***Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through World War II-Peggy Lee Backed By The Benny Goodman Band- From Deep In The American Songbook-Irvin Berlin’s How Deep Is The Ocean …

And memories of that girl (or guy) who got away, or who was married to another, or who had another girlfriend (or boyfriend, or today mix and match, and then too come to think of it), or one of a thousand other reasons for parting, some good, some bad but in misty future time regret, sheer regret for that maybe first love and why things hadn’t worked out. Thus this song to get one by on that cold, lonely remembrance night.          

 

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Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin       

 

Additional Markin comment for this series:

 

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, what sacred place it held in their youthful hearts, this is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the Generation of ‘68. Those of us who came of age, personal, political and social age in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot, and who were driven by some makeshift dream, who in the words of brother Bobby quoting  from Alfred Lord Tennyson were “seeking a new world.”  Those who took up the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture before the hammer came down. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note drifted out into the ebbing tide. But enough of that about us this is about forbears and their struggles, and the music that they dreamed by on cold winter nights or hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl, empty bowl, no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for… Search for something that was not triple decker bodies piled high cold-water flat with a common commode and brown stained sink, rooming house, hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines, or tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, and get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the soup kitchens, the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the rural fallow fields, and that gnarring hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.  Survived the look, the look of those who in their fortified towers tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. Survived too to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, either carrying one on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific or waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie or Jimmy.          

 

It wafted through the large console radio centered in the living room of my house via local station WDJA in North Adamsville as my mother used it as background on her appointed household rounds. It drove me crazy then as mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.