Music: Sounds of the City

I won’t go to Macy’s any mo-ah, mo-ah,

mo-ah, There’s a big fat policeman at the

do-ah, do-ah, do-ah, He pulls you by the coll-ah, and make

you pay a doll-ah, So I won’t go to Macy’s any mo-ah,

mo-ah, mo-ah.

The song came drifting out of a littered yard between two tenements. The young man passing in the street stopped for a moment to listen, then turned into the yard and unslung the tape recorder he always carries over one shoulder. The children’s voices recorded on that muggy summer afternoon are preserved in an album called New York 19 (Folkways). The man who recorded them is 35-year-old Tony Schwartz, folklorist with a passion for the sounds of his time and place.

A sometime commercial artist and maker of television commercials, Schwartz roams Manhattan with his 16-lb., battery-operated recorder, flicks it on in buses. subways, cabs, restaurants and elevators. His recordings of street singers, songs by national groups, church services in Harlem have provided the basis for nearly a dozen pop songs, including Sippin’ Soda (Guy Mitchell), The Pendulum Song (Nelson Riddle), Wimoweh (Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers). In his midtown Manhattan apartment, such singers as Pete Seeger, Josh White, Harry Belafonte have sampled Schwartz’s 1,500 hours of recorded tape, including more than 5,000 songs from some 40 countries.

The sounds of Manhattan are far more fascinating to Schwartz than the echo of an Indian sitar. In addition to New York IQ (covering the sounds of Manhattan postal district 19, from the Plaza Hotel to the West Side docks), he has released The New York Taxi Driver (Columbia) and Sounds of My City (Folkways). On them, listeners will find strolling sidewalk instrumentalists, the raucous chatter of pneumatic drills, the wail of sirens—plus a series of rambling speeches, sometimes funny, sometimes pathetic, in the polyglot accents of the New York streets. A plumber, on music: “I mean to me when there’s music I’ll stop anything; without music, I mean I don’t think there’d be life—there would be no world.” A Times Square pitchman selling a pen: “If my physiognomy is not too conspicuous to be comprehended, I’m gonna clarify . . . You can write Yiddish, you can write English, you can print, you can sketch with this very same pen.”

Schwartz is now working on a record about the prizefighting business, has plans for records on superstition, old age, the reasons why people move. Meantime, he continues to collect the bittersweet songs of the slum children:

Policeman, policeman, do your duty, Here comes Diane with th’American

Beauty.

She can wiggle, she can woggle, she

can do the split; I bet you any money she can’t do

THIS!