He Brought the Songbook to Life

The Boston Globe

Gerry Gottschalk once said: "Nobody just sits down and plays. You have to earn what you have. You have to experiment.” You would think that he never had to try. That he just sat down at a piano one day and, presto, out poured the notes. That he played the way most of us walk, without having to think about it.

But even walking is a process: crawling, standing, balancing, teetering, falling, then getting back up and starting all over, the effort that goes into what eventually looks effortless, forgotten.

Gerry Gottschalk, who died last month at the age of 84, was a musician. Hum a tune and he knew it. Whisper a few words into his ear, and he'd take it from there. "Music for all occasions," said his business card. He could hear a song once and sit down and play it. He could play anything. People said he had a gift. But no, he said: "Nobody just sits down and plays. You have to earn what you have. You have to experiment." I tried so often to picture him as a young boy experimenting, teaching himself notes and scales and chords and keys, making music, while his friends were outside playing. I tried to imagine him at 15, quitting school to play every night at the Ward One Club for $8 a week. But I knew only the adult Gerry.

His uncle was Nathan Gottschalk, a professional violinist who graduated from Juilliard. But his father only dabbled at piano. Neither of his two children plays, nor do his grandchildren. "Is music in my genes?" he said he was always asked. "I don't know," he always said.

He was 13 when his parents bought him a Wurlitzer piano for his bar mitzvah. At 84 he was still playing that same piano, which sat facing a wall in the parlor of his Brockton home. He played it every day. He practiced on that piano.

But he didn't call it practice, because he didn't think of making music as work. "I never worked a day in my life," he said. Work was something that, when given a choice, you would not do. Gerry chose to play. He was most alive sitting on a piano bench, his fingers rolling, sometimes flying, over the keys, the music in his head filling a room.

When he was a young man, he played with a band all over the country. When he married and had kids, he chose to play closer to home. He made his living making music, and he made himself a name. He didn't need sheet music to play. He knew thousands of songs by heart. The last few years he was a little forgetful. Sometimes, names eluded him. Sometimes, the title of a movie got stuck on the tip of his tongue. But sit him on a piano bench and he had no trouble at all. The words and the notes flowed. "I don't understand it," he said. "But the words and music come back when I play." Two weeks before his death he was frail and ill. But at the piano, he was as good as ever. 

Among his possessions, tucked in a manila envelope, were two pocket-sized, very worn old notebooks. The pages, yellow and tattered, are filled with the lyrics of hundreds of songs. Most are typed, but some are handwritten. The songs are in alphabetical order. "Know all the words to every single song you play, because you'll play the song better," a fellow musician told him when he was young. He heeded that advice. He copied and memorized the words.

In the last few years, he introduced songs that had been hits in their day but were now forgotten. "Lost songs," he called them. He played them. Sang them. Gave a little history. " 'I Get Along Without You Very Well.' Hoagy Carmichael wrote that in 1939." " 'Home (When Shadows Fall).' Do you know that one? Peter van Steeden wrote it.”

Lost now is a human bridge to so many old songs. Lost now is an irreplaceable musician. People say that Gerry had a gift. What's indisputable is that Gerry Gottschalk was a gift.