THE HIPSTER'S LEGACY

The daughter of a 20th-century jazz musician recollects her unique childhood in this debut memoir.

A classically trained Julliard musician, Harry Raab first made a splash on Harlem’s jazz scene in the 1930s. The Jewish, jive-taking boogie-woogie musician eventually evolved into “Harry the Hipster,” an alternative persona characterized by screwball, drug-themed antics. In the words of Cohen, his daughter, “He wanted his fame,” even if that meant shedding his own personality to become a caricature in the interest of securing television and radio appearances. In this memoir, set primarily during the 1950s and 1960s during Cohen’s childhood and adolescence, the author provides an intimate lens through which readers can view the life of an iconically idiosyncratic 20th-century musician. Readers are given a backstage tour of the era’s jazz scene featuring reflections on Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, and Fats Waller, among others. Cohen also takes readers into the backrooms of radio studios and low-budget television stations of the era; the book begins as Harry takes his family with him to The Al Jarvis Show, where they meet Betty White. While Cohen’s life as a showbiz kid was never dull, her dad consistently battled with personal demons and insecurities, spurring his never-ending quest to strike it rich with a platinum hit. This led him to write a slew of novelty Christmas songs in hopes one of them would take off, including “I Hope My Mother-in-law Don’t Come for Christmas.” Harry was also preoccupied with drugs, which inspired some of his more well-known songs, like “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” On one occasion, after Harry was arrested for drug possession, Cohen recalls her mother selling the family’s furniture to pay for legal fees (despite her father’s status as a B-list celebrity, the family lived modestly in a small home adjacent to a landfill and oil wells).

More than just a tell-all book about a wacky entertainer, this coming-of-age memoir features Cohen’s own story as a girl growing up in California during an era of national upheaval and social change—historical anecdotes from the era are blended with more intimate memories of childhood friends, siblings, teenage hormones, and even a hitchhiking adventure. Based on journal entries the author began writing in the early 1960s, the book’s vignettes are remarkably detailed, especially given the half-century between them and this remembrance. Described by Cohen as a “dramatized memoir,” the book is written almost like a novel, featuring reconstructed dialogue and occasional third-person narration (notably, the author rarely refers to her father as “dad,” but almost always as “Harry”). Cohen’s accessible prose style is punctuated by Harry’s jive-infused vocabulary, and the book includes a glossary of the era’s hipster lingo for neophytes. The pages also include an abundance of photographs and family snapshots. Cohen’s successes as a New York City–based artist and package designer for JC Penney are minimized in the text; invested readers may hope for a second book that details the author’s own history as a trailblazer in corporate America.

The spellbinding story of one of history’s zaniest entertainers as told from the perspective of his daughter.