Before The Rock and Roll Jailbreak-With The Music Of Rosemary Clooney In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James

The Sixteen Greatest Hits of Rosemary Clooney, Rosemary Clooney, Columbian Records, 1975  

Some bars in the old working-class neighborhoods right after World War II like Jack Miller’s Irish Tavern over in Gloversville were hang-outs for guys who worked in the shipyard a few towns over in Weymouth, guys who a few years before were knee deep in Normandy muds, or scraping their shins on coral reef in the great Pacific wars. In such joints, simple drunk tanks really, a few stools, a few booths and the long bar with plenty of beers and low-shelf liquors and Jack serving them off the arm in lieu of hiring a waitress to do such chores which he was too cheap to do (and if truth be known no woman would have lasted too long with that crowd and to save more than a few marriages and some broken windows and doors Jack did the honors) the neighborhood fathers and in some cases older brothers did their serious drinking. Serious payday drinking in too many cases leaving too many mostly Irish wives, and one generation off the boat mostly, with short money for the always chronically short weekly bill envelopes that were the only different between a roof over the family’s head and the streets (or worse. almost better to be on the streets and maybe Saint Vincent DePaul would help out, the county farm). Serious drinking in the case of Jimmy Jenkins’ father, William, a crackerjack welder when he was sober, yeah, when he was sober and it is better left at that.   

So now that you know the story, know what was what when Jimmy was growing up and spent half his free time away from school trying to coax his father out of Jack’s, had to stand around for hours sometime while his father “finished’ his business, that business being buying yet another round for the boyos, his boyos from the softball team that played at Devens Field a couple of nights a week and which was the excuse for the boyos to stop off at Jack’s after the game and quench their thirsts. While waiting Jimmy would inevitably hear the music from Jack’s jukebox which seemed to have stopped at the year 1951 in terms of selections. Hear all the music that his father when he was “in his cups” would say had gotten him and Jimmy’s mother, Eleanor, through the war she at home waiting for the other shoe to drop and he in France on the way to Germany waiting for his own shoe to drop. Tops on the list when William and the boyos had had a few was their girl, their own Irish rose Rosemary Clooney singing all kinds of weeping songs along with covering a few popular tunes as well. Jimmy would grind his teeth anytime anybody from his own crowd, the crowd he hung around with at Vinnie’s Variety Store over on Talbot Avenue mentioned anything about the ‘stuff that got their parents through the war,” square nothing but square.    

That was not the worst of the situation because when Jimmy was not shagging after his father in some gin mill (after William got wise to the fact that Eleanor was sending Jimmy on missions of mercy to save something for those almost empty white envelopes he would sometimes go to the Starlight Lounge or to Benny’s) but when he got up in the morning or when he got home after school the family radio located right in the middle of the living room would be turned on to WJDA which catered exclusively in those days to the “songs that got them, (and you now know who them is), the war.”  See Eleanor was in some time warp believing Jimmy thought that if she listened hard enough to that stuff things would turn around (they never did William packed a bag one day in 1960 and was never heard from again-Jimmy by then saying good riddance-mostly). Though particularly that Rosemary Clooney’s No Too Young would get them by. So more grinding of Jimmy’s teeth (he made Bart Webber laugh one time when he said that might have been the reason he had spent a lifetime at the dentist’s. Bart ever the wit said it was that genetic bad teeth Irish thing so a double curse of William Jenkins).

One night in 2007, maybe early 2008, winter time anyway, Jimmy was sitting in the Shattuck Lounge in Riverdale talking to Bart, one of the few friends from high school that he kept in contact with over years when somebody played Rosemary Clooney’s cover of Blues In The Night. He did not, until he asked a few minutes after the song was over and went up to the older woman who had played the song (and a couple of  Harry James instrumentals), know that the artist being played was Ms. Clooney but said to Bart that the song sounded familiar. More importantly that it sounded good. After discovering who had sung the song Bart and Jimmy had a good laugh, a laugh about how what goes around comes around.

Here is the funny thing though he started picking up Rosemary Clooney material, started getting her CDs which were being re-issued including the one mentioned above. On some nights when he was alone after his wife went to bed he would crank up his computer and play some of the CDs. And shed a tear for his mother who never did draw a break in the world whatever hopes she had after World War II and shed a tear too for his father who he hadn’t thought about in years. Yeah, what goes around comes around.