It was a question I asked some years ago when America was listening to real music, not the mind-numbing noise of today. Music won’t solve the problems of growing crime and violence in America, and much of the noise that passes itself off as “music” today certainly makes its contribution to crime and violence. But there was a time when music did make a positive contribution to the softer and gentler things of the America I used to know. This is the prologue to my book “Birds With Broken Wings” and it seems more timely now than ever:

Why can’t life be more like the music? I asked.

He replied: Because people don’t listen to the music anymore.

I was in one of the dangerous parts of this city, visiting friends. Drive-by shootings, welfare and drugs were an endemic part of the culture in this community. But I was here largely because of the music.

It was late evening when I arrived. My friend’s little girl met me at the door and asked if I had brought my guitar. I told her I had more than that. I then proceeded to unload both guitars, my clarinet and tenor saxophone. Since it was fairly mild weather, I set the instruments up on the front porch of the house.

We sat together and using the acoustic guitar, I played and sang a simple song for the little girl. A couple of her little friends wandered over and sat on the grass listening.

I put the guitar in the little girl’s lap and told her to try to pick out the notes to the song. Then I played a couple of melodies on the clarinet. But it was that big, beautiful, gold and ivory tenor sax that had the attention of the children. More children and adults had gathered.

A tenor sax is a difficult instrument to mute. But the children were anxious to hear it. So I picked it up and began to play. The neighborhood could hear this. For many of my audience, this was the first time they had heard the kind of music that I had grown up playing and listening to, the music of Sammy Kaye, Russ Morgan, and Guy Lombardo.

By the time I had played two songs, I had more than a dozen children and several adults in attendance. By now both guitars were in the hands of children and I had an impromptu audience of children and adults listening to music of a by-gone era, the big band and ballad music of the 30s and 40s which I had been playing and singing in a club down South.

Country Western is a large part of my life as well. I thoroughly enjoy much of this and my voice, nearly baritone, is well suited to this kind of music, especially the slow, romantic ballads. A lot of really good music has recently fled other fields and gone Country.

Unquestionably children readily respond to music. I wish every child could have music lessons and learn to play an instrument. But I have learned that only the music of a softer and gentler time, of an age of relative innocence that promised real love and romance, clean fun and hope of a future, works in the hearts and minds of children to their good.

The young men and women who had gathered, mostly teenagers, many in gang clothes and sporting identifying tattoos, were curiously silent as I played. There was no profanity, gang signals or chatter. They were caught up in a kind of music they had never heard live before. Most of them knew me but hadn’t known of the music that was such a part of my life.

It was getting late and we had to go in the house. I hated to call an end to the magic of the music and it hurt to see the children leave. I knew what most of them were going home to. I knew the destructive noise of the kinds of so-called music they would hear in such homes, noise that accompanied violence, drugs and alcohol abuse. But thanks to the magic of a different kind of music, it would be a quieter night on this block and my friend’s little girl didn’t awaken screaming from her nightmares.

But the kind of music that both children and adults need in their lives is denied them. Few will ever have opportunity to learn to play a clarinet or saxophone, and how many might have a better chance at life if such things could be made available to them?

I have made love to many women by singing and playing music to them, by writing them love letters, by nothing more than holding hands or dancing while beautiful music played in the background. These are the softer and gentler things of romance, of the real poetry of life, the things people say they hunger for but can’t seem to find.

A very lovely lady who knows me well recently wrote and said I should spend my time writing of the evils of this world. She has read much of my writing that has been concentrated on the abuse of children, of the destruction of family and family values, of our nation’s loss of its moral bearings and the corruption and chaos that seems endemic of the leadership of our government, schools, and churches.

But sustained anger takes its toll. I needed to write a book like this in order to focus on the things that have real and eternal value, the love of family and children, the love between men and women. As the two halves of humankind, it is the relationship between men and women that predicts the future of a nation. Lacking understanding in this area all else, children especially, suffers accordingly and the loss of hope among our young people, the loss of direction for our nation is the result.

This book deals with the loss of so much in our lives, the things that contributed to real love and romance the loss of which produced a generation of young women that I came to call: Birds With Broken Wings.