I decided to make Chapter 4 a Thanksgiving bonus and post the next chapter today, on my normal schedule.
First, here are the non-musical callouts in this chapter:
If you've been paying attention, you know that the names of Annie's brothers - Stephen, Thomas, John, and Wallace - come from Harry's brothers, Steve and Tom, and his "brother by another mother," Big John Wallace.
Jonathan is Harry's middle son, mentioned - along with three of his siblings (not sure why Josh was excluded) - in "Someone Keeps Calling My Name" on the "Portrait Gallery" album.
Lily is Harry's niece, who performs with her sister Abigail as part of The Chapin Sisters.
Miss Michaela Fields (née Howard) is named after Harry's drummer - who still performs with the Harry Chapin Band - Howard Fields.
A "normal school" was what we would now call a teacher's college, and the one in Ewing, New Jersey, was among the first to be established in America.
Now, then...
I am old enough to have brought home report cards that were entirely hand-written by the teacher(s), and each of them included a section for the teacher to write free-form comments about the student and their performance during the grading period.
Harry Chapin's secretary had a son who came home with such a report card. It criticized the kid for being a nonconformist. Not for poor academic performance... not for poor conduct... but for being free-spirited.
To understand the first three chapters of Book 2, "Flowers Are Red" is the song that resulted from Harry hearing about it... and it could have been written last week, let alone 1978. Miss Judith Harlan is written to basically be the teacher in the song.
Harry's brother Tom, who primarily writes and performs songs for children, wrote his own version of this song, "Not On the Test."
Incidentally, Tom still tours... as does Steve.
Also from this chapter's soundtrack:
"March 21st, the first day of Spring" is the day Harry's daughter, Jen, was born. She performs a wonderful jazz/blues cover of her father's song, "I Wonder What Would Happen to This World" which is also Harry's epitaph.
(Fun fact for Babylon 5 fans: the title of the episode "Midnight On the Firing Line" also comes from "I Wonder What Would Happen to This World.")
Watertown, New York - of which Harry once said "I spent a week there one afternoon" - inspired his song "A Better Place to Be" which Harry considered his personal favorite of his own songs. You'll catch the secondary references once you listen to it. "A Better Place to Be" will get a few callouts over the course of Book 2.
"She seemed determined to prove that she could stand just as tall..."