The music was brilliant and the story, as our teacher described it, exciting. Some of the music even sounded vaguely familiar.Harlem was full of music when I was growing up. If you started on 125th Street at Broadway and made your way cross town toward the East River, you could actually hear the music change as you walked by different blocks. Broadway was Irish and German, and that was the music coming from the small bakeries and butcher shop we frequented.At St. Nicholas Avenue the neighborhood turned into a mixture of races, and the music in the record shops along the most famous Harlem thoroughfare was African American. The blues blared out from speakers hanging by wires outside of shops so narrow you had to turn sideways to get into them. Harlem above 125th Street had become the Black cultural center of America. Churches shared the streets with nightclubs, funeral parlors, and shady jazz clubs. Across from Blumstein’s, the department store, a small shop sold gospel records.As you neared the Apollo Theater it was all jazz.
