Fools of Song

The Fools of Song is the name a band of working-class boys from a New Jersey neighborhood gave to their street-corner singing group in E. L. Doctorow's City of God. They were not musicians in