Summer serenade of taxi horns and fun arcades
Children are up dancing into the streets
A bright star in the dark age
So the sidewalk leads us with music to two little dancers
Balancing dreadful and wonderful perceptions
They have been handed day by day
It says, 'Pork Pie Hat Bar'
Love is never easy
Now Charlie's down in Mexico with the healers
Cellars and chittlins'
In the sticky middle of the night
There's a sign up on the awning
And drove them from their hotel bed
Of refusing a black man admission, black musician
And a circus dangerous clowns
Bright and sweet love is never easy street
Had a Porkie Pig hat on
For you and me the sidewalk is a history book
Embracing out in the lunatic New York night
To Charlie's bass and Lester's saxophone in taxi horns and brakes
Arm and arm went black and white and some saw red
Where right or wrong under neon every feeling goes on
When Lester took him a wife
Now we are black and white
It's short of the hope we have for happiness
The sweetest swinging music man
Dancing outside a black bar
In those days they put him in an underdog position
Generations on down
Or be hung in a tree that's unlikely
We came up from the subway on the music midnight mix
Tonight these crowds are happy and loud
When the bandstands had a thousand ways
It's very unlikely we'll be driven out of town
