The melody came first. It almost always does. Sometimes I dream it. Late at night. When I’m sound asleep. But then I hear myself humming a tune. If it wakes me up, I write it down. I used to keep manuscript paper and a pen on the nightstand next to my bed. And yes, I was awakened late at night with the music for “One Fine Day” playing in my head. It was 1982.

Melody flows for me. It is spiritual. Universal. It creeps into my subconscious. It rolls through time and space nearly unphased. Words take more conscious effort. They’re earthbound. They take time. They’re harder. More demanding. Words are governed by specific languages. Locked into clearly circumscribed cultures, they are far more dependent on the times in which they are written.

I cannot point to any one influence that inspired “One Fine Day,” words and music. There was not simply a single person or one book or one painting or an event that prompted me to write the song. It cannot be merely laid at the feet of growing up steeped in classical music. Playing the majestic melodies of Bach, and Mozart and Brahms on my violin. There were countless influences. The song speaks to what I think is important. What I believe. It goes to the core of who I am. I cannot name just one, or even ten, but looking back 42 years there were a few distinct and immediate catalysts.

I had been reading again. In addition to histories, which I’ve always loved, I was devouring a range of writers and styles including: Death Comes For The Archbishop, by the Red Cloud, Nebraska writer, Willa Cather (1873 – 1947); Living My Life, the autobiography of the political activist, Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940); Jailed For Freedom, by the suffragist, Doris Stevens (1888 – 1963); and I had begun working my way through The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, (1830 – 1886). Not understanding some. Savoring others. I was reading the authors’ works while simultaneously searching for more information about their lives and the times in which they lived.

We have no idea what it was like to be a woman living in America in the 1800’s. It is beyond my imagining. The clothes alone would have discouraged me! We can read about it. Even write about it, but we lack the palpable experiences, the visceral reactions to the limitations, the prejudices and restrictions that governed everyday life. Unless a woman was helping out as unpaid labor in her family’s mercantile, her place was in the home. There were very few opportunities for women in the workplace. And most African American women lived and labored as slaves until 1865.

Colleges didn’t begin admitting women until Oberlin opened its doors to 15 women and 29 men in 1833. The few 19th Century women who did attend college had almost no choices for paid employment afterwards. A woman could be a nanny to small children, a teacher to young kids, and, of course, a nurse; women could take care of the sick and the dying. But to enter the professional sphere. To study law with an eye to someday being appointed a Judge on the Supreme Court, or to earn a Ph.D. and run a large company or be head of a bank – this was as far away as the moon. As a matter of fact, it was farther. When we landed on the moon in 1969, there was still not a single woman CEO of any Fortune 500 company. And no woman had ever been appointed to the Supreme Court.

For ambitious women, for women with eager minds, the opportunities and outlets in the 19th Century were extremely limited. But there was one realm where a creative woman could find freedom. And Emily Dickinson found it. She found it and exploited it and reveled in it. If a woman had pen and paper and that “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf so eloquently speaks of years later, if she had that and time. And given the demands of family life a woman’s selfish endeavors might have to be relegated to late at night with a single candle burning, but if she had pen and paper and time and the desire in her heart like Emily Dickinson, she could write, and no one could stop her.

My own writing had hit a snag. I had pen and paper and plenty of time. The chorus to “One Fine Day” was written along with a first draft of the first verse, an homage to Emily. I knew the second verse would honor Willa Cather and the third, Emma Goldman. The music was finished, but language was not forthcoming. It was not for lack of pen or paper or time or desire, I just couldn’t find the words.

It was nearly Christmas. With the lyrics to my song sketchy at best, I retreated to my artistic sanctuary, Paris. I found a cheap flight. I know all the cheap hotels. And I escaped to that resplendent city of light where the arts are on prodigious display and artists are revered. It was in Paris just a few weeks later that a surprise encounter inspired me beyond words.

Paris is cold over the Holidays, and rain comes at you sideways. But I love it. Walking. Thinking. Ducking into a bistro to get out of a frigid wind sweeping off the Seine. Sipping a café noir. Scribbling in a notebook. I know from my journals that it was this very sojourn in Paris when I first noticed it. Paintings by women artists were beginning to show up in the great museums of western art. The Musée D’Orsay. The Louvre. And the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne – a.k.a. The Pompidou.

It was on one of those cold, drizzly Paris days that I spotted her. Even from across the room I knew immediately. Without a doubt. She had been painted by a woman. And as I approached her it became blatantly obvious. This was no painting of yet another naked Venus with idealized features – one more reclining nude woman rendered by a male hand and resigned to the male gaze. No passive pose here. This woman I recognized. She was defiant. Modern. Comfortable in her own skin and with her own thoughts. Lounging on her own flowery blue bed in her pj’s and confidently smoking a cigarette, she was looking off to my left and couldn’t care less who was looking at her. The painting was Le Chambre Bleu. The artist, Suzanne Valadon (1865 – 1938).