As an elderly woman listens to a Geordie folk tune she hasn’t heard since she was a girl, her face lights up. After seven decades, the song has evoked her childhood.
When she was 18, Dorothy Stein moved from Newcastle, UK, to Canada, and now lives in a US care home. Though dementia has robbed her of her memories, the 89-year-old remembers the words to ‘Blaydon Races’ and sings and claps along; her delighted laughter is magical.
“She was connecting deeply to her past,” says her carer, who’d found the song after contacting a Newcastle community group on Facebook for help. She was overwhelmed by the response – and played the tune for Dorothy as suggested. From across the Atlantic, memories flooded back.
Back home in the UK, a Twitter video last summer of former music teacher Paul Harvey playing an improvised piano composition prompted a whirlwind of acclaim – and his song went on to be recorded by the BBC Philharmonic. Diagnosed in 2019 with dementia, he...