***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 

…she could not have been more thrilled, thrilled to be sitting, actually sitting, in Boston’s famous jazz club, the Hi-Top that she had heard so much about, sitting waiting just that minute with Lillian, her tagalong girlfriend, for the  Duke to begin his show. And as she, they, waited she thought back to just a few short months before when she had dismissed jazz, swing, anything faster than some slow waltzy thing as nothing but the devil’s music and good riddance.

Of course that theory had been drilled into her (and Lillian too) by every single thing that had happened in their blessed lives back up in Olde Saco, that’s in Maine if anybody was asking. Her (their) old-fashioned parents who had come down the vale of tears from Quebec and tried to replicate everything that had gone on there. Including tolerating only jolie blon music that seemed to have come from about the time of the forbears’ expulsion from Arcadia by the bloody British. Apparently they had not gotten over it (especially her father, Jacques, a frantic francophone ). Worse, if anything could be worse, was the weekly (maybe daily if she counted her parents’ harangues) preachment from the pulpit at Saint Anne Dupre’s railing against jazz, blues, mixing with the coloreds, and any movement faster that a trot. Jesus. (She knew she shouldn’t say that but there in Boston it probably would not get back to Olde Saco and penance.)

But that was then. One night, a Friday night after work, she (they) had gone to the Starlight Ballroom down by the far end of the beach at Olde Saco where they expected to hear Lester Mack and the Pack play their slow, dreamy music for the mixed crowd of G.I.s from the local military installations and civilians who had not heard the new dispensation. Somehow Lester had taken sick and Jean Bleu and the Dews were that band’s replacements and they came out swinging with Duke’s “A-Train.” What a night, a night when all those dreary guys turned out to be very happy to see some Jills (she, Lillian, and all the women in the place) swing to high heaven, jitter-bug to give it a name.    

That was the start and that was why on that very cold October night in 1943, after a three- hour train ride down from Portland, she (they) were sitting waiting on his lordship the Duke. And the only worry she (they, see they had talked it all over coming down on the train) had was where they were to meet the next morning if either of them “got lucky.” Yeah, bless that old devil’s music …