievements are often narrated as solitary brilliance. He slips in a different engine for a scientific life - not genius, but atmosphere. Singing trains attention, pattern, breath, timing, listening to others. The subtext is a corrective to the myth that science springs from pure rationality. His father’s mine may have paid the bills, but the songs stocked the house with a different kind of resource: a disciplined joy that could travel anywhere, even into a lab.
Quote Details
| Topic | Father |
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