I know a lot of old songs. Back when I was a child and young teen television hadn't yet made its way to our town (large cities had it, country towns had to wait longer) but my mother would turn on the radio first thing in the morning and turn it off last thing at night. She played piano in her younger days and had a collection of sheet music from the late 1930s through the war years. Back in the late 1950s-early 1960s country town radio stations played current music, but also music of earlier days - 50s, 40s, 30s, even 20s and older, many of which were in my mother's music collection. It sunk in by osmosis, and many of the words are still there in my head.