I'm With The Band

Nan and I were playing backyard tourists 50 miles from my home, exploring the funky streets and alleyways of Chinatown and pretending I got a great deal haggling over a pair of binoculars that I later found cheaper on Amaon. While we were debating the medicinal value of dried ox testicles ($150/oz) , I was drawn out to the street by the tight rattling sound of Chinese drums (expected) and trombones (certainly not expected) in a weird cacophonic tune that sounded an awful lot like “Nearer My God to Thee”.

Slowly winding its way up Grant Avenue was a strange funeral procession-part Salvation Army, part New Orleans jazz band, leading a hearse and red mustang convertible displaying a huge picture of the recently passed on. Family and friends were walking behind throwing bits of paper, or Spirit money, into the crowd.

As the procession snaked through the throngs of people, everything stopped. I turned around and saw shop owners come out to the street, tourists stopped chatting on cell phones and window gawking, hats were removed and for a few minutes we all became mourners ourselves, respectfully acknowledging a stranger’s last mile.

When I got home I had to find out who or what this band was. This hodgepodge, almost pick up band, was a San Francisco staple for the dearly departed. Formed in 1911 and originally called the Cathay Chinese Boys Band, it played at almost every major event in the city; important funerals, Chinese New Years, the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge and the 1939 Worlds Fair. In the 1940s the San Francisco Musicians Union Local No.6, convinced the Chinatown mortuaries to hire union musicians to play for the funeral processions. As the mortuaries closed the local Chinese started taking their business over to Green Street Mortuary in Little Italy. The band became The Green Street Mortuary Band and continues to play hymns and dirges for more than 300 Chinatown funeral processions a year.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a great poem about them:

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

marches right down Green Street

and turns into Columbus Avenue

where all the café sitters at

the sidewalk café tables

sit talking and laughing

and looking right through it

as if it happened every day in

little old wooden North Beach San Francisco

but at the same time feeling thrilled

by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band

as if it were celebrating life and

never heard of death

And right behind it comes the open hearse

with the closed casket and the

big framed picture under glass propped up

showing the patriarch who

has just croaked

And now all seven members of

the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

with the faded gold braid on their

beat-up captains' hats

raise their bent axes and

start blowing all more or less

together and

out comes this Onward Christian Soldiers like

you heard it once upon a time only

much slower with a dead beat

And now you see all the relatives behind the

closed glass windows of the long black cars and

their faces are all shiny like they

been weeping with washcloths and

all super serious

like as if the bottom has just dropped out of

their private markets and

there's the widow all in weeds, and the sister with the

bent frame and the mad brother who never got through school

and Uncle Louie with the wig and there they all are assembled

together and facing each other maybe for the first time in a long

time but their masks and public faces are all in place as they face

outward behind the traveling corpse up ahead and oompah oompah

goes the band very slow with the trombones and the tuba

and the trumpets and the big bass drum and the corpse hears

nothing or everything and it's a glorious autumn day in old

North Beach if only he could have lived to see it Only we

wouldn't have had the band who half an hour later can be seen

straggling back silent along the sidewalks looking like hungover

brokendown Irish bartenders dying for a drink or a last hurrah....

If you’re dying to learn more about The Green Street Mortuary Band and other interesting death rituals, check out The Daily Undertaker at http://www.dailyundertaker.com/2008/11/green-street-mortuary-band.html