Sing, Sing, Sing

This Sunday is Father’s Day in the US. Last week, 20 years ago, my Dad died. I thought a fitting tribute to both of these occasions would be to post here a short story which was, in many ways, a story of my Dad (although none of the actual events described in it occurred to him). That’s Dad in the photo at the left, circa 1943-44, when he was in training for a while at Texas A&M.

Below, I’ll excerpt the first couple-three pages of the quite old-fashioned story, whose title is “Sing, Sing, Sing.” It’s gone through many versions by now, the earliest written in the autumn of that year of 1988. The version which appears here is simply the most recent.

If you like that much of the story, feel free to download the complete version, in PDF form (146KB); a link to that appears at the end of the excerpt.

(Note: For what it’s worth, there has never to my knowledge been a newspaper named the New York Messenger. Should you go on to read the whole story, there’s never been a book called The Big Hall: The Good Times of Benny Goodman, either, or an author named Robert G. Ehling.)

Update (2008-08-07): I’ve done a more complete breakdown of the “Sing, Sing, Sing” performance, including full-length clips of the three main segments (which together make up a “triptych,” as the fictional Big Hall calls it).

Sing, Sing, Sing

by John E. Simpson / copyright © 2008

—

Oblivious, trusting, a kid’s awareness is like a stateroom on a doomed ocean liner: bobbing along in a tiny prettily-illuminated watertight chamber of time and circumstance, where all verbs are in the present tense and other people exist only if they’re with you in your chamber at that very instant.

But sometimes you brush up against a fact or a bit of unsuspected history and your little bubble goes pop, and before you know it you’re awash in someone else’s chronology. All barriers down, the two times swirl together in a torrent about your eyes and ears, rush into your mouth and nose with every breath; from then on, whenever you sniff the pungent air of the present you’re never certain: is this your moment, or his?

—

When you opened your Sunday paper on January 16, 1938, you could read of the usual jumble of “major events” with their usual minor resonance for later generations.

You could read of Wendell Willkie’s offer to sell a chunk of his billion-dollar holding company to the Federal government. The Japanese (this was the important news about them then) had approached American business, seeking fifty million dollars for the purchase of machinery; more ominously, as we today might see it, they also withdrew recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, and “showed deep concern” that the United States had sent a fleet to accompany the British navy on maneuvers near Singapore.

FDR typed his nomination to the Supreme Court of Solicitor General Stanley Forman Reed. The weather in New York City that day was expected to be cloudy, warmer than the thirty-one-degree high recorded the day before. The cost of milk had dropped by a half-cent per quart, bringing it down to sixteen cents for Grade A and thirteen cents for Grade B.

And if you looked hard enough or just stumbled in the right place, you’d find, buried deep inside, a small notice about an odd concert: Benny Goodman and his swing orchestra were to appear that night at Carnegie Hall, the bastion of classical music.

If you were my Uncle Matty, though, you wouldn’t have read or even stumbled over that little item; Uncle Matty was only eleven years old then, and newspapers held no place at all on his preferred reading list. Even better, in Uncle Matty’s eyes, he wouldn’t need to read about it — that night he sneaked into Carnegie Hall and saw Benny Goodman for himself.

Well, so what? Kids sneak away to sample all kinds of forbidden fruit: a cigarette; a first kiss; just the simple, perverse pleasure of splattering their parents’ minds with worry. But Matty’s case was more extreme: New York City was a hundred miles away from the town where he lived.

Over years of hearing Uncle Matty tell it (a little differently each time, but with long sections common to all versions), I came at last to know the story as well as one of my own. It was seasoned here and there, I’m sure, with exaggeration, imagination, fading memory. But it began always in the same uncomplicated way: with his account of a simple schoolboy afternoon pastime.

In the autumn before the concert, 1937, Matty and his friend Tom got into the habit of stopping at Tom’s house on the walk home from school every day. Chief among the attractions there was a huge Victrola in the living room, piloted by Tom’s older brother Frankie solely for the purpose of listening to swing bands. When Matty and Tom arrived, Frankie would be lying, disheveled, sprawled across the sofa, his eyes closed — dead, apparently, but for the relentless wiggling of his feet and the soft snapping of his fingers in time with the music. Just before the first hiss which signaled the end of the side, Frankie would leap from the sofa, snatching up the heavy, swiveled tone arm just as the song finished. Then he’d continue with a fresh record, or sometimes replay the same one, an endless cycle through the stack of whatever recordings he owned or could borrow.

While they both spied with furtive schoolboy pleasure on Frankie, Matty watched his friend Tom out of the corner of his eyes. Tom too, it seemed, became lost in the music. At first Matty thought Tom was just imitating his older brother; maybe at first he was. But then, as if in a trance, Tom’s eyes closed, his limbs twitched, his shoulders bobbed in time with the music.

Matty shut his own eyes and yes, before long he could feel it happening to him, too — the pumping of saxophones and the boom-booming of some huge drum seized control of important enclaves of his mind, sent little motor pulses down throughout his body. Before long, he could feel himself jerking about — no, being jerked about, a puppet hanging from the music and dancing to its rhythm.

One afternoon, swept up in the music’s undertow, Matty and Tom jitterbugged into the living room from the hallway. They felt a little self-conscious, and so donned goofy, self-parodying faces; but in their minds they knew this was really fun, not funny. Frankie popped open one eye, maintaining the drumbeat with his fingers on the sofa back. He looked at first as though he might become angry, angry that his music should be made fun of; but then he saw something in Tom’s face behind the goofy mask, something that told him this was not satire but the real thing: his kid brother had caught the bug.

After this incident, for many weeks Matty and Tom did little else with their free time but listen, with Frankie, to Benny Goodman, the Dorseys, Jimmy Lunceford, Artie Shaw, whatever else Frankie could get hold of. The names themselves meant nothing to Matty; the names he usually heard over his own dinner table were those of FDR, Gehrig, and his father’s boss Fred Tuck (who was always referred to by both first and last names). Once, though, Matty heard his mother and father discussing something called “the Whiteman orchestra,” and he carried that little tidbit to Frankie the next day.

“Hey, Frank,” he said, all chummy sophistication, “you have anything by the Whiteman orchestra?”

Frankie opened that one eye again (always the same one), examined Matty, and sneered. “Whiteman? Whiteman? What would I be doing with anything by Whiteman? Haven’t you learned anything?”

Matty was mortified, but tried to bluff his way through: “Come on, what’s wrong with the Whiteman orchestra?”

For once, the spell was really broken. Frankie opened both eyes this time, pivoted around to a sitting position and stood up, stomped over to the Victrola and shut it off. Then he whirled around and shouted across the room, “Don’t go shooting your mouth off if you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Want more? Download the complete “Sing, Sing, Sing” at Amazon, here. FREE, through Monday 12/1/2014 only!