Between now and Ben, numerous talents have emerged from city streets throughout America to make their marks on our art and culture.  Among the earliest was a young Sam Clemens who, in favor of his sharper pen, left his guitar in San Francisco, another reason to call him Mark Twain.  He was still writing about The River when Louis Armstrong took his cornet to the streets of New Orleans, and numerous other jazz and blues artists chimed in upriver in St. Louis and Memphis, uptrain in Chicago.  Soon, downtown Baltimore would hear Cab Calloway, and Frank Sinatra would croon in front of the hotels of Hoboken, N.J., while Milton Berle sang and danced on the sidewalks of Manhattan.  Later, in New York and Boston, artists such as Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, and Tracy Chapman would hone their crafts into recording careers.

Street-performance thrived in America during the Jazz Age.  The most prominent, unifying theme of filmmaker Ken Burns'  PBS documentary, Jazz, is that for years it was an infectious music that made young people want to play it.  Moreover, many of these aspiring musicians were growing up in large families--immigrants from Europe onto our eastern shore, and internal immigrants from the Jim Crow South into our northern cities--and needed to help support their families.  Rather than asking outright, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" these fledgling musicians--most of them too young to play nightclubs anyway--played in the streets and let the dimes fall where they may.

Meanwhile, ethnic music was strong in ethnic neighborhoods.  New York City licensed 1,600 street-musicians in 1923, according to the Boston-based busker and busker-historian Stephen Baird.  Half of them were organ-grinders.  Indeed, numerous buskers in American cities during our waves of immigration had been buskers in European cities.  More and better jobs  would logically mean more and better tips.

However, just as the Jazz Age closed behind the electronic curtain of on-coming radio and movies, so too did street-music.  In the words of the "Boswell of Busking," Patricia C. Campbell, it began "to seem old-fashioned and naive"--a remark that could as well summarize any number of scenes from Sinclair Lewis' novels, set in the Roaring Twenties, showing the effect of the automobile on such pastimes as sledding and bicycling.  Cambpell's 1981 book, Passing the Hat, documents the "death warrant" signed by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia on New Year's Day, 1936, stating that the city should have no part in "this concession of mendicancy."

And so the stereotype of busker as beggar, if not set in stone, was writ into law. Both Baird and Campell report that, except for the odd outposts of New Orleans and San Francisco where the unusual is the usual, street-performance vanished from American streets and consciousness until well into the Roaring Back Sixties.  At first it was little more than an outcropping of the counter-culture, not so much to earn or supplement a livelihood, but as one of a variety of ways--along with smoking marijuana and wearing colorful clothing and beads--to express social, political, and sexual liberation in public places.  And tips, what few there were, indicated approval for  artists' politics or lifestyle more than appreciation for the art.  Nor was there much thought of money, as public artists were more likely to perform on or near a college campus than to attach themselves to a marketplace.

By no mere coincidence, then, attractive marketplaces located near the centers of large universities became havens for public performers.  Berkeley and Santa Cruz in California; Boulder, Colorado; and Harvard Square soon had reputations that drew musicians, magicians, and mimes  as readily as Hollywood drew actors and cinematographers.  All numbers were higher, more people and more tips, in a setting where money was already changing hands and storefronts served as picturesque backdrops.  All of this gave performers the idea that they could play for a reliable income, and in so doing, improve an act, tailoring songs, tricks, mimes, and jokes for passersby willing to make eye-contact.  When the place and the audience became part of the show, busking was reborn.

The infant art would thrive thanks to a development quite apart from the hippie hangouts of its gestation.  In the White House, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took up the cause of preserving and restoring buildings and homes built in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.  Although her stay in Washington was short, she continued her efforts during her long career as an editor in New York, enlisting countless influential Americans in the cause, the late violinist Isaac Stern among them.  Back in the White House, her successor, Lady Bird Johnson, applied the same principle to public space in her campaign to "beautify" America.

In January 1969,  a new administration would inherit efforts so substantial from the two women that the National Trust for Historic Preservation might have seemed like a name for an agency already in place.  But give credit where it is due:  Nixon's the one who signed the orders to extend grants for historic preservation, restoration, rehabilitation, renovation, and more of entire downtown districts in cities large and small.   In the Settling Down Seventies, run-down, burned-out shells of places as diverse as Larimer Square in Denver, The Flats in Cleveland, and Essex Street in Salem, Mass., became tourist attractions with open, scenic spaces among their storefronts.  Benches appeared under the trees and newly-fashioned 19th Century lamposts, in addition to tables and chairs placed outside by cafes, restaurants, and bars.

But the news-of-old has not been entirely free of modern obstacles for buskers.  While chambers of commerce have embraced the concept of historic preservation for the appearance of a marketplace, they tend to neglect--and at times reject--what it should mean regarding sound.  Since 1982, I have had to petition the chambers of both Salem and Newburyport, Mass., at least a dozen times over the use of outdoor loudspeakers by businesses seeking to draw attention to themselves.  Reluctant to restrict a dues-paying member, their response usually echoes that of the proprietors who "pay rent."  Sometimes the business will relent, usually when a few of their neighbors take my side.  More often I prevail by making the case in a letter to the local newspaper, always quoting the chambers' own brochures promoting "the way life used to be."

