THE MUSICAL HISTORY of NEW YORK CITY

So many great New York City musical moments: Sinatra, the Beatles, Marian Anderson, the Ronettes, Leonard Bernstein, Billie Holiday, Dion and the Belmonts and Duke Ellington…and that’s just scratching the surface.

From the time I was three or four years old, thanks to my mother, I was listening to the radio. First it was what we now call the American Songbook, then it was Doo Wop, the Girl Groups, Rock, Jazz, and Classical. And then there were/are the venues….the Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, the Apollo, Central Park, 55 Bar and on and on.

I, like so many of us, live for good music…and I’m also very interested in the history of music, particularly in New York City.

Post a photo, a piece of music or a story and…please…add a couple of sentences or a paragraph or two that puts your post into an historical New York context. If you want to personalize a story, go ahead. Everyone loves a universal story…it may be your story, your parents, your grandparents, a friend or an old family acquaintance. So join me here at The Musical History of New York City.

MUSIC of the LOWER EAST SIDE: THE MUSICAL HISTORY of NEW YORK CITY

A few years ago, a group of musicians and I performed “The Musical History of the Lower East Side” in a number of venues around the city. We featured music from the many immigrant groups that have arrived on the LES over the past 400 years. Most of the groups, including the Italians, Irish, Hispanic, German and others brought music from their homeland…in many cases it connected them to their past and was one way they could pass along their heritage.

I was particularly struck by the audience and friends response to “Oyfn Pripetshik,” written by Mark Warshawsky, a Yiddish speaking Russian composer. Many told me how, when they were young, their Jewish, Eastern European/Russian grandmother, living on the LES or in the Bronx, sang this song to them, one of the most popular songs of the Jews in Eastern Europe.

You may remember the song from the film “Schindler’s List: CLICK HERE

“When, children, you will grow older…You will understand…How many tears lie in these letters…And how much crying.”