12/31/2024
RAINING OUT💦
🎶I just heard APRIL SHOWERS☔ on my fave radio station📻, WJIV. DJ John plays the real old timey stuff in the early morning, and then it's back to mostly 1970s Top 40 tunes the rest of the day, with Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline and lots of '50s classics and Broadway hits liberally sprinkled in. But most of his music is the music of my youth: the Eagles, America, the Beach Boys, the Moody Blues, Meat Loaf, Bob Dylan, John Denver, Joni Mitchell, the Bee Gees, the Carpenters ... the great and the merely terrific. This morning, listening to Al Jolson croon, I sang along with the recording - instantly remembering the song that America sung when Charlie Chaplin graced the silver screen and vaudeville was still around. I knew almost all the words! To APRIL SHOWERS! A sentimental World War I tune that was revived during the Great Depression and sung by millions of Americans who were living through hard times but looking for - expecting! - those violets - with no regrets, after those April showers☔! I sang along with Al Jolson this morning, straining my croaky old-lady vocal cords to hit the high notes, my eyes welling with tears. My late mom used to play this record for us kids on our old Victrola decades ago! Up in our Lafayette Street flat in Green Island. Ma loved this tune so much she played it over and over again. So, naturally, I picked up the words even though I was around 5 when I first heard them and didn't know what the song meant. Still, it got to me the way all great music does, through a kind of osmosis...the rhythm, the pleasant sound of the singer's voice, the musical instruments providing the backdrop. Magic time! So I sang along, loving the lyrics: so hopeful and evoking nature, the seasons of our lives ...
Like Enrico Caruso, Al Jolson's records were played in many an immigrant household all over America at the turn of the 2Oth century. Caruso - Opera! For the masses! No matter how poor you were you could buy, for pennies, a Caruso record...for your Victrola. That's how my family played the record. The original! on my Polish immigrant grandmother's Victrola! My mother loved Caruso, too, and had his records also. All her records - hits of the day - were carefully placed in her record albums - big sturdy, serious looking cardboard books - like a photo photo album or scrap book but black or brown and with heavy black pages that were like big envelopes - huge pockets that you placed your special records in. Pockets to hold each individual record, a 78 rpm - not the 33 lp of my youth or the little fun 45s that I used to buy and collect as a kid - for my Close and Play record player (The Jackson Five, the Partridge Family, Bobby Sherman here we come!).
Caruso made my poor, overworked mom feel classy, "continental," smart - a true music aficionado. This was also back when our country was truly aspirational. America in the first half of the 20th century was more about fulfilling artistic - or any kind of - DREAM, and less about accruing tons of dough. More soul, less bling! And most Americans up until WW II were pretty poor. It was a more serious America back then, too, and, in my opinion, kinda brilliant. There was Tin Pan Alley and all these great Broadway lyricists and shows and melody makers... jazz, the art "invented" in America mostly by African Americans under the harshest forms of segregation, was evolving and going global...All this incredible music and art was percolating thru the culture, accessible to all, touching the hearts and minds of millions. High and low enjoyed America's music - including my Bapy and Jaju and their kids in their Bigelow Street tenement, right next to Lafayette, right here in Green Island.
So this morning I sang along with Al Jolson in my croaky, old-lady's voice, decades after first hearing the song in our Green Island tenement, and my eyes welled up with tears. Jolson singing, "Life is not a highway strewn with flowers/Still it holds a goodly share of bliss" made me see, all over again, our impoverished Lafayette Street flat, the way it was 55 years ago! The ancient windows we stuffed with newspapers to keep the cold (and snow!) out during those harsh Worcester winters. Our big but still cozy kitchen with its old white porcelain gas stove with its tiny "gas log" that heated our whole tenement during the winter months. Ma closed up the parlor for the season to conserve the heat, and we pretty much did all our living in the kitchen now homebase for our old black and white Philco television set, our old round refrigerator with the ice caked up thick in its freezer section (time to defrost!), the tall, used barbershop cabinet where we store our canned goods and baking flour and sugar and whose doors never did shut right and, of course, our ugly green kitchen table with its severe straight back wooden green chairs. Then the jewel in our crown: our little, fierce, fiercely opinionated and sometimes loud Polish-speaking Bapy, my Polish immigrant grandmother. There she'd be sitting in her dilapidated easy chair at the head of the kitchen table wearing her flannel night gown covered with pink daisies, her ancient bo***es flat as latkes. I see her now watching with keen interest as my mother makes her her fresh cup of Sanka and then places the cup of instant coffee before her - for the afternoon. My mother was Bapy's favorite daughter - her little "Skravonik (sp?)" - Polish for "Sparrow." An appropriate moniker as my mom was a sickly little, skinny and coughing and she sickly almost died once. Yet she'd run around the house on her twiggy legs and whistled! The most complex songs, verse chorus verse. My mother loved to whistle and could carry a tune until her dying day practically!
