Ellington Meets Chicago

I gave the following presentation to the Duke Ellington Music Society's fourth international convention, in Chicago, Illinois.  The event took place over four days in May,1984, and was put together by Richard Wang, head of the music department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, assisted by members of the Ray Nance Chapter of the Duke Ellington.  Luminaries present included Gunther Schuller, Willis Conover, and Robert E. Johnson, the former chief editor at Jet Magazine.  Mark Tucker, fresh out of graduate school at the University of Michigan, was also present.  From the U.K. came the author George Edward "Eddie" Lambert with his companion, Elaine Norsworthy.

The first few minutes of my talk was not related to the topic, so I omit it here. 

To Ellington, Chicago in the 1950s meant the Blue Note.  The archives of that legendary establishment, permanently archived at the Chicago Historical Society, reveal a partnership between Duke and the club's owner, Frank Holzfeind, that lasted over ten years.  It culminated with the band's appearance there in 1955 was for six weeks.   In 1956 and 1957, seven weeks.  And before the Blue Note closed for the last time, the Ellington band played for a full eight weeks in 1959:  that is, roughly one night out of every six the band resided at the Blue Note.

What else comes to mind concerning Chicago?  Well, there was the Civic Opera House during the years of Ellington's "social significance" thrusts, as Duke put it.  There was Ray Nance, and there still is the exquisite Kay Davis, both Chicagoans.  There was the little-remembered bassist, Hayes Alvis, who was born and raised in Chicago.  Freddie Guy died in Chicago tragically, in 1971.  There was the Congress Hotel series from 1936, when we had the Mills organization and a young Toronto debutante named Hellen Oakley, and a bunch of traditional jazz nuts called the Chicago Rhythm Club, all working overtime to put the wind in Duke's sails in the mid-30s.  The very first Ellington recording to originate outside a recording studio, as far as we know, was taken from the WMAQ and WENR broadcasts of the band playing in the Urban Room of the Congress Hotel.  There was My People at McCormick Place in 1963, and sadly there was Duke's last public performance in DeKalb, just a few hours north of Chicago, on March 20, 1974.

We might also recall the magnificent records Duke waxed in Chicago.  Imagine, if you will, Duke here in the Windy City getting in the mood to bring to perfections gems like "Rude Interlude," "Daybreak Express," "Solitude" in its very first recording, the furious "Ko-Ko," "Jack the Bear," Betty Roche singing scat on "Take the 'A' Train," and that's just to name a mere handful of the Ellington masterpieces that were recorded here in Chicago.

With all of that said, although Washington will always be Duke's birthplace, and New York became his home base and springboard, Chicago, quite simply, hosted his most glorious achievements.  Period.

Perhaps the most glorious was Duke's first appearance here in 1931.  It was part of his first theater tour away from the east coast.  The 1931 edition of the Ellington band was already famous as the Cotton Club Orchestra, yet it was clearly on its way toward another incarnation altogether.  This was, as recordings document admirably, a time of tremendous creativity for the band, still evolving toward what would be known as the Famous Orchestra of the '30s.  Otto Hardwicke was temporarily out of the band, pursuing his own career.  He would rejoin in 1932, and then Lawrence Brown would complete the trombone section, and there we would have the classic Famous Orchestra.  Under the astute management of Irving Mills, the band took its first step in the hinterland of the Midwest, but this step was anything but tentative.  Duke came strutting into Chicago with pomp and ceremony:  look out Pops Armstrong, look out Fatha Hines.

The centerpiece of the Ellington band's Chicago debut included the beginning of the first three weeks of an eighteen-week contract to play movie theaters on the Midwest Publix circuit.  This was, in fact, the second leg of the very first tour of picture-houses by any big band, Black or white, a fact that Duke credits to Irving Mills.  At that date, the fact that the tour took place at all was a small miracle, for 1931 was a very bitter year for jazz in general and for Black jazz orchestras in particular.  Variety wrote that year that "colored showbiz can shout at only a few spots.  In all the other spots, it hasn't the strength to shout; it can't even whisper."

