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

 

 

…and for a minute, or rather the two plus minutes (okay, two plus minutes plus fourteen times played or until the nickels ran out), that it took to play this song, this song sweated out in some Tin Pan Alley shop, sweated out to rise to the top of the jukebox charts and therefore had to “speak” to the young, the forlorn, the sweethearts, who put the nickels in. Speak to those hungry masses who had their hunger curbed for that time, flashing through fresh-mown fields and shroud mists, dreaming dreams as if dreams could curb that hunger.

Sitting who knows where-surely old Mowbrey’s Drugstore (or name your drugstore) crowding the soda fountain after school (or better those “saved” booths, saved for the couples) the whole place filled to the brim with sexual longings (keep that under your hat), down some moonless night lovers’ lane with a bevy of fog-bound cars, over along some deserted stretch of beach car-less, snuggled in some dark, dank, double feature movie theater (hoping against hope to be balcony-bound away from old fogy eyes). All the places the young (and not so young) learn their trade, learn their youth.    

Yeah, too after shaking the grime and dust of the coalmines (never, never ever getting the black out of those fingernails) sitting in Smiley’s Tavern just outside the shaft or at some Saturday good old boys barn dance, complete with that white lightning that made many a young man liquor brave, shaking the sweat of the steel plants living infernos with some be-bop thing in the head to wipe the sweats away, shake off the speed of Mr. Henry Ford’s automobile lines making a parallel be-bop sound in some other head, and assorted other jobs for those who had the privilege of working.

That song too used to forget the sourness of the endless soup-line (what did that old Okie balladeer call that soup-thin enough to read a newspaper through), the ill-fit of those second-hand clothes from Saint Vincent DePaul’s or the Sallies (a fate that no balladeer could find words for except that those torn and tattered rags made no picture to place on some white-washed walls), the cold northern wind coming through that crack in the window, the discomfort of the cold-water flat, and always, always the hunger and want, yeah, forget but just for those two plus minutes.