Ma played APRIL SHOWERS, the original record, on Bapy's Victrola. Side A: APRIL SHOWERS, side B: HALLELUJAH, I'M A BUM AGAIN! On our old Victrola, the way the record was played - and heard - in the early part of the 20th century. So I experienced all of it: that crackling of the needle on the heavy record, the occasional jumping of the heavy needle...listening to the artist as if she or he were singing from very far away - like from a beautiful dream. Ma loved the song APRIL SHOWERS so much that she cranked our Victrola over and over again to get that lime green felt circle in the middle of the turntable rotating - so that we could play the record again! It was all manual - no electricity needed. So even if your lights went out cuz you couldn't pay your electric bill that month, you could still listen to the mighty Caruso!
Can you believe it?! Me listening to Jolson on a Victrola - which I still have to this day and which sits in my bedroom under a few nubby throws. Of course there were record players and stereos around when I was a kid and my mom was a young mother, but we were too poor to afford$ one. So Ma dragged out Bapy's Victrola, and we used to listen to the music of Ma's youth that way. All her favorite records, heavy things with just one song on one side and another song on the flip side.
Through all the hard times, we always had the little beige radio on our old refrigerator playing - the polka hour on Sundays for Bapy, Elvis and the early Beatles for Ma and us kids. Wolf Man Jack and Casey Kasem...and when our radio wasn't on, we were playing our Victrola! All the off-key singing by Ma, all the clapping of hands by Bapy to the Polkas that we toddlers would run around to in the kitchen. After bath time! Ma just gave us our Sunday baths and now we were buck-naked and running circles around Bapy who was laughing and trying to tap our little butts as we raced by her, we kids giggling, out of control, as she "slapped" our bums. Then I remembered the time my father, "Daddy," stormed into our kitchen where Ma had dragged the Victrola so we kids could play it while she cooked and did her household chores. My father had abandoned us on and off ever since my sister's, the twins, were born. This time he had disappeared for two or three months. He was peripatetic, unsteady and mean. "Hey, F**k Nut!" my father screamed to my mother. "That's an antique and you're letting her (me) play with it!" (I was cranking up the Victrola, getting it ready to play April Showers). "F**k nut!" Daddy screamed again, "That's an antique and those records are antiques!" Daddy was right: he was a junk man but also a kind of a mobile antiques dealer with his truck and knew good stuff when he saw it. But we were used to him by now, accustomed to his abuse, inured to his being gone for months at a time and then erupting like a volcano as soon as he crossed the threshold of our Lafayette Street apartment. We knew "the routine" like the back of our hands and were no longer afraid. We had cut Daddy out of our lives the way you would take a paring knife and cut the bruise out of an apple. So my mother went on stirring our Campbell's tomato soup on the stove. I ignored Daddy, too, and went right on cranking and cranking our Victrola - so that its metal arm would turn no more. And then I released the arm go and I watched as my favorite record turned 'round and 'round and 'round on that mahogany turntable, letting myself be hypnotized, and sitting next to the Victrola the whole time, I listened to APRIL SHOWERS for like the third time in a row.
- Rose🌹
"April Shower" is a 1921 song written for the Broadway musical "Bombo." It was performed by the famous Al Jolson (1886-1950.) It has also been redone by Cab ...