Oriental Theater, Downtown Chicago

All this was no small challenge, even to the formidable resources of Duke Ellington, Incorporated.  The stark social realities of the Depression, which dictated the demise or decline of many superior bands, only to add still more luster to the fame of Ellington, and many more doors were to be opened for him during the run of the Chicago tour.  The major engagements here included a week's booking at the Balaban and Katz Oriental Theater in the Loop with a matinee performance on February 13.  According to the original Publix contract, the Ellington band was to spend the following two weeks playing at the Regal Theater, on the South Side.

In January, about two weeks before the tour hit Chicago, the contract was amended to include the B & K Uptown Theater on the opposite end of town for its final week in Chicago, and the Regal stay was shortened to a single week.

Apparently, there was one other important change in the Publix contract, for originally the shows in Chicago were supposed to import a portion of the Cotton Club's floor show, along with Ellington, to perform during the band's intermissions.  Although Ellington's program at all three theaters included supporting acts similar to the Harlem fare, accounts from the Chicago papers of that time indicate that local talent filled out the remainder of the billing. Perhaps this was the basis for some of the premature speculation that Ellington was about to leave the Cotton Club permanently for the greener pastures of theater tours.  The Publix contract reportedly carried a stipulation bearing more than four figures, so financially it was a very wise move for Ellington to have made at that time; at the same time, it seems the Cotton Club management was threatening cuts in the band's salary.

For its part, the Balaban & Katz chain had already earned a reputation for giving breaks to Black performers, and here, no doubt, Irving Mills sensed a golden opportunity.  At the beginning of February, they cast the comedy team of Chilton and Thomas to head a stage production called Whirl of Luck at the Oriental, and from there until Ellington's premier, the show went to the Uptown Theater, and then out of town on a Publix tour.  From their point of view, Ellington could generate the kind of interest that could yank B & K and Chicago out of the doldrums of the Depression.

The public in Chicago was well-acquainted with Ellington, from musicians to ordinary radio-listeners, a market that included just about everybody.  The Mills office publicity, coupled with broadcasts from the Cotton Club, was largely responsible for the ever-increasing ballyhoo over Ellington.  Moreover, many Chicagoans had already seen the band in its early film appearances, including the new Pathe studio revue then showing in town.  Word of mouth, the most reliable of all publicity, had it that, at a theater in Boston the week before the Chicago opening, the audience gave the band a standing ovation lasting twenty-two minutes after the curtain went down on the show.  The Bostonian audience, never known as the most demonstrative kind, continued to applaud until the picture was stopped and Duke came out for another bow.

With this kind of momentum, Duke Ellington, couldn't miss in Chicago.  Many of the important components of what would become the standard Ellington p.r. sheet was already filling the local show-business columns.  One such piece in the Chicago Defender, whimsical in tone and bearing a strange byline, "Anonymous Weineshenk.," may have been the first of a long line of capsule biographies of Duke.  It dubbed Ellington the "the leading exponent of what is known as dirty and hot music," and chronicled.his rise from Washington salons to the pinnacle of celebrity at the Cotton Club, "one of the places Mayor Jimmy Walker takes visiting swimmers to see."

Duke's first recording of "Creole Rhapsody" appeared in January that same year, and this article may have been the first to reveal Ellington's intention to complete, in an extended form, his musical history of his race, an idea that was to occupy Ellington for many more years.  Even at this date, there appeared in Ellington's career a dichotomy between serious art and popular success.  He had been a popular success at least since "Mood Indigo" became the first of his hit songs.

The band's opening on Friday, February 13, kicked off an engagement that broke all the attendance at the Oriental Theater.  For the matinee performance, as the theater opened its doors at 1:33, Chicagoans "pushed, shoved and thronged the entrance to get a peek at Harlem's king of jazz," some of them having stood in line for three hours in the February weather.

That phrase, "the Harlem king of jazz" was surely the brainchild of Ned Williams then doing B & K publicity and soon to become the heart of the Mills office's promotion of Duke Ellington.  Ned's most obvious talent was his rapid-fire compression of images, phrases and slogans to gain an effect. His ad copy in the Chicago Tribune and the other big daily papers was filled with such things as, "Today!  The Hottest Music, the Most Sizzling Stage Show in the World!"  "Come on! Get Hot!  Get Happy!"  "Harlem's Jazz King Blaring, Crooning, Burning Up the Stage with His Red-Hot Rhythms, Moaning Saxophones, Wailing Cornets, Laughing Trombones, Screaming Clarinets!"  "Sensational Stars of Radio and Records in an All-Colored Jamboree, High Low-Down,Wild, Mad Dancing Girls!"  "Low-down Hilarious Comedy!  Blazing Blues Singers!"  "Furious and Fast Stage Show, Hotter than Blazes!"  All this and a movie, The Truth About Youth, starring Loretta Young, for thirty-five cents.  

