Musician, broadcaster and blues historian Danny Marks will be bringing his guitar along to a lecture he’s giving about Jews and the blues, as part of Jewish Music Week. He’ll be performing his Belt Line Blues, a coming-of-age song in which he reminisces about the railway line that bordered the backyard of his family’s midtown Toronto home.
Marks, the host of the 2013-14 HiFi television series Cities in Blue, which focuses on the history of the blues in eight U.S. cities, wrote Belt Line Blues for the Piedmont, Kan. episode.
“We saw Toronto’s first subways arrive fresh off the boat, on flatbeds,” he recalled, and, growing up, he remembers playing up and down the line with friends. Today, the trains that Marks saw pass twice a day are gone, as are the tracks, removed to create the Kay Gardner Beltline Park and Trail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyhzhKxaNow&list=PLLM723SFceqYfLbTvzCI5iHs7-1Vl7UfL&index=9
The hook of Belt Line Blues, an engaging country-blues tune, is the touching verse about Mark leaving home as barely a young man. Marks, who got his first guitar when he was 11, realized he needed to go out on his own to follow his dream of becoming a professional guitarist. In Belt Line Blues, he sings: “Well, I left home when I was 17/ Mama was a cryin’/ Baby boy please don’t go/ I said I gotta go/ And my papa said, ‘Hand me the keys.’”
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Marks went on to join the Yorkville village-era pop/blues group Edward Bear and played on the band’s 1970 hit single, You, Me and Mexico. He became a sideman for Canadian and international performers, and he paid his dues in the Toronto club scene, often playing at Grossman’s Tavern, a blues incubator on Spadina Avenue. Hosting blues jam sessions eventually led to Mark’s dual career as musician/broadcaster. Marks, who currently hosts JazzFM91’s Saturday night blues show, bluz.fm, plans to return to the small screen.
A recipient of the Toronto Blues Society’s Blues with a Feeling Award for lifetime achievement, Marks got his first taste for the blues watching Louis Armstrong perform on the Ed Sullivan Show.
“He considered his music to have a lot of blues and he recorded a lot of blues, a different kind of blues than some but still distinctly blues,” Marks said.
Armstrong, who wasn’t Jewish but was adopted by a Jewish family, is one of the artists Marks will discuss. One of the greats of African-American culture, Armstrong wore a Star of David until the day he died.
“A lot of the Jewish soul and spirit went into him as a young boy and shaped him,” Marks said, adding that as a child Armstrong paid for his first trumpet by helping out in the family’s rag business, “the real schmatte business.”
Marks intends to pack a lot of information into his hour-long lecture. Harold Arlen; Benny Goodman; Leonard and Phil Chess; Michael Bloomfield; Leiber and Stoller; Phil Spector; Morris Levy, the founder of Roulette Records, and Jerry Wexler, who coined the term “rhythm and blues,” are among the producers, musicians and songwriters he’ll be talking about.
You can pick up a copy of Marks’ latest release, a critically acclaimed collection of songs he wrote for Cities in Blue, from him at his Jewish Music Week lecture or at the Cadillac Lounge on Queen Street West in Toronto, where he plays Saturday afternoons. For more information, visit his website.
Marks lectures on Jews and blues at 10 a.m. on May 30 at the Columbus Centre, 901 Lawrence Ave. W. The Jewish Music Week morning lecture series also includes talks on the portrayal of Jews in opera; on the creative process of a Jewish composer; on Jewish musical comedy, and on Ethel Stark, who overcame anti-Semitism and sexism to form the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra. All the lectures are free, but tickets are required for some.