Street cries of the world

This article originally appeared in Vol. 2 No. 1 of The Musical Quarterly, published in the United States in 1916.

A SONG OF RAGS

By JAMES FREDERICK ROGERS

HOW universal is the presence of music! As nature abhors a vacuum, so human nature cannot banish musical utterance from daily life. The Quakers, who sought to bar melody from their house of worship, became more continuously and formally musical in their service than any other sect, for their every expression fell, from its content of deep feeling, sooner or later into singsong.

So those oft-repeated utterances which form a daylong part of the life of many people—the cries of the petty tradesmen and perambulating venders of food and apparel—merge into melodic measure which pleases and attracts in proportion to the vocal gifts displayed, as the songs of birds delight the ear and cause the eye to search out the songster. The utilitarian is merged with the artistic. Moreover the musical expression renders less intolerable to the singer himself the endless repetitions which are required for his vocal advertisement.

Alas! with organization and concentration, with the exchange of the free, open-air nomadic competition for the close confinement of trade within four walls, how completely the natural musical atmosphere of business vanishes! The attractive power of a well-voiced musical phrase gives place to the thousand identical smudges of printer’s ink, and the lure of the bargain-counter. A man or woman who can sing stands no better chance of employment or preferment than one who can only use the monotone. What music, but that which is unuttered (if the surroundings ever incline to it) is there in the department store, save the occasional squall of the self-advertising phonograph, or the dreary rattle of ragtime from a cheap piano? Will music ever again walk hand in hand with business, save in the rare survivals of an earlier order of which we write?

The perambulating tradesman doubtless fell into musical utterance from the beginning, for in the days when none could read there was no other way to advertise. The musical cry was an advantage to all concerned. A cry without melody would have answered the purpose but indifferently, for the musical phrase was not only more attractive, but only by the individual and fixed form of expression could each trader apprise his regular customers of his approach. The melody was equivalent to a name attached to a modern shop-sign.

In the days (not long past) when most of the tradespeople were itinerant, there was a great uproar in the streets of the large cities, but it was a musical hubbub, and the merchants and mechanics often added “to the sweetness of melody the honey of poetry.” Some of the verse used is recorded by Lydgate, who, in Chaucer’s time, first became the chronicler of street criers. Ben Jonson in his “Silent Woman” furnished Master Morose, who could bear no kind of noise, not even ordinary speech, “with a huge turban of night-caps on his head, buckled over his ears” to shut out the cries of the fish-wives, orange-women, hammer-man, broom-man, costermonger, and chimney-sweep. A twentieth-century numerous colony of Masters Morose, through their representative Commissioner Bingham, found it necessary (?) for the good of their nerves to banish the banana-man, old-clothes-man, kettle-mender, umbrella-fixer and all the numerous company of vocal soloists from the streets of our great metropolis, though the discordant rattle of trolleys and “ells”, and the murderous shriek of motors waxes continually louder in the land. Fortunately this hypersensitiveness to melody does not extend to other cities, else the collection of the present few examples of the cries of one sort of trader would have been impossible.

Professional musicians have always given ear to these “natural” singers; Lydgate tells us that the composers of his time introduced many of these “right merrye songs” into their works, and there is no knowing how many compositions are the better for such borrowing without credit. Very recently Charpentier has shown his appreciation of the street singers by weaving their cries most effectively into a scene of his opera “Louise.” Until Georges Kastner published his remarkable work “Les Voix de Paris,” in 1857, there had been no very systematic study of the music of these vocalists. Besides fifty-eight examples of the musical utterance accompanying various feelings and representing the cri en général, heard on occasion of emotional disturbance, or as put into the mouth of operatic characters, Kastner collected no less than six hundred and forty-two different cries (are they ever alike?) of the trades-people of the streets of Paris and of other European cities, and classified them as to place, time and the occupation of the crier. To cap the climax to his most complete and interesting study, he composed his elaborately scored Symphonic humoristique “Les Cris De Paris,” for full orchestra and chorus, in three sections—Le Matin, Le Jour, Le Soir.

Kastner preserves for us seven cries of the Marchande de Chiffons, though in each instance the words used include old hats, clothing, or shoes, as well as plain rags. At the time that the aforementioned edict banishing these perambulatory merchants went into effect, some of their cries were recorded in the New York Sun: the song of the vegetable-man, the scissors-grinder, the kettle-mender, the banana vender, the old-clothes-man, and others were represented, but there was no song of “rags.” Was this a deliberate attempt at suppressing the facts of New York life? Did the author wish to make the world believe that the residents of the great metropolis never wore out their clothing or household furnishings?—that none of its inhabitants were ever ragged?

