The lower east side of Manhattan means many things, to many different people. For me it's the land of my ancestral dreams. It's a place where my people came to rest after many a brutal journey across land and sea. Eager to leave Eastern Europe and it's antisemitism behind, we were tailors, shoemakers, garment factory workers (sweatshops). cantors, rabbi's, peddlers and business folk.
America was the new-found-land, full of hope, promise and despair.
It was
a place where a corset salesman and a necktie salesman joined forces to become
the top publicists of the day; a place where a composer could write about The Sweet
Sunny South, having never been there; a place where the greatest composer of
the day could play in only one piano key; a place where those who had musical
schooling were often looked upon with disdain and suspicion.
…Yep! This was the place where American
Popular music history came to be.
It was the land of pick pockets, publishers,
brawlers, gangsters, hucksters, singing waiters, arrangers, song-pluggers and salesman
of every ilk. More than that, it was where we imagined who we were and who we
could be as a nation. It was a place where the streets where paved with gold
and Ellis Island was but one step closer to that pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow. It was a place where stealing ideas was as common as opening the door
for a pretty girl or helping a little lady cross the street.
It has been said that the lower east
side of Manhattan, which was home to writers, poets, factory workers and its whole immigrant mass, was also the place where
we realized that not only were the streets not paved with gold, but we
were expected to do the paving!
It was brutal and beautiful all at once; or to
quote the great folksinger Utah Phillips, “the melting pot was a place where
the scum would rise to the top, while the working stiffs got scalded at the
bottom.
It was also the place where inspiration was
often hard won. How else could we have written about a tough Irishman (Throw Him Down, McCloskey!) or the dark end
of the street (The Bowery), with such
bittersweet candor?
It was a place where we changed the game
plan that had been laid out before us by genteel publishers who believed that
music instruction and classical scores where the only ones deserving of copy.
It was a place where a tear-jerker about
broken hearts at the ball (After the Ball)
could go on to become the top grossing sheet music of all time.
Amidst all of this comedy, there was
quite a bit of tragedy (The Triangle Fire).
Day to day life was one filled with
bed-bugs, hunger, low-wages, gangsters, racial violence, crowded living quarters
(Tenements), flu, virus, unsanitary living conditions and horrid working
conditions.
This was our life…and from this we made
a living! But Oy! Such a Business!
How else could we have imagined that there
was an Apple Tree in Central Park (In the
Shade of the Old Apple Tree) or A Georgia
Camp Meeting out on the corner of 28th street!
Let me put it another way…
My grandma often said that her matzah ball soup tasted so much better
than everyone else, because she mixed the laughter with the tears.
Does this explain why our best singers
(Jolson, Cantor, Tucker, Brice) wore their hearts on their sleeves and a tear
in their voice?
Make no mistake! We are all a product of
this domain and much of it has become public!
Somewhere inside us all, there is that
old familiar, haunted smile. It’s the one we wear with a toothless grin and a blackened
eye, as we race across the finish line.
It’s the one we all deserve, most covet
and few retain; it’s the stuff of legends and those lucky devils whom we remember…long
after the song has ended.
-Lil Rev
October 2012
-Lil Rev
October 2012
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