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

… he nothing but a kid, nothing but a bog Irish kid fretting away his time, his after school time, was hungry. No, not food hungry although that happened often enough when his father was out of work like a million other fathers in the reared-back Depression night, but hungry for some new sounds, new musical sound that he kept hearing every time he passed Riley’s Market, Riley’s who to draw a crowd had placed a jukebox in the place to lure and lull the patrons. But since he had no money, no nickels to play such an entertainment, he would just linger for a moment and then pass on.

 

And that hunger was not abated until one day he went over to his grandparents’ house and mentioned something to grandmother who was alone in the house at the time about those sounds he heard at Riley’s. His grandmother summoned him to go to her china closet and bring out the radio, a beautiful old Emerson in perfect working order as far as he could tell, hidden there behind a stack of dishes.

See his grandfather an old Puritan, if as bog Irish as he and the whole blessed family, refused to have what he called the devil’s music, that n----r music in the house. After he brought the radio to his grandmother she told him to turn it on and what he heard that afternoon, and many afternoons after that when his grandfather was not present, was out of heaven, some music all sultry and bluesy (although he would not have known then to call it that, call what ailed him the blues either), especially one voice, one voice that spoke of all the anguish and sorrow of the world, spoke through the subtle pauses between the notes of her own personal sorrows, and sang his blues away for a time. He did not learn until much later that she was a Negro, and that the distance between her negritude and his own bog-Irishness, was very short, very short indeed...