Hi, Kevin -
I puppose you're interested in a parody, but I thought I oughta post a fascinating article I found at this page from the New York Daily News
-Joe Offer-
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Mamie O'Rourke
By DAVID HINCKLEY
Tuesday, September 10th, 2002
Perhaps she expected to stay for only one dance. A quick waltz and she would be gone, having escaped for only a stolen moment from the grinding life of the 19th century immigrant.
But by chance two men caught a snapshot of her step, a snapshot in song. And that's why, a century later,
Mamie O'Rourke is still dancing.
East Side, West Side,
All around the town
The tots sang "Ring-a-Rosie,"
"London Bridge is falling down."
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie O'Rourke
Tripped the light fantastic
On the sidewalks of New York.
Seldom have those well-trod sidewalks been cast in more romantic light, and though some might argue that Mamie owes her spot in history primarily to the fact her surname rhymes with "New York," she was exactly the girl who would have been waltzing along E. 18th St. in the summer of 1894.
That's the year a composer and second-tier vaudeville actor named Charles Lawlor walked into John Goldring's East Side hat shop, whistling a catchy tune he had composed, he allowed, during a spell of intoxication. Tending the counter was James Blake, who happened to write lyrics. Lawlor whistled, Blake wrote and somewhere between a half-hour and three days later, depending on when Blake told the story, they finished "The Sidewalks of New York."
In an age that felt no degree of sentimental melodrama to be excessive in its popular music, Blake and Lawlor had a winner: Their ode to the bright old days sold more sheet music than any other song in America in early 1895, and they sold its rights for $5,000, a small fortune in the short term.
But that was a small fraction of its ultimate value. The songsmiths had no way of knowing in the summer of '94 that Al Smith would one day ride into the governor's mansion to the tune of "Sidewalks," or that Mamie's song would someday signal race time at Belmont Park, or that the New York Mets would appropriate her melody for a fight song.
So she has gotten around, Mamie O'Rourke, though we know nothing more about her than that she tripped a mean light fantastic.
Did she have dark hair? Red hair? Blue eyes? What did she wear to a sidewalk waltz on a summer evening? Wide hoop skirts? Muttonchop sleeves? Blake said later that all the characters in the song - pretty Nellie Shannon, little Jimmy Crowe, Jakey Krause the baker - were modeled after his own E. 18th St. neighbors. But there is no record of anyone coming forward to claim a real-life role, and so we are left with shadows, of which Mamie may be the most intriguing simply because she alone is cited by name in the chorus.
We are not even certain of her age. Perhaps she was as young as 10 or 12. She probably wasn't over 20, for then she might well have been married. She was most likely a teenager, old enough to waltz but young enough to still want to come out and play.
Down in front of Casey's
Old brown wooden stoop
On a summer's evening
We formed a merry group.
Boys and girls together,
We would sing and waltz,
While the "ginnie" played the organ
On the sidewalks of New York.
Inelegant as a street organ might sound, it could crank out a perfectly serviceable waltz. Blake would complain 30 years later that with all the foolishness of the Roaring Twenties, jazz and all, no one knew real dancing anymore, certainly not like they did in Mamie's day.
We do know that Mamie O'Rourke very likely enjoyed a level of respectability not accorded to her mother or even older siblings, because the New York Irish of the mid-1890s were not the Irish of the 1850s.
For starters, they were no longer seen primarily as the criminal class. Not only were three-quarters of the police Irish, the percentage of violent crimes committed by the Irish had dipped from 60% in the 1850s to less than 10% - in part because they now had less need to commit crimes. New York's first Irish mayor, William Grace, was elected in 1880, and that opened the usual number of doors, particularly in civil service. At the same time, reformers like Dagger John Hughes, a clergyman who founded the Society to Protect Destitute Catholic Children, had helped to take an estimated 60,000 Irish kids off the streets and raise the literacy rate among the Irish to 90%.
Mamie's people, almost certainly including Mamie's family, if not Mamie herself, began landing on New York's shores in the late 1840s, driven from their homeland by starvation and finding only slightly less misery here. By 40 years later, the city's population had tripled, from half a million to 1.5 million, and 30% of these people were Irish. But by 1890 they were no longer on the bottom rung of the social ladder. That position was now occupied by Italians and, to a lesser extent, Russian Jews.
While Italians constituted only 8% of the city's population, they were widely regarded as, at best, an untidy presence. The Irish had moved up - a status Blake pointedly reinforces with his casual reference to the one Italian on his sidewalks as "the ginnie," which then, as now, was not a compliment.
Blake later spread his ethnic references around, reteaming with Lawlor to write a tune called "The Mick Who Threw the Brick." Still, in most modern renditions of "Sidewalks," the organ grinder has become "Tony."
Whoever composed Mamie's merry group, it soon became evident that, among music lovers, the sheer exhilaration of the light fantastic crossed all ethnic lines.
Despite all the happy sing-along parlor songs they left us, the 1890s were more grim than gay for most Americans. Of the 12 million families in the country in 1890, 11 million had an annual income below $1,200, and the average in that group was $380. If Mamie O'Rourke was over age 9, she very likely had a job, in a shop or a rich lady's home or a garment factory, helping to feed and clothe the other O'Rourkes.
So a chance to head down to the sidewalk for a waltz was not an incidental social obligation for Mamie O'Rourke, but a rare moment of carefree delight.
Things have changed since those times
Some are up in "G,"
Others, they are wand'rers,
But they all feel just like me.
They'd part with all they've got
Could they but once more walk
With their best girl and have a twirl
On the sidewalks of New York.