Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2007.

Bruce thinks it’s amazing, the musical performers I saw when I was young and they were famous.

In retrospect, I guess he’s right.

My first boy-girl date was when I was about 13 and we crawled under the fence at Norumbega Park in Auburndale, Massachusetts, to hear Benny Goodman play at the Totem Pole ballroom.

I barely knew how to dance, but I sure knew Goodman. The sound of his clarinet floated on air.

In high school, when we were living in Hermosa Beach, my brother and I often wrote for tickets to Glenn Miller’s radio show. We would drive in the family Buick to Hollywood on a Tuesday or Thursday and sit in the audience, enraptured. I had a huge crush on Ray Eberle, Miller’s male vocalist.

I also had a crush on Frank Sinatra — what teenage girl didn’t back then? — and I followed the crowds to the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco to hear him sing. He was still jug-eared and skinny, but most of us swooned anyway.

I was not even a pop music junkie, but music was all around us in those days, and being a fan was a kind of “calling.” My parents derided our idols — “You call that music?” — which, of course, made them doubly alluring.

In the end, my dad fell for “I’ll Never Smile Again,” a Sinatra ballad, and my parents and I called a truce.

Cruising the music scene was a big part of my life in Southern California, where I got my first job at a newspaper. My love-of-the-moment and I pursued every appearance of Billie Holiday, whose smoky voice was the epitome of tortured love and life gone wrong.

She wore a gardenia behind one ear, and the smell of marijuana filled the air.

Then came the love affair with Sarah Vaughan’s voice, which still seems miraculous to me. I saw her in Los Angeles, I saw her in San Francisco, I saw her wherever I could. My best friends and I knew her every warble on tunes like “Black Coffee” and “Tenderly.” One night, at a cafe in Paris, long separated from our records, we sang her version of “Don’t Blame Me,” never missing a riff.

Later, my idol became Ella Fitzgerald, whom I had danced to as a preteen, but saw only once, when she came to the Marin Center, and I interviewed her backstage. As I remember, her preoccupation was with aching feet and the hamburger dinner she’d eaten that night, but she was magical anyway. That voice! That perfect, do-anything voice.

In L.A., with a male friend named Stu and a Stanford professor named Jeffrey Smith, we saw Louis Armstrong on a night I will never forget. The primitive rhythms, the freestyle vocals, the unique personality of this wonderful man — we were transformed. Now, when I listen to “What a Wonderful World,” I love him all over again.

The night before Stu and Skid and I sailed for Paris, we heard Dizzy Gillespie in a New York nightclub. I was not into bebop then, but I remember my fascination with his trumpet and ballooning cheeks.

A few years later, I was living in Germany and heard Duke Ellington, who had brought his band on a tour of a country still reeling from war. What a talent. Billy “Sweet Pea” Strayhorn played with him then. So did saxman Johnny Hodges.

Over the years, I saw most of the big names: the Dorsey Brothers, Count Basie, Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton, who played at my senior ball in college.

My musical bio got richer and richer as the years went on, but music kept changing around me. The Beatles arrived and so did Willie Nelson. I found new voices to love, new rhythms to dance to.

But lately I’m lost.

When Bruce plays his CDs, a mix of lounge music and nouveau rock — I think he’s lost, too — I can’t help sniffing.

“Hey, Bruce,” I say, like a voice from the past, “How can you call that music?”