***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Bill Haley And The Comets-Rock Around The Clock 

  

 …she had been through it all before, six or seven times now at least,  been through the part about what happened to her when she heard the new music on the radio, some called it rhythm and blues, some called it rockabilly, some, more recently, had begun to call it rock and roll after some DJ from New York City called it that and it was starting to catch on as the way to describe the beat, the dancing, and the feeling of freedom just being around the scene. Her parents, her know-nothing parents, called it the “devil’s music” but what did they know, what could they know about what she felt, what she felt in certain private places when the beat got strong. How could they know never having been young, never having those feelings. She was not exactly sure why she felt that way, why she felt warm in what all the girls in the before school “lav” called their “sweet spot” whenever she heard the local radio station or the kids at Doc Drugstore on the juke-box endlessly playing Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle, and Roll or Warren Smith on Rock and Roll Ruby but she did. (Some of the rougher girls, the girls who smoked, drank and did “it,” so they said, called it other things which she did not find out until later, much later, guys called it too but she then still preferred the more modest “sweet spot.”) All she knew was that when the beat began to pick she would start swaying, maybe dancing by herself, maybe with a girlfriend and get that feeling like she was not in Olde Saco but New York City getting checked out by all the cute boys whose leers when she swayed told her they were interested in some of her.

Someone, Betty, she thought, a girl that she had grown up and gone to school with,  said it was just her coming into “her time,” although she did not know what to make of that idea since she had that same feeling before and after she came into her time. Got her “friend.”   Betty, or whoever it was who had said it said she did not mean that, that thing every girl had, but the time when everything was confused and when a teenager did, or did not, know which way to jump. Somebody on the news programs called it alienation but she was not sure what that meant. All she knew was that the old songs on the jukebox or radio, the ones that she loved to listen to the previous  year, Frank, Bing, Patti, Rosemary, did not make her feel that way anymore. Didn’t make her feel that she wanted to jump out of her skin.

Tommy from school might have had a better handle on it, have had a better sense of what turbulence was going on inside her when he told the whole class in Current Events that there were some new songs coming out of the radio, some stuff from down south, some negro sound from down in Memphis somewhere, some white hillbilly sound from around that same town, that he would listen to late at night on WJKA from Chicago when the air was just right. Sounds that made him want to jump right out of his skin. (She never dared to ask whether it made him feel warm in his “sweet spot” since she didn’t know much then about whether boys had sweet spots, or got warm).

When Tommy had said that, said it was about the music, she knew that she was not alone, not alone in feeling that a fresh breeze was coming over the land, although she, confused as she would not have articulated it that way (that would come later). And so she asked Tommy about it after class, asked him about what it felt like for him to jump out of his skin when he heard the beat beginning. He explained to her his feelings, feelings that she said she shared with him and he smiled. She agreed to let him walk her home after school and they had talked for a couple of hours on her front porch before he left. This went on for a while since neither one was assertive enough to ask for a date for a long time. Then both saw the announcement in the newspaper for the next dance around town and one night called each other to see if, ah, they might go together. And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down in Olde Saco and listen to some guys, a band, play the new music. She wondered to herself as she prepared for that night (she could not speak of such things to Tommy) whether she would feel warm again in her sweet spot when they danced, she hoped so…