According to the review of the Friday opening show in the Defender, "The patient crowd was amply repaid by Duke, once they took their seats.  Some of the little femmes, after grinding at their typewriters all day, relaxed under that beaming personality and smile that the Duke emulates.  But more soo, thing than his smile was the music that he and his band dispensed.  What rhythm, what harmony, what unison!"

Regal Theater, South Side

The Regal Theater Chorus opened the show with a strike-up-the-band dance routine.  They then sang a special number, introducing the great Ellington.  A second curtain ascended to reveal Duke under an amber spot, cuing the band into "Ring Dem Bells" and "Three Little Words," which they had performed in the feature film Check and Double Check the year previously.  Then came a bit of magic:  Ivie Anderson, aged twenty-five, was already a show-business veteran, having been a professional singer for ten years, both at home and abroad.

She had most recently worked as a featured attraction in Earl Hines's Grand Terrace Revue on Thirty-fifth Street, and she expected her current tryout with Ellington to last no longer than his Chicago booking.  For eleven more years, Ivie was to spark the band's appearances with her verve, wit and dignity and would become a star in her own right, but nowhere would she move an audience more effectively than at the Oriental Theater on opening night.  Recalling Florence Mills, Ivie gave her rendition of "I'm a Little Blackbird," and the cheering mob wouldn't let her go.  It took four bows and a speech to get her off the stage in the opening show.

Third on the bill, Duke returned as an emcee with "If I Could Be With You."  The reviewer wrote, "and the femmes sigh and close their eyes."  Then, against lurid jungle scenery, the Regalettes come back to dance to Duke's arrangement of "Tiger Rag."  They were followed in the fourth spot by the old vaudevillian dance team of Ford, Marshall and Jones.  The Ellington band closed out the show with a set of Duke's own compositions:  the mournful "Black and Tan Fantasy," with a blue klieg light full upon the entire band, and then the astounding "Old Man Blues" as a rousing finale.

Duke's opening on the South Side did not go without fanfare, either.  For Friday, February 20, the Defender carried notice of a "monster parade to be held in Duke's honor," inviting "everyone with an automobile and a heart full of welcome for Duke Ellington."  The throng stretched all the way downtown from the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh Street by noon.  The matinee opening at the Regal was billed as the biggest in the history of that theater.  Advance publicity, proclaiming Ellington's as "the only band in the world that plays jazz, with a primitive rhythm that thrills to the fingertips, with harmony blending soft, warm jungle melodies in perfect syncopation," was undoubtedly again the doing of Ned Williams.

I might add that some of Ellington's publicity in the Negro press directly reflected Black America's hunger for race heroes and champions it could call its own.  One item in the Defender went so far as to depict Duke as a sort of Black Jack Armstrong.  The article was slugged, "Duke Ellington Proves Mettle in Cotton Club Blaze."  The story informed South Side readers how Ellington, "rushing in, loaded with pails of water, saved the chorus girls from a dressing room fire at the Cotton Club" showing "he could cool things down as fast as he could warm them up."

The band closed at the Regal Thursday night, February 26 and opened at the Uptown Theater the following day.  The show there was essentially the same as the ones presented at the Oriental and Regal, except that the Ford, Marshall and Jones dance team was replaced by the Four Blazes.  The week at the Uptown brought Duke's first Chicago stay to a fitting conclusion.  The band would go on with its Publix tour to the Paradise, Tivoli, and Fisher Theaters in Detroit, before returning East for an engagement at the Brooklyn Paramount, but it was a different band than the one it had been three weeks before.  Chicago was the origin of many new motifs in the Ellington story.

Uptown Theater, North Side

Henry Blankfort, part two

 

L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993

Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in North Hollywood of cardiac arrest.  A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People."  He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure."  During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps.  His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.  

Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.

The Hollywood Theater Alliance was also responsible for Zero Hour.   After Meet the People and before Jump for Joy?

