Songs & Sayings

Otherwise, so many details about our ancestors will be lost when my generation goes. Even a trifling bit of research, as I did at Ellis Island in 2011, reveals a trove about us: in that case, confirmation of Sam Essid's ship, original name, and original destination in the US when he immigrated.

At 60, with some long-term health issues starting to rear their toothy, mocking heads, it hit me: my sisters and I are the elders. I don't feel worthy. I am still a punk, in my own mind, maybe in yours. In any case...

When was it that I first heard Margaret Essid called "Mama the Plumber"? She often reminded me "you only got one mama." How true, and what a good one I had! To me, who only broke things, it seemed that mom could fix anything. She had to, because when dad was on the road and we had no money, if the sink got plugged up or began to leak, she fixed it, with a rag and pair of pliers. My late brother Louis gave her that name, back when they had five kids under the small roof and the money was no better. 

I cannot, in a time when we all are so pampered, imagine their courage. Mom would laugh off adversity, saying about something that was in terrible shape (or if her hair were mussed, herself) that it looked like "The Wreck of The Hesperus." I had to Google that Longfellow poem decades later. I figured that whatever happened to that ship, it must have been truly awful; mom saved the expression for particularly apt moments. Mostly in those days, she was surprisingly optimistic around me, at least.

Dad, meanwhile, was what we now call "snarky." I got it from him, as well as a few choice expressions. He once yelled "What the HELL is wrong with that old bag?" when a careless woman pulled her car right out in front of ours on Roseneath Road in Richmond. Mom and I cracked up, earning a Lebanese bugged-out-eye stare from Big Joe and the admonition "Boy, don't you ever say that!" Of course I did, and sometimes still do!

Dad was a good driver, unlike that nameless old bag, which was fortunate. He was on the road a lot when I was young, before he and Leroy Soffee started Berkeley Tomato in Chesapeake, VA, right off Tidewater Drive (its second location). Somewhere I have the "sold" sticker for my first car, a '74 Buick Apollo dad bought for mom. Ray, the guy at Perry Buick who sold cars and became dad's friend (thanks to many boxes of tomatoes and fifths of liquor, I'm sure) marked it "Sold to Joe Tomato!" Dad loved that. I am sure he had many other kindly nicknames from the many people who knew him, and the business contacts to whom he was nothing if not a square dealer, as good as his word.

He gave the kids nicknames I won't repeat, but I will record a few sayings by him, with attribution where I can:

• China is a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! (Napoleon Bonaparte)

• Do not leave dirty water until you find clean water (Dad told me this whenever I said I was fed up with a job).

• A man makes 100 dollars a week and saves 5. Another man makes 20 a week and saves 10. Who is wealthier? (Dad told him his mother, Montura Soffee Essid, taught him that wisdom).

• You can go to the college, you can go to the school, but if you ain't got that religion you're an educated fool (From "Denomination Blues" by Washington Phillips. I would say "right on" with a smirk, sometimes when Dad said this. He knew what I was up to).

• Lordy lordy what a party! (from his father, Sam Essid).

• Rocking along in an old rocking chair (when I asked him, in his last years, what they were up to).

• To the grandkids, "Uncle Joe don't know nothing from nothing!" True. I once sang  to him Billy Preston's comeback "Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You gotta have something, if you want to be with me." I got a smirk in return and a shake of his head.

• The broken clock is right twice a day (when I said something clever or correct. I use this one a lot, now). Mary Ann Ryan adds "True and there was only one clock in the house most of the time."

I started learning these, as well as dad's songs, in the early 1970s, a time when so much changed, forever, for the family, our blue-collar Parkwood neighborhood, and the nation. After that, dad stopped driving a produce truck and was home a lot more. 

But he did still sing on the highway, a habit he'd taken up to keep himself awake on long hauls from, say, Jacksonville to New York City with a load of citrus. Mom and I went to Florida with him, in his big GM cars, about five times during the 70s; I was in my second year at UVA, 1981, the last time we went. 

Often he'd sing. Without a radio in the truck he had to do something to keep his eyes open.

When did I first hear Big Joe sing the Hank Williams song "Kaw-Liga"? Dad could not recall (or cared not to repeat) all the lyrics, but he loved these: 

And then one day, a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her oh-so far away but ol' Kaw-Liga stayed. . .

Yes, it's a song about a wooden Indian at a cigar store who falls in love with a wooden Indian princess across the street at an antique store. He never says a word to her, so off she goes and Kaw-Liga is left behind, just a "poor old wooden head."

It was the early 50s, folks, and people like my parents had just saved the world from the greatest evil of our times. So we can forgive them a ridiculous song (what was a wooden Indian going to say anyhow?). I've since come to really, really love it and sometimes quote the lyrics. The same goes for Peggy Lee's "Mañana":

The window she is broken and the rain is coming in!
If someone does not fix it, I'll be soaked right to the skin!
But maybe in a day or two the rain will go away,
And who would need a window, on such a sunny day? 

Those lyrics were his watchwords for "relax, boy."

I recall another song about easy living that went "Dancing, romancing, always on the go! Everybody crazy about Mexican Joe." Dad would sing only that lyric from Jim Reeves' 1953 song "Mexican Joe." That tune, like Peggy Lee's, is definitely not politically correct today.

