This is true for every one of us: for Termen and Rockmore, Stalin and Page, writers and readers with our own private songs.
All, ultimately, are tragic: they dance as an act of resistance against straitened circumstance or passing time, as if they were singing private songs in a desert.
Converse enrolled her brother and Jean, his new wife, as members of her own private Song-of-the-Month Club.
It was like his own private little song.
Muhammad was said to have been hostile to music and musicians, yet there are indications that he tolerated functional music such as war songs, pilgrimage chants, and public or private festival songs.
He derided Sweden's government in "The New Improved Hypocrisy" and confessed to private failings in song after song: "It breaks my heart to say that when I was in pain/I wanted you to feel the same," he sang.
In 1982 the group even performed the song "Private Idaho" on the CBS soap opera "The Guiding Light".
"Hands up to all the men who've cried in private to that song," said Paul Godfrey after one ballad, and more than a few fans waved in answer.