At around the same time as Meet the People.  A professor who is fired because of the hierarchy.  [director] Sidney Salkow was out here.  So was Albert Maltz.

Of the Hollywood Ten.

Yeah.  And they wrote Zero Hour.

It didn’t have a successful run.

No.  As a matter of fact, at the end of the second act I posted a closing sign.

On opening night?

Yeah, I smelled it.

I have something about another production by the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a thing called They Can’t Get You Down, but by that time you were gone.

Departed.  And They Can’t Get You Down did not go up.  Really, its main success was Meet the People, number one.   And I see, Eddie Eliscu, one of the writers, has just written a show directed by his son, up north.  It’s playing near San Francisco.  My son, who lives up around San Raphael, read the reviews.  Brilliant, great reviews.  Eddie Eliscu is still writing plays; how do these guys hang around?  I thought they were dead!

Getting back to Ellington, was the person that you got to know very different from his suave, sophisticated onstage persona?

No.  He was a suave and sophisticated guy, very much onstage all the time.  A wide-ranging imagination.  The one reservation I have about Ellington is that he never really did anything strong for his people.  I think there were a number of reasons for this; one was his religiosity.  Everything that happened was God’s will.

Do you mean to say he was fatalistic about things like Jim Crow?

It wasn’t fatalism.  I’m an atheist.  The God-fetish that too many people accept isn’t fatalism, but there’s a meaning in it I just can’t understand, that there’s some hand or some chemistry that’s the reason for all this.  My own philosophy is I'm against anything that divides people.  I think they're all manufactured, anyhow.  Basically, to be very crass about it, most of it's bullshit.  Those people are programmed to walk with bended knees, heads down.   I've seen so much hypocrisy in the religious world, the misuse of people for personal benefit.  What are there: fourteen hundred different religions?

But Duke didn't want any part of it.   

No, Duke would never get involved.  I think because of his talent and his personality, he was readily lionized in his successful days by the chic whites who would ask him to dinner to prove they had no prejudice.    

In a sense, that was the basis of his whole career, at least one way of looking at it.  In show business, he was the number one Black, the Negro who showed that the Negro could "make it" in show business.

  

Because of my involvement with Jump for Joy, I became one of the writers on Tales of Manhattan.

I don't know anything about that.

Tales of Manhattan was a major film.  It had an interesting concept:  it was the story of a tailcoat.  It had Ginger Rogers and Eddie Robinson in it.  [Charles] Laughton was in it, and Ethel Waters.  Paul Robeson was in it, and my assignment was to do the section with Paul Robeson.   Later on, they also put me on the Edward G. Robinson section.  It was one of the big pictures of its day.

And history has a funny way of twisting about itself.  When he [Robeson] and I were doing that part, there was bad segregation.  His daughter is still alive.  He sang at a show where his son and daughter were assigned the same seat one night.  Can you imagine that?  But his daughter did a book that lies:  it says he didn't like his episode in Tales of Manhattan.  Tales of Manhattan was made in the 1940s.  Fortunately, there has been some change in Black attitudes.  Paul had complete artistic control over his section.  He even sent me a handwritten note, which said he was overjoyed.  When he read my draft, he wrote in some comments.

Anyway, in the story the tailcoat with money in its pockets. lands on a little sharecropper's place.  Ethel Waters, who plays his wife, believes it's from God.  Robeson thinks that's bullshit; he wants to spend the money on tractors, and plows, and everything for this little community.  She wants it for a church.  He wins.  

Another thing about Ellington:  he was a great womanizer.  When we were casting the show, he called me over and said, "I want to tell you something. There's a woman coming to your office," and he told me her name.  We walked out of the office, and he had E.S.P.  This is true!

There's a lady, Lena Horne.  I was the first white man whose hand she shook, because she had intense dislike for whites and still carries it around.  I read somewhere that she married Lenny Hayton because he was white, not because she loved him.  But she learned to like him.  

Duke tells in his book, about Jump for Joy, that there were backstage discussions every night.  Every time the curtain came down, there would be changes made.

Oh, all the time.

Tell me about that.  Were there sharp disagreements?  Were they political in nature?

Some of them were, like no dialect was political in nature.

How did these discussions usually play out?  Were there conservatives or radicals among the cast?

