We're gonna have a good time - music, race relations and religion

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1992 by Marlene Lily

Some of us who were kids in the forties and early fifties sought an antidote to the boring pop music that infested the prime time of virtually every major network radio station. We discovered jazz - traditional Dixieland, bop, and cool. The transparent structure of Dixieland made it easiest to understand. You could dance to it. Hearing it live was in thrilling contrast to the orderly, sappy stuff played to a society of squares. The mostly ancient musicians were friendly. Many were black. We learned a lot. Here's how it went for Marlene Lily, now a self-proclaimed activist" in Santa Rosa, California. It went much the same for me.

In 1956, at the end of my freshman year in high school, my class had its first official social event - a dance at "the Barn," a large, dry nightclub for kids on the outskirts of Rochester. Since my school was all girls, it was up to me to find an escort. Although my social life had been busy in the seventh and eighth grades at my co-ed grammar school, being in an all-girls' school had slowed things down. I couldn't think of anyone to invite.

One day I remembered a boy I had seen on the school bus, but had never talked to. He had been a year ahead of me at my Catholic grammar school, and was now attending the boys' Christian Brothers high school. He lived less than a mile away. I saw his older brother all the time, because he hung out with the boy next door. He was a handsome, smooth, socially adept fellow who always made me feel inadequate and awkward. But Jimmy seemed shy and quiet, open and innocent. He was thin and sandy-haired, with huge, cobalt-blue eyes that tilted down at the outside corners, giving him a sad expression if he wasn't smiling. I had never heard of him having a girlfriend. I decided to invite him to the Barn.

We went. I had a good time in a low-key way. It was always weird to be driven on a date by somebody's parents, but that was the only way to get there. I could feel Jimmy's shyness, his discomfort with conversation, and it inhibited my usual exuberance. But I liked him. I had the feeling he liked me. Nothing intense, nothing dramatic. I didn't see him during the summer. The following fall, when his school had a dance, he called and invited me. Thus started a romance that lasted four or five years, and a friendship that continued off and on for fifteen more.

Jimmy was shy and quiet - at first. But it soon developed that we both loved to dance, and dance we did. He wasn't shy on the dance floor. Dancing made him smile, and I loved his wide, infectious grin. He paid close attention to the music and expressed its nuances with his body in a way that was uniquely his. Halfway through his junior year, he began drinking, and that was the end of any residue of shyness that might have remained from the days before he had girls in his life. When alcohol entered the picture, he stopped being a "good boy" and became a hellraiser. His grades dropped, and he often concluded his school day with a period of detention as punishment for cutting up in class. He didn't care.

He was the youngest of three children, Irish Catholic on both sides. He had an uncle who was a priest, a sister who was a nun. His father owned an upscale men's shoe store in the old section of downtown Rochester. His mother, a petite woman to whom he referred as "my little round mother," was from a wealthy family and had never worked outside the home. I later realized that she had a bit of a drinking problem herself.

Jimmy's father was good-looking, socially comfortable, well known among the prosperous merchants and professionals who patronized his store and belonged to the same country club, or clubs like it. When he wasn't at the store, he spent a lot of time playing golf. Jimmy admired his father, and he, too, became a golfer. Once in a while, his picture would be in the paper if his school's golf team won a particularly challenging match.

I don't know exactly how Jimmy discovered Dixieland jazz; I just know that he was the one who introduced it to me. There were two Dixieland bands in our area - Max McCarthy and the Dixieland Ramblers from Rochester, and the Salt City Six from Syracuse. Once in a while, they would get together and have a "battle of the bands." For us, that was one of the big events of the year. All the musicians in the Ramblers and the Six were white, and the music they were playing in the late fifties was actually a revival of the black music of the twenties and thirties. But its age didn't matter. It was wonderful music and they played it well and it spoke to us in a way that most rock'n'roll never did.

The popular music we liked to listen to on the radio (Dixieland wasn't played on the radio) was rhythm and blues, but we never had a chance to hear that live. In fact, it had only been on the radio for a few years. It was black music, so-called "race music," and there weren't enough black people in Rochester then to bring the Coasters or the Drifters or the Olympics or Chuck Berry to town. And if there had been, the color line was still substantial enough that we probably wouldn't have chanced crossing it.