***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-Cole Porter’s  Let’s Do It…

Yeah, lets’ fall in love. Get this.  After all Argentines without means do it and a whole litany of other nationalities and species. Got it. 

 

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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 great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses, robbed them as an old-time balladeer said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them. Survived the soap kitchens hungers, the endless waiting in line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Out of work, or with little work waiting for that day, that full head of steam day in places like Flint, Frisco town, Akron, Chicago, hell, even in boondock Minneapolis when the score gets evened, evened a little, but until then shifting 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 too the look, the look of those who in their fortified towers tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest.  Survived 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. Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, waiting for the other shoe to drop hanging in some corner drugstore, Doc’s Rexall, name your name, sitting two by two at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out.              

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.  

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Let's Do It

When the little bluebird
Who has never said a word
Starts to sing Spring
When the little bluebell
At the bottom of the dell
Starts to ring Ding dong Ding dong
When the little blue clerk
In the middle of his work
Starts a tune to the moon up above
It is nature that is all
Simply telling us to fall in love

And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

I've heard that lizards and frogs do it
Layin' on a rock
They say that roosters do it
With a doodle and cock

Some Argentines, without means do it
I hear even Boston beans do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

When the little bluebird
Who has never said a word
starts to sing Spring spring spring
When the little bluebell
At the bottom of the dell
Starts to ring Ding ding ding
When the little blue clerk
In the middle of his work
Starts a tune

The most refined lady bugs do it
When a gentleman calls
Moths in your rugs they do it
What's the use of moth balls

The chimpanzees in the zoos do it,
Some courageous kangaroos do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

I'm sure sometimes on the sly you do it
Maybe even you and I might do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love