 Yes, like society.  This was not quite true of Meet the People.  There you didn't have anybody who was conservative, none.  I was politicized through Meet the People, in an organizational way.

What about the backstage discussions in Jump for Joy?

Well, there were many of them.

Were certain sketches taken out by consensus?

These people became afraid when they got threats to blow up the theater, that kind of stuff.  One thing I saw in the general cast, among the girls and fellows:  some of them did become radicalized.   They saw something happening, even to themselves.  They began to understand, when you want to get your master's foot off your neck, you've got to take that goddamned foot and twist it.  And it gave them a sense of pride.

There was a gal called Lomax who wrote for the Black paper called The Sentinel, a very brilliant writer with a very mordant pen, razor-edged.  We opened against Cabin in the Sky, the stage version, the same night.  She compared Cabin in the Sky to Booker T. Washington and Jump for Joy to Frederick Douglass.  When I saw that review, that's all I wanted.  

I can see how she would think that way.

I'd never met her, up to that time.  The first time I saw her we fell in love.  Fantastic.  We kept in contact for a number of years, then she went abroad for a and became a columnist.  There were too many of complaints from white people.  She was ahead of her time.  The thing in the past that bothers me most about Jump for Joy is the in the attitudes of reviewers that this was never recognized as a milestone in the theater.

Now, in a sense, too-- this was also true of Meet the People-- was Dorothy Dandridge.  This would play down South, and there were attitudes among white actors, not in the cast, but within the Actors Guild.  In the matter of my driving her home, her mother was black and honest with me, and she understood it.  I could only suppose it; they lived it.   She was afraid.  Some might say it's being paranoid on the part of Blacks.  It's actual.  Dorothy went out when some white boys and girls threw tomatoes at her, and there were some episodes going into restaurants.  For a while, my wife and I lived a very stormy life!  We'd make reservations in restaurants, and we'd come in with Dorothy.  "Sorry, sorry."  I remember one night at the Brown Derby on Vine Street, I told the maitre-d' I'd piss on the floor.  They called the cops, but we got a table.

We introduced her to one of the Nicholas Brothers-- Harold?--  She was married to him.         

Later on in the Forties, you became quite a political activist.  You have a cousin named Michael Blankfort?  

He just died.

I'm sorry to hear that.    

I'm not.  He was an informer, on his own volition, too.

  

You're referring to the HUAC hearings that took place here thirty years ago?

He named two people, whom he had no knowledge about:  me and his former wife.    

As a result, did that bring you in front of the Committee?

Oh, no, no, no.  I was at the bottom of the barrel, but I was there.

I've read your testimony, by the way.

It's one of the high points of my life.

Your message rings out, bold and clear.

Oh, I had a wonderful time.  

Was Michael blacklisted?

For about ten minutes.

So he went on working, while you were blacklisted.  You were out of the film business from that point on.

I did a couple of things under pseudonyms.

As in Woody Allen's movie, The Front?

Yes.  I didn't mind keeping a double set of books.  Of course, I'm involved with an aerospace education, on levels of all sorts, and they know all about me.

How did you get involved in that career, and when?

I live by serendipity.   When I was blacklisted, I'd been doing quite well in the motion picture business.  You lived up to everything you made in those days.  I had to work!  Oh, I sold door to door, all that kind of stuff, but I took it in stride.  I wasn't bothered at all about being blacklisted, psychologically.

I don't know how to worry, you see.  I simply don't:  I'm retarded!  It's funny; by a series of coincidences, I got a job with a company called Revell.

Model airplanes?

On my first day, I met the president.  I didn't know who he was, and I got into a big argument with him.  And he offered me a job!  I didn't know who the hell he was.  And six months later, I was a vice-president of the company.  So many letters from kids came to me about those airplanes.  

I talked to Patricia Willard a couple of weeks ago.  She worked for you, is that right?

Yeah, I remember her taking up a lot of my time.

She's on a grant.  She's working on an Ellington book, too.

From the Smithsonian, right?

From the National Endowment for the Arts or Humanities, I'm not sure which.  That's what I should have done!

What are you going to do?  A book?

I've sent a manuscript to a couple of publishers, who don't seem to be interested in my first draft, so I'm working on my second draft.  One of them I interested was the Louisiana State University Press.  The commercial publishers aren't interested in anything about Ellington, as far as I can tell.

