Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
My father introduced me to this heartbreaking song when I was a boy. It was recorded by Bing Crosby in 1932 and was immediately popular, becoming the anthem of the Great Depression. The song tells the story of the everyman whose honest work towards achieving the American dream has been foiled by the sudden collapse of the economy, so that he is now reduced to “standing in line, just waiting for bread.”
In my book, The Palace at the End of the Sea, the hero, Theo hears the song for the first time at school in England when his communist friend, Esmond plays it for him on his wind-up gramophone, and it brings back the suffering that Theo witnessed on the cold streets of New York, and encapsulates his father’s experience, who like the man in the song, had built his garment factory like a “tower up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime,” only to see it fall crashing to the ground, turning his dreams to dust.
St James Infirmary Blues
This is an old folk song that was immortalized by Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five in 1928. It has visceral strength, building from the lingering funereal notes of the introduction to the powerful vocal section in which the narrator describes his dead girlfriend stretched out on a long white table in the Infirmary, “so sweet, so cold, so fair,” and then sings out his defiance, demanding when he dies to have “a twenty-dollar gold piece (put) on his watch chain, so the boys’ll know that I died standin’ pat.” Death is certain and utterly bleak, and the best that a man can do in response is to stand up straight in a “box-back coat and a Stetson hat”, and insist on his dignity when it comes.
The song belongs in the same tradition as the funeral installment plans in which the Victorian poor invested their meager savings, determined to go out in style. It was hugely popular in the Great Depression when life was hard and cheap, and in my book, Satchmo’s rasping voice and soulful trumpet runs through Theo’s memory of his childhood in early 1930s New York, telling the truth in a way in which his father, holding fast to the American dream, never could.
The song has remined popular ever since, and there is a wonderful version on YouTube by Hugh Laurie, with whom I went to school in Oxford fifty-five years ago.
Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out
This was another of the great, bleak songs that came out of the Depression, vividly describing what happens to a man when he loses his money, going from “the life of a millionaire,” in which he “bought bootleg liquor, champagne and wine,” to falling so low and losing all his friends. ‘Life is cruel and so are people’, is the message of the song, and it must have resonated for the homeless and hungry standing in bread lines and warming themselves over ashcan fires.
The song’s curse also lay on its writer and its most famous performer. Jazz pianist, Jimmie Cox never got the chance to record his work because he was shot dead on stage in Chicago in 1925, and then four years later, Bessie Smith made the song her own, singing the blues in a way that none of her contemporaries could match. The record was a huge success, but Bessie’s life spun rapidly out of control, destroyed by drugs and alcohol and domestic violence, as if in fulfilment of the words of the song, and she died in a car crash in Mississippi in 1937, aged just forty-three.
Thirty-three years later, the song appeared on Derek and the Dominos’ wonderful record, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. It was the first song that Eric Clapton and Duane Allman played together, and it was recorded live with no overdubs, not needing any further takes because the first one was perfect!
Keep on the Sunny Side
This was written in 1899 and became the theme song for the Carter Family after they recorded it in 1928. I have included it in my songbook because it represents another type of feel-good song that was just as popular as the bleak existential anthem during the Great Depression. The song’s message is that “it will help us every day, it will brighten all the way / if we’ll keep on the sunny side of life,” but it’s one that’s lost on Theo as he hears the melodious harmony drifting out from a Sixth Avenue speakeasy that he walks past on a winter’s night in 1930. What if there is no sunny side? he wonders, pulling his coat up around his ears. Where does a man go then?
Simon Tolkien
A young man comes of age and crosses continents in search of an identity—and a cause—at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War in a thrilling, timely, and emotional historical saga.
New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling’s world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his parents: His father, a Jewish self-made businessman, refuses to give up on the American dream, and his mother, a refugee from religious persecution in Mexico, holds fast to her Catholic faith. When disaster strikes the family, Theo must learn who he is. A charismatic school friend and a firebrand girl inspire him to believe he can fight Fascism and change the world, but each rebellion comes at a higher price, forcing Theo to question these ideologies too.
From New York’s Lower East Side to an English boarding school to an Andalusian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Theo’s harrowing journey from boy to man is set against a backdrop of societies torn apart from within, teetering on the edge of a terrible war to which Theo is compulsively drawn like a moth to a flame.
Historical | Fiction Literary | Saga [Lake Union Publishing, On Sale: May 27, 2025, Trade Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9781662528644 / ]
I live in Santa Barbara, California where the sky really is as blue as the deep blue sea most days, and I love the roar of the ocean, the majestic mountains, the white Spanish adobe architecture, and the twisting oaks and carpets of flowers in my yard where I walk with my beloved pug, Sadie, twice a day. It’s a long way from the sleepy Oxfordshire village where I grew up and the Catholic boarding school where I spent my teenage years.
I studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford and then reluctantly went to law school. I thought that I was putting my life in a straitjacket, but criminal law was a revelation. In the London prisons and police stations I met people from every walk of life, and I became a barrister because I wanted to represent them in court, rather than just prepare their cases for trial. I loved the drama and responsibility of the work, but then at the age of forty-one, I decided to reinvent myself as a novelist, even though I had never written a word of fiction before! I am the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien and I think that his immense literary achievements had inhibited me up to then. I started with what I knew and wrote courtroom dramas, and then this developed into crime thrillers with historical settings, and finally character-driven historical fiction. I loved history as a child and my novels have enabled me to recapture the sense of wonder I felt about the past as being another country just as real as our own. My focus has been on the turbulent first fifty years of the 20th century and my settings have included the London Blitz, the Battle of the Somme, and now, in my forthcoming duology, New York in the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.
I have been so lucky to have been married for forty years to my wife, Tracy who has encouraged me in all my creative endeavors. She is a writer herself and an expert on vintage fashion and jewelry, and we have two wonderful children, Nicholas and Anna.
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