The writer cannot tell a lie in this particular matter and he must confess that, while in his own city the hawker of fruits and vegetables, the mender of luckless umbrellas, the repairer of decrepit wash-boilers, and a few others of those who formerly wove music into their work, are heard but occasionally, the dealers in rags are a very numerous as well as an almost lonely survival of the old order in ways of trade. The call of “Cash paid for rags” resounds through the brick and mortar cañons which we call streets, and often one merchant is not out of hearing before another is heard approaching. Usually the call to barter is set to interesting musical phrases which are as different as are the men who utter them. The words (which are very inclusive) are always the same, but the musical prelude to a bargaining over disreputable apparel, papers that long since ceased to contain “news,” spiritless bottles and superannuated pots and pans, varies with the melodic gifts of the singer, from a monotone pronouncement of the matter in hand:

to such an elaboration as:

Though some rag-men accumulate a fortune and are in comfortable circumstances while they still, in person, push their cart and handle their gunny-sack, yet the lot of most of them would seem not to be the happiest. Since music is an expression of the emotions we would expect the cry of the rag-man to be often, and usually, of a plaintive nature. The wholesale contemplation of once useful objects in condition of dilapidation and decay must condemn one to the graver moods. Often the song of rags is in a minor key, but that it is not more often melancholy reflects on the bravery and buoyancy with which the exchanger of cash for once proud possessions pushes his cart forward for mile after mile, day following day, in fair or foul, warm or cold weather. Some of us would be less philosophic under similar circumstances of occupation.

Here is a staccato phrase which resounds through the street like a trumpet call:

This rag-man is young and robust and moves rapidly along, with an eye that searches every window and doorway for a nod or beckon.

He has not been long out of hearing before there follows in his wake a push-cart man with grey-tinged beard and slower pace, uttering this enigmatic motive:

We learn no more from such a phrase than from the mask-like countenance of him who utters it.

Here is the plodding, insistent song of a well nourished, comfortably clad rag-man of middle age:

The following phrase might have found a place in Beethoven’s note-book, had the composer’s damaged organs of hearing permitted him to catch the hurried notes:

And this:

reminds us of the knocking of fate in the Fifth Symphony.

There is pathos—almost despair—in this:

It is not to be wondered that all cries of rag-men are sober in character, for, as noted by Kastner, is not the contemplation of decrepit finery “a spectacle of a nature to inspire complete detachment from the things of this world”?

There is evidence of struggle in these figures:

There is large store of romance in this call:

And there is triumph in these:

Does the rag-man ever “change his tune”? He changes his “tempo” slightly on occasion, as does any other real musician, but we have never heard one alter his melody to any extent. We heard one of them lower the pitch of his cry a semi-tone, but without changing the relation of the tones of his song. Whether he had previously pitched his voice too high or whether he lowered it to relieve his vocal cords, we cannot say. We have heard one and the same melody from the lips of one rag-man for ten years, and we doubt whether, after making his first utterance on the subject of rags, he changes his cry. It embodies his feeling toward existence and, unless his condition in life and his attitude toward it become much altered, his musical speech is likely to remain as it was.

Though “only a rag-man” this public singer has more to embody in the cryptic embellishment of his trade advertisement than we usually think. He pushes his crazy cart from the dark basement of a forbidding tenement in a squalid street. Out he goes bravely, rapidly forward in the crisp morning air. His mission is not that of mere hard bargaining for cast-off human vestments, but to obtain good clothing and food for the family he leaves behind. There may be some interest in the task but there is love back of it. There is elevation and a joyous running forward of spirit when the rag-man returns from a short detour with wagon loaded to the breaking point. There is another feeling, when, after peering anxiously from house to house, from sunrise to sunset, he comes home with the cash with which he started and with a limp bag within his cart. But the rag-man is a seer of contrasts in other lives as well as an experiencer of ups and downs in his own daily existence. He cannot but be a philosopher in his way and his philosophy keeps his song, no matter what its general color, within the extremes of elation and depression.

There is much discussion these days of program music. Here is a commentary from life. Without the words none of the tonal expressions of the rag-dealer could be interpreted as indicating the purpose of his presence in our streets, and there is such variety of expression that, with other settings on life’s stage, the same musical theme might as appropriately announce a victory, express sorrow, or call to prayers. The emotional and intellectual interpretation may be worlds apart. Words belong to a narrow realm, tones to the universe.

How and when did these various motifs originate? Have they been handed down for the purpose? It is, in most cases, not likely. There is no school for the music of rags, and the cries must be in the great majority of cases spontaneous. Whatever their origin, they are rendered individual and unique by him who chooses to make them his own. We need no more striking example of the way music originated and of how it soars above and transfigures the commonplace.

Symphonists have found material for great works in homely and obscure quarters. May not some composer evolve a masterpiece—not of mere program music—not a “descriptive piece”— on themes from rag-men? The material will present as much that is profound as is offered in more well-threshed fields. Certainly if written it will be a serious and a spiritual work, for as noted by the author of the “Grande Symphonic Humoristique” there is “something solemn and touching in the cries of the rag men” and another critic, Mainger, went so far as to say that of all cries heard in Paris none were so beautiful as those of the dealers in rags.