 You know, his book didn't sell too well.  It wasn't a good book.

They gave him a huge advance.  That's why he did it.  It's very entertaining, if that's what you're looking for, but as far as telling what it's like to be a Black person in show business, it's worthless.

I see him as an example of all things are possible.  I think a writer should bear more responsibility.  What is your approach on the Ellington book?

There have been a lot of books about Ellington, but all of them are focused on his music.  I want to see him in a larger context.

The exceptionalist idea comes into play:  he's "exceptional."  Not an example of what a human being can be.

I'm very involved with education in the ghettoes and barrios.  I'm a volunteer teacher for the L.A. school district.   They just gave a Golden Apple Award to Mayor Brown.  I'm involved in aerospace education.  I've always been interested in the learning process; I'm a dropout.  I have no academic credentials, but I come from an academic family.   My mother taught at Hunter College.  My father was the in the first graduating class from the City Colleges of New York.  My sister in New Jersey graduated from Cornell, and I had an older brother who went to N.Y.U. and another who attended Princeton, until the First World War broke out.  There are many contradictions in me.  When I was a kid, I wanted to go to military school; now I'm so violently against violence!

So, we began getting letters from these kids who were building these models, hundreds of letters, and I began thinking these little kits could be turned into learning tools.  I read in the p.aper that there was to be a conference on aerospace education in one week, someone.  This was in the 1950s; I was at Revell at that time.  So, I strolled over to see what it was like.  I sat through three days of this thing, and I met Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley.  I got into an argument.

A technical argument?

Technical?  I didn't even know how a plane stays up in the sky!  And they were so unsure of themselves, they thought I was a maven, someone with wisdom who could point out their lack of knowledge.    

Now, an interesting thing about Meet the People:  As time has gone on, first of all Nanette Fabray, some of that cast's participation is never mentioned.  It's the same as saying you're a Communist.  It's funny, these hidden fears we have in this so-called democracy.

Some of Duke Ellington's past has been hidden.  I wrote the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act.  Were you with the Hollywood Democratic Committee?

Sure.

The F.B.I. says Duke Ellington was on the executive board.  Does that mean anything?

It was just to support candidates.  Roosevelt!  But in those days, this was anathema.

There's a list of benefits:  American Committee to Save Refugees; an Exiled Writers' Committee; the American Spanish Aid Committee.  The F.B.I. marks these as involvement with the left.  Plenty of people were blacklisted for much less than this.

I know that the F.B.I. was interested in Jump for Joy.  Why, I don't know.  That was in a period when mail was opened.

Did the show go off to other places when it left the Mayan Theater?  I've seen mention of some "tabloid versions."

Oh, Sid was involved with that.  They thought they could perform some acts in a nightclub.  I remember a time when I got a phone call from Duke at four in the morning.  He wanted to do a revival of Jump for Joy.  Duke used to call at odd hours.  Sometimes he wanted me to come to New York to revive Jump for Joy.  

Well, they finally did revive it in Miami, unsuccessfully.  And Kuller wants to revive it again.

I know it.  I have this penchant for not thinking about the past.  A day came when someone wanted to revive Meet the People.  Well, the world's changed.  Attitudes are different.  They wanted to use some of the same songs that had been hits.  The big hit from Meet the People was "A Boy and a Girl."  Christ, that would be ridiculous today!

It's a period piece.

You see, what incites success for some of the old musicals inspires them, but we're on a different channel.

I sense that to reprise Jump for Joy, you'd really need the original cast and the Ellington band itself.  It's a period piece, a success that can never be repeated.  You'd need Ivie Anderson.

It still plays occasionally.  There's a lyric in there about a glass of gin, somewhere.

"My man and me just gin some, and sin some,,."

 Yes, gin some, sin some.  That'd be crap today.

Still, something about it makes me cry.

It's a good song, musically.  But it doesn't have the feeling of some of this rock music that's more contemporary.

I can't agree with that.  Most pop music is crass commercialism and crap.

Have you heard "Take This Job and Shove It"?  The kids who write today are like meteors.  They go to the sky and come back again.  I used to have a house on Beverly Boulevard, and there was a music agency in the place.  Those kids, some of them in their twenties, driving around in their Rolls Royces,  They had a hit song!