On a rendezvous in Denver in 1998, I took my daughter to Larimer Square to show her the spots where I first played.  The sight hadn't changed in 20 years, but the air was filled with a tinny, low-fidelity reproduction of a top-40 tune coming from several speakers mounted onto lamposts that lined the street.  This, in a marketplace that once featured a violinist on its brochure with the caption, "Delight in a street-musician."

As stunned as I was that day in Denver, it wasn't until later that year that I realized the full extent of the contradiction.  Michael Burke, a frequent Newburyport busker, was half-way into his opening song when a woman from a nearby store leaned in to ask:  "Can you lower your volume?  I'm playing Ella in my shop."   She meant, of course, Ella Fitzgerald--or, rather, a tape-recording of Ella Fitzgerald.  And that's when it hit me:  Would Ms. Fitzgerald herself ever want her recorded music to pre-empt a live musician?

Apart from these chronic audio-infringements, historic preservation has been both boom and boon for buskers.  It has presented us with not just stages, but fairly well-appointed outdoor auditoriums.  The emphasis on brick, furthermore, enhances the acoustics for musicians, which is why the voices and instruments of countless folk and folk-rock musicians over the past quarter century have flavored the popular public squares and crossings of many northeastern cities.


IV.   Non-Admission Price

With so much American busking tradition before me, why would I identify myself with a character from a time when America was but a gleam of China in the eyes of European cartographers and navigators, merchants and monarchs?  And why would I, a seasoned and devout busker since I took to Larimer Square in 1977, claim lineage to a con-artist whose only use of the streets was to take his audience down a road of no return?

At first it was simply a name to fill a program.  Four years ago I joined King Richard's Faire in Carver, Mass.,  just as many buskers perform in renaissance festivals all over North America to supplement modest incomes.  A few less burgers to flip, tables to wait, deliveries to make.  In my case, a few less classes of college writing to teach, which, because I am one of the 43% of all college faculty nationwide with part-time, no-benefit status is a very good deal.

Since I'm a flautist and for years have heard myself called by the name of an actual character from the early renaissance, the connection seemed ancestral.  Taking the town's name, Hamlin, was word-play to describe a hammed-up act.

The effect on my performance as a busker was immediate.  As anyone who has been in theater will confirm, a costume--in my case, period shirts with billowing sleeves, layered with colorful vests and sashes--propels you into character.  No longer was it merely a selection of Celtic songs and Baroque compositions but a presence, an attitude, which appealed to the public.  A memorable moment while going about routines, spontaneous entertainment while shopping, photos for the albums, cassettes for the VCR, something unlikely to talk about, a spark for children's curiosity.

For years I've been able to surprise listeners with "Thank you" and "Hello" in mid-song, but now I gain more laughs with the unexpected "Nice Hat" and "Nice Shoes" and "(your imagination here)" --inspired by my fellow rennies'  "Wondrous Hat, M'Lady" and "Splendid Leggings, M'Lord" and "(your imagination there)."  One Jethro Tull concert is enough to show a flautist that an occasional grunt or groan can provoke a laugh, although my own daughter once warned me to tone it down because I was sometimes scaring little kids.  Thanks to the renfaire, such things are now in character.  I've also been hamming it up more for cameras, moreso for camcorders, sometimes moving right at them, eyes wild, sometimes cross, finding riffs played by the left hand alone so the right can fly.  You get the moving picture.

Sure, I've been aware of all of that since I began busking, but only as Hamm Lynn have I realized it adds up to a public role that cannot be played by--indeed, a public need that cannot be met by--stage or festival performers of any degree of talent.   

Buskers never have to make arrangements regarding schedules, authorization, staging, payment, and all else claiming the attention of stage or festival performers.  Most times those arrangements lead to an admission price which some folk, among them mostly families, cannot often pay.  Moreover, most venues for musicians must restrict entry to those over the drinking-so-as-not-to-be-thinking age.

The result is an inadvertent non-admission price paid unwittingly by American parents--and rather heavily by American children.

If you think that this is overstated, spend some time with me in Newburyport, Salem, or Portsmouth, N.H.,  and listen to some of the comments  from parents and their children, and maybe strike up your own conversations with them.  Numerous times I'm told that I'm the first musician that a child has seen and heard live, and in some cases the child is not all that young.  Sometimes he or she is the one who tells me.  The implied compliment is always a harrowing reminder of how far the arts are now removed from day-to-day American life.

We allowed this when we watched our schools cut and curtail both curricula and extra-curricula programs with the narrow-minded idea from the Bottom Line Eighties that the arts are "frills."  Years later we're beside ourselves wondering how and why American youth is enthralled by music played very fast and extremely loud.