Next on the Big Joe Playlist, cue up anything by Johnny Horton, especially "North to Alaska." Dad would belt them out as we rolled down brand new, and still tranquil, I-95 to Florida. He had some modern tastes, too, saying it was a shame the Beatles broke up, because they had finally made a song he liked ("Get Back"). We had a good time together listening to Canadian Singer-Songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, especially his 70s masterpiece, the album "Sundown." I still play that one quite a bit. 

Mom would only stop us when dad and I would turn up the radio to sing along with Joe Tex's outstanding and outlandish funk song, "Skinny Legs and All":

Hey, Joe
Yeah Bobby?
Why don't you take her?
Shut up fool! I don't want no woman with no skinny legs!
Look here, I thought I might give this woman to Clyde
But, no, I know the kinda woman Clyde likes
Ol' Leroy'll take her.
Say Leroy? You want her? You got her!

That song had a Joe and a Leroy in it, so Pop adored it. I have that song and crank it up regularly. So should you. Listen to Joe Tex's "I Got Ya!" while you are at it. Mom banned my playing it or owning the record, as she thought it was filthy. Naturally, I went out and got it as a single, playing it until the vinyl wore out.

For her part, Mom sang sweeter, less urban songs. This fit her more ladylike upbringing in quasi-rural Lakeside. 

I still tear up in springtime when Robins make themselves more plentiful, thinking of her singing Harry Wood's 1926 hit, "When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbing Along":

What if I were blue,
Now I'm walking through,
Walking through the fields of flowers
Rain may glisten but still I listen for hours and hours
I'm just a kid again doing what I did again, singing a song
When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along.

Hell yes, those were more innocent times. In times like these, I'd fly there like a shot if I could, even though in the 50s I'd end up some malcontent Beatnik with my beard and earrings, drinking with Kerouac or "smoking reefer" in Tangier with Paul Bowles, a rather genteel travel writer (his novels are darker) and composer of classical music I'd have loved to have introduced to mom.

When our NPR affiliate plays Chopin or Liszt, I often have to pull the car over. I can recall mom playing pieces by these composers on the piano. I am so pleased that mom helped me select a piece of classical music, Bach's Brandenberg Concertos, when we made a final visit to a downtown record store going out of business in the 1980s. It's still a treasured possession (and some of Bach's finest music). I got my interests in classical music from mom, something that may have contributed to my life in academia. If so, it's her finest gift to me.

I broke down in Warsaw, at the Chopin moment, a year after mom passed. Pop must have been impressed by my show of emotion; a week later, hiking with Polish friends in the Tatra Mountains in the south of the country, right on the Slovak border, I saw him. Really. 

We embarked from an idyllic glen into the high country. The Polish National park service set up a traditionally designed mountaineer's hut serving local food. Beside it, the rangers had placed some picnic tables. I took one look back at where we'd just had a snack. Instead of an empty table we'd left, I saw dad sitting there.

Enough of that; one saying I made up and use quite a bit is " 'might have been' are the three saddest words in the English language." So let's not pile on: 2020 has been a dreadful year, riven with illness and division, even between people in this very family.

I picked up my parents' habits of singing silly old songs. Some of them, like "Mairzy Doats" are from World War II, and that was perhaps the most awful threat we've faced since the Civil War. 2020 is a cakewalk compared to 1862 or 1942. How did foks make jokes in the midst of World War II?  Because they had to, that's why. I still quote a line from that era, "must be jelly 'cause jam don't shake like that." It's a Glenn Miller song title mom loved to quote, especially when some well endowed young woman strolled past our house.

Some silly sayings and lyrics did, of course, point to dark events. From that First Great War we entered in 1917, just before mom was born, she'd sometimes say, "Kaiser Bill went up the hill to get a look at France. Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants."

Somehow such songs and sayings lighten the burden of gloomy times and sombre feelings. It's whistling in the dark, perhaps, and I do whistle better than I sing. That said, singing Jethro Tull's "Fat Man" to our fattest cat, or crooning George Thorogood's "Move it on Over" to the dogs makes me laugh.

So when I put straw in the dog's shelter, I usually say, "Move over cool dog, the hot dog's movin' in."

I'll close with a song that dad never sang, but he should have because he lived it. He got pretty excited when I told him that I got to hear Cab Calloway's Big Band play in the mid 80s. I think he sang a verse from "Minnie The Moocher," who was "a red-hot hoochie-coocher." Dad loved the phrase "hoochie-cooch" as well as Calloway's term (and song title) "the jumping jive."

The wartime band leader was in his last years of performing when I saw him, but it was a show to remember forever. I think it is when I first heard "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House," which should have been Dad's anthem. If he ever insisted you eat something, no matter how full you were, you'll understand:

Have a banana, Hannah
Try the salami, Tommy
Get with the gravy, Davy
Everybody eats when they come to my house
Try a tomato, Plato
Here's cacciatore, Dory
Taste the bologna, Tony
Everybody eats when they come to my house.

So join me in learning and singing a few of these old songs. Christmas time is when the darkness begins to turn. It's a birth of light, one older than the Christian Savior but so well exemplified in Jesus' birth. The days get longer, and there has long been a sense of hope rekindled.

Now please eat something, so you don't end up like the woman with the skinny legs.