Music played constantly in our home. The kitchen radio shared air time with the phonograph, filling our Manhattan apartment with classical music, especially Mom's beloved Bach. She would sing along, note for note, seeming to know every composition under the sun. Awed, I wondered how she could remember it all. She was especially fond of the complex baroque pieces she committed to memory and the ragtime piano tunes she yearned to play. Her single original composition was the deceptively simple six-note phrase my family still whistles to locate each other in a crowd.
In 1944 I was four and living with Mom while Pop sailed to Greenland to do his bit against the Nazis with the Merchant Marine. I remember sprawling on the floor of our livingroom with my crayons and pad of paper as Mom worked in the kitchen as usual. I hummed along with the solemn Red Army Chorus from the album I adored and played constantly, eventually wearing out my parent's set of 78 rpm recordings. Or so my they told me years later.
I also liked Tubby the Tuba, learning the songs and with them the names of the orchestra's instruments. When Mom put Woody Guthrie on the turntable I would sing and pantomime: "I dropped my shoe, pick it up, pick it up..." or another favorite from Songs To Grow On. We owned both Frank Sinatra's and Paul Robeson's recordings of Earl Robinson's Ballad For Americans, featuring "The House I Live In" and listened also to Josh White, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and union songs from The Almanac Singers. But we loved Songs Of The Lincoln & International Brigades from the Spanish Civil War most of all. Resonant, earnest voices intoned noble and heartfelt family passion. Less than a decade earlier Mom's brother had been executed in Spain by a fascist firing squad.
Also included in the family repertoire were the songs of Afrikaner Josef Marais. There was no suggestion of a Black presence in his Songs Of The African Veld, which troubled me since I knew that Africans were Black. So when we sang "I Think Of My Darling When The Sun Goes Down" or "Marching To Pretoria" my mind imagined a racially mixed cast.
We memorized Burl Ives' songs. I loved singing with Mom's clear, sure alto, and after he returned home, Pop's sweet baritone which I adored, and often told him, "You sing better than Burl Ives." He'd laugh and wave it off. At times he'd take out his extensive Dixieland collection and treat us to Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael and Nellie Lutcher, whose piano-playing Mom, a pianist herself, particularly admired. "Do ya or don'cha love me, baby, like you useta..." we'd chirp in falsetto along with Nellie, prance and wave our arms around to "Hurry On Down ( To My House Baby ) " "...nobody home but me." ) .
Joe Venuti became the first No. 1 recording artist of all time in 1936. He and Eddie Lang's lyrical guitar and violin duets were our favorites along with Louis Armstrong. Pop would shut his eyes and sing along with Louie and Jack Teagarten, "Rockin' Chair," "Fetch me some gin, son" / "I ain't got no gin, fatha / "Gonna tan your hide...".
Every so often he and Mom would dance together. With my back to the livingroom windows, I'd sit riveted, spellbound, by their graceful footwork as daylight illuminated the worn carpet and our secondhand furniture. They looked so happy, eyes closed, seamlessly gliding through the complicated walking patterns of "The Peabody." I could have watched them forever. It was even more exhilarating than standing on Pop's feet while he taught me the basics of social dancing, as it was called then. During the 1920s he and his buddies had rotated first place prize between them at monthly NYC YMCA dance contests.
These influences as well as the Yiddish resistance culture I learned a few years later at camp, plus the Broadway showtunes of Rodgers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin and Cole Porter that I soaked up as a teenager, infuse my work. The advantages of my roots in conscious politics combined with a rich and diverse cultural upbringing are major forces driving an enviable life, and looking back now at that four-year-old scribbling on the floor accompanied by the hearty voices of the Red Army, I wonder how I got to be so lucky a girl.
XXAlix@aol.com
