This year marks my 25th year performing for adult and senior audiences. Hosts have included libraries, retirement villages, arts & culture councils, fraternal groups, senior centers, churches, museums, community colleges, social clubs, coffeehouses and many other venues across the East Coast and Midwest.
I launched VintageMusicConcerts in 1999 after 28 years of writing for magazines, catalogs, newsletters and newspapers in Boston, New York, Trenton, Philadelphia and Washington DC. The last nine years included churning out feature articles and a weekly column for the Washington Post. But I decided I wanted something more productive than dealing with the swamp creatures of Washington and the scalawags of publishing. I was ready for something fresh.
I had abandoned a budding career as a singer and guitarist during college and now, 30 years later, I began looking for a musical niche to exploit. After a year playing open mics, smokey bars and radio shows for free publicity and something called "exposure," I was invited to perform for residents at a retirement village in Bucks County PA.
That night I discovered the joy I could bring an audience of adults and seniors. I also felt the modest glow of getting paid to play vintage guitars and sing great old tunes for an appreciative audience.
Vintage songs for vintage audiences
I hatched a plan to produce concerts with me playing vintage guitars, singing vintage songs and performing for vintage audiences. That was the concept.
My events were never billed as "legacy concerts" or "tribute concerts," to name the clichés I sometimes heard. Nor would I offer "musical therapy" or "lifelong learning." In small venues people want entertainment with a side of education, so I knew they'd enjoy attending live concerts more than listening to the tinny noises on a cell phone. I also knew they'd like hearing songs they heard in their younger days.
After minimal research, I began promoting this venture to activity directors who booked and paid for concerts with my target audience — seniors at continuing care retirement centers, libraries, arts & culture venues, museums, travel clubs, and associations of retired professionals with a budget for monthly programs.
It soon was clear people enjoyed my stories and songs in the context of a 60- to 90-minute entertainment. Within five years, I averaged 140 one-night stands a year while I hauled my sound system, six to eight guitars and a small suitcase between Maine and Florida, and west toward Ohio and Michigan. No overnight sensation by anyone's measure, I was earning hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year with this enterprise.
Oh, the stories they'd tell
Early on, I learned fascinating things about 20th Century Americans and their favorite songs. My audiences — folks in their 80s, 90s and 100s — would hum and sing and tap their feet to the music, especially if I was in sync with their mood. Then, afterward, they'd come up to me to talk about the music of their youth and about their younger days.
They told me who they dated, their favorite songs, dance steps, where they grew up, places they visited and what they did with siblings, friends and beaus. The intimacy of these concerts led them to reveal what they saw, sensed and felt — private things that had happened to them back in the day when the songs I sang that night still belonged to them.
One woman, she called herself a "Jersey girl," recalled it cost a quarter to get into RKO Paramount Theater in December 1942 to see a movie and hear Frank Sinatra sing a few songs to an audience of teen-aged girls. She didn't have the money for admission, so she climbed the fire escape to enter the theater from the roof.
Once inside, she had to fight for a seat because none of the other bobby soxers in the audience would give theirs up after one of Frank's sets. By late afternoon, the aroma in the theater was breath-taking, she added.
Another woman, who worked as a soda jerk in her father's Indiana drugstore, remembered making milkshakes, lime rickeys and one-at-a-time sodas (syrup + ice + seltzer, five cents for a small, ten cents for a large) for teenage boys and girls who met after school at the drugstore, dropped dimes in the juke box or hid out in the phone booths.
Yet another woman, a Rockette dancer at Radio City Music Hall in the 1940s, described an awkward date she had one night with a stagedoor johnny named Mickey Rooney. "He came to the back door looking for a date with a big bouquet of flowers," she told me. "So, I went out with the guy, but I didn't marry the S.O.B. You know he was married eight times?"
One night, after a concert in Florida, I met the pilot of a Flying Fortress — B-17 bomber. He told me he had flown more than 25 missions and survived miserable ack-ack attacks over Europe in World War II. He could barely walk and eased his awkward gait with a cane. Yet he smiled as he recounted intimate details of a disastrous blind date his sister had set up for him. He also repeated the words to a few of the songs I sang that night.
One time, to announce my next song, Herman Hupfeld's 1931 classic, "As Time Goes By," made famous in the 1942 film, "Casablanca," I told them, "It's about star-crossed lovers." People in the room giggled. They broke out in smiles. Then, they gushed with misty tears.
In memory's grip
My audiences revealed things to me they never told anyone else.
The stories they shared could summon a long-ago lover's tryst. Or unmask a lover's double-cross. Or embrace a torch that still shined for a misbegotten cad. As well, a story might summon from memory's depths the smile of a father, brother or son lost in the war or the perfume of a woman they once dated.
I couldn't resist telling my latest audience about my encounters with the people I'd met at a previous concert. I began to fashion their stories, tall tales and secrets into anecdotes, humorous stories and pithy intros. Each concert would expand my repertoire of narrative accounts for the next concert.
Eventually, I spun these yarns into more than two dozen themes that traced musical, romantic and historic ideas. Each concert employed the memorable melodies and sophisticated lyrics of their favorite songs from back in the day.
But time marched on and audiences began slipping away. Concertgoers included younger and younger cohorts, folks who came of age during the 1940s, then the 1950s and 1960s.
Likewise, the stories and songs in my themes moved out from the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s and 1950s. Today, most of my programs are aimed at people who call themselves Baby Boomers — the folks who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s.
So, as I perform VintageMusicConcerts across the East Coast this year as I have for 25 years, new concert themes ideas continue to arise. So stay tuned.