Ironically, all our attention to lewd and hostile lyrics only compounds our inability to grasp that this enthrallment is with loud aggression.  As the Beatles proved with the dual tracks of "Revolution" on their White Album, instrumentation will determine how we perceive a song.  Hence, the first track is heard as raucous and rabble-rousing, with some shrill mention of a communist icon no less; the slower, calm second version is heard as a cautionary tale:  "Well, if you're carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You're not going to make it with anyone anyhow."  Only beat and bass survive the volume and speed of the first version--and it is that first version which serves as a forerunner of much of what American youth favors today.

Nor is it any mere coincidence that beat and bass form music's bottom-line.  While American politics, sports, education, medicine, and more devolve toward the point where the bottom-line is the only line, it's eerily logical that music, in the ears of American adolescents, should follow suit.  Given the chance, younger children's responses to bottom-line-only music might well echo that most public retort from the privatized Eighties:

Where's the melody?  Where's the rythym?


V.   Having Fun Yet?

We say that this trend in music, and in all else, is a sign of the times, and we resign ourselves to it.  It's as if a country or a culture has the same aging process as that of people and animals, and nothing can be done to reverse it.  Reminds me of Thomas Paine's opening line to Common Sense:  "...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong , gives it the superficial appearance of being right."

For buskers, the mounting stress felt by the American public in this increasingly gotta-go-go and decreasingly stable world, has yielded an odd harvest.  In the weeks following the trauma of September 11, both National Public Radio and the Boston Globe reported the increased attention we were getting from a public suddenly willing to pause for reflection.  One singer on a Boston subway platform told of a generous tip from a woman who let her train pass three times while she copied the words to a song.

As far back as the late-Eighties, I noticed  that I was a reverse barometer of the economy.  A beneficiary of the same trend, harper and Newburyport busker David Bishop thinks that when it's more difficult to buy stylish clothes and dine at gourmet restaurants, people find it easier to give a one dollar tip.  My non-busker friends guess that there's more appreciation for the sight of those visibly working for every dollar.  No matter what the psychology, every busker I know agrees that our tips have gotten better in recent years.  Michael Burke may have explained it best.  As people's lives become more busy, more crowded, more rushed, he reasons, they feel a certain pressure to have fun in free time. "They feel that they have to work at it," he observes.

For him it's a paradox he can work with; he plays guitar, so the public expects a range of sound.  I play recorders, those old-style wooden flutes, the very sight of which causes some folk to bounce to the beat of an Irish jig--no matter that I might be playing a Bach Aire.  The result is usually so comical that I try to keep a straight face long enough to abbreviate the piece and segue into a dance tune.  However, there is nothing at all comical about the young parents who, with all good intentions, will start bouncing their toddlers to a beat quite apart from what they hear--that is to say, what the children hear, but what the parents cannot.

When I see the little brows furrow, when I hear the confusion in their high-pitched voices, I worry that I'm the cause of some kind of audio-trauma.  Enough such episodes have convinced me that I do have more in common with the story of the Pied Piper than I realized during all those years when I politely smiled to conceal my inner cringing at the stereotype.


VI.   Flooded by the Sound

The Piper worked no magic with music; for all we know, he may not have even been a very good musician.  But he did know floods, and if America is awash in anything, it is cheap sound.  Flooded by Muzak in stores and malls and bus-stops, by simple-minded jingles at every commercial break on television and radio, by sound systems booming beat and bass from cars cruising city streets, our sense of hearing is like a set of teeth ground down by a steady diet of sugar candy, and we are left with raw gums by age twelve.  As trumpeter Wynton Marsalis answered when David Frost asked him to explain the popularity of gangsta rap and heavy metal, we are from birth innundated with "music that never develops."

And we wonder why our children follow rage-laced sounds down wrong roads of no return?

Take what liberties you will to stay afloat, but I navigate into the new millenium as a busker.  Some would say I'm already extinct; others would call me on the verge.  But if street-music is about anything, it is about reviving the best of our public past that otherwise drowns in our privatized present.

For me the question "To Busk or Not to Busk" is easy to answer.  Buskers perform not for audiences with set expectations, but for a public that is palpably frustrated by prices forever pumped up and entertainment too long dumbed down.  Perhaps the woman from the chamber of commerce had a point:  Young children are the ones most aware of this, and open to what is better.  As Paine might say, they are free of the "long habit."

If buskers can claim to fill one public need, it is that we serve as life-preservers in the modern flood of contrivance.  At the very least, we serve as immediate proof to children that art can be, should be, part of life.   In time, some may come to think of us as the start of an idea that they, too, can perform and entertain--an idea that needs to take hold before the allure of and addictions to easy plug-in drugs.  Children are born with senses, not yet ground down, that can distinguish the authentic from the false, and the distinction is never more pronounced than between an electronic device built into the ceilings of indoor malls and a musician tapping a foot on outdoor pavement.  Who, after all, ever says "Thank you" to a loudspeaker?

America will be better off when we are willing to look at what our children see.  And listen to what they hear. 

For a fine time any given day or evening, admission is purposefully free.