***The
Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World
War II- From Deep In The Songbook-The Inkspots –To Each His Own …
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, to stretch those legs, to sway those hips to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming out of New York, always New York then, Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay. The sound of swing replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, no banishing it, casting it out with soup lines, second-hand clothes (passed down from out the door brothers and sisters), and from hunger looks, because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but squareville (my term, not their), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word. And swing a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.
Songwriters: MCCOY, VAN
…it
was as simple as this. He had asked her, asked her quite politely although she
could tell that he had liquor on his breathe, for a dance, a slow one, at the
weekly USO dance. A dance held by those who were keeping the home fires burning
in order to keep up the morale of the boys getting ready to go overseas, to go
east to preparation places in order to take back Europe from the night-takers,
to go west and island by island to take back the Pacific from the night-takers
on that side of the world. But that night like every USO dance night such talk,
such thoughts were set aside for those few hours before the ships and planes
took off to their appointed destinations.
She,
well, she was as patriotic as any other red-blooded American girl, young woman,
and had volunteered to be one of the hostesses.
And he, nothing but a country boy he from down in Appalachia up north
for the first time, had spied her from his bashful corner, spied her all flowing
black hair, sweets smiles, simply dressed for the occasion, no flash but an
allure, something struck in his down to earth country way and spoke of soul
mate (although he would have dismissed such term out of hand as too city). So after
fortifying himself with some store-bought liquor, he had asked for a dance and
she had accepted. Something about him, about the way he held her, about their
talk afterward got her going, although she sensed that what was ahead for him,
for them, would not be the pretty dreams of her younger girlish days, not the
pretty dreams at all.
But
that was later, the not pretty dreams part, that night, and for the rest of the
nights before he took a plane west to take a ship to join in on that desperate
island by island fight in the Pacific they flowered, there is no other way to
express it, their burgeoning love heated up the night, they would, if he came
back (and she was sure he would, he was more fatalistic) share whatever dreams
came their way, together. Would share their small inexpensive dreams together …
**********
Peter
Paul Markin comment on this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it
meant to our parents or not, knew what sacred place it held in their youthful
hearts, Benny Goodman with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, Harry James with
or without the orchestra, Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges,
Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller with or
without glasses, Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday with or without the blues, personal
blues, Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather, Miss (Ms.) Margaret
Whiting, Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts, Mr. Billy Eckstine, Mr.
Frank Sinatra with or without bobbysoxers, The Inkspots with, always with, that
spoken refrain, the Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The
Dewdrops with or without whatever they were with or without, Mr. Cole Porter
with or without the boys, Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, and Mr. George
Gershwin with or without his brother, is the music that went wafting through
the house of many of those of us who constitute the generation of ‘68.
Yes, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what
Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,” decidedly not your parents’ or grandparents’ (please, please do not say
great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation. Those of us who came of
age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the
post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the age of Jack Kennedy’s
Camelot. Who were, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us,
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 swirl before the hammer came down.
And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that
we searched for, desperately searched, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But
enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please
not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the
newer world, to satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and
the music that in their youth dreamed by
on cold winter nights or hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music of the generation that
survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers
taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was
movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from,
survived 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. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights
against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. 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…
Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies,
three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest,
the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being
cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even
that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so
they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in.
Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat
high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a
common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down
the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking
out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of
oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on
its last legs. Hell, call it what it was
flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others
had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles
falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming
out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to
the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, 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. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different
ways but it all came down to 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, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in
the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said
at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.
Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait
in the endless waiting 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. Planning the fruitless day,
fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally
breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached,
mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink.
Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash
together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul
suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was
in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly
destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some
terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard
dollar indeed.
Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry
growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he
thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke
loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times,
San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much
around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too
proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul
hard-hearts. And that day not him, not
him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos) were
dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront
Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even
in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened
a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread
to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of
world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the
scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the
have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the
rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of
all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search,
search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want
that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the
economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the
guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to
fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns,
their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other
spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That
crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone,
U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread.
Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a
letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about
what was what in the land of “milk and honey. ”
Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some
road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some
hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against
those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that
cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot
of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in
those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell,
any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that
survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and take collective action to put things right,
hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories,
shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just
maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that
sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, to stretch those legs, to sway those hips to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming out of New York, always New York then, Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay. The sound of swing replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, no banishing it, casting it out with soup lines, second-hand clothes (passed down from out the door brothers and sisters), and from hunger looks, because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but squareville (my term, not their), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word. And swing a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.
Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh
airs, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, a time when the
night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant
steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie,
Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on
this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff
without a squawk. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid
world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old
neighborhood, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys from
the wheat fields fresh from some Saturday night dance, all shy and with
calloused and, guys from the coal slags, down in hill country, full of home
liquor, blackened fingernails and Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up
carrying an M-I on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Susie, Laura, Betty,
and dark-haired Rebecca too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some
wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young
Benny. Jesus not young Benny.
Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and
West, some who could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office others, well,
other hanging back, hanging back just a little to think things over, and still
others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. All, all
except that last crew who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even
odd-ball Rebecca waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the ships to sail or
planes to fly, hanging in some corner drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your
drugstore name, sitting two by two at the soda fountain playing that newly
installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana songs,
rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs to get a minute’s
reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.
Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about
faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world
out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie, Jimmie and
the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their
dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later.
Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid,
told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach,
the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in
their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you
think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.
The music, this survival music, wafted through the air
coming from a large console radio, the prized possession amid the squalor of
second-hand sofas and woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs,
centered in the small square living room of my growing up house. My broken
down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows
stuffed with paper and held with masking tape, no proof needed, overgrown lawn
of a shack of a house too small, much too small, for four growing boys and two
parents house.
That shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack
houses, too small to fit Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams
but which represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such weirdness
then I just cried out in some fit of angst) the great good desire of those
warriors and their war brides to latch onto a piece of golden age America. And
take their struggle survival music with them as if to validate their sweet
memory dreams. That radio, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station
WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors
and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard station manager
knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s
platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that
crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the
basics of the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and
brides.
My harried mother, harried by the prospects of the day with
four growing boys, maybe bewildered is a better expression, turning the radio
on to start her day, hoping that Paper
Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine,
their songs, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs and so
embedded, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as
background on her appointed household rounds. The stuff, that piano/drum-driven
stuff with some torch-singer bleeding all over the floor with her loves, her
hurts, and her wanderings, her waitings, they should have called it the waiting
generation, drove me crazy then, 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. As
far as I know Doc, knowing his demographics as well, did not, I repeat, did
not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda
fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. 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.
********
Songwriters: MCCOY, VAN
A
rose must remain with the sun and the rain
Or it's lovely promise won't come true.
To each his own, to each his own,
And my own is you
What good is a song if the words just don't belong?
And a dream must be a dream for two.
No good alone, to each his own,
For me there's you.
If a flame is to grow there must be a glow,
To open each door there's a key.
And I need you, I know, I can't let you go,
Your touch means too much to me.
Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they'll never know what love can do.
To each his own, I've found my own,
One and only you.
If a flame is to grow there must be a glow,
To open each door there's a key.
I need you, I know, I can't let you go,
Your touch means too much to me.
Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they'll never know what love can do.
To each his own, I've found my own,
One and only you.
Or it's lovely promise won't come true.
To each his own, to each his own,
And my own is you
What good is a song if the words just don't belong?
And a dream must be a dream for two.
No good alone, to each his own,
For me there's you.
If a flame is to grow there must be a glow,
To open each door there's a key.
And I need you, I know, I can't let you go,
Your touch means too much to me.
Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they'll never know what love can do.
To each his own, I've found my own,
One and only you.
If a flame is to grow there must be a glow,
To open each door there's a key.
I need you, I know, I can't let you go,
Your touch means too much to me.
Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they'll never know what love can do.
To each his own, I've found my own,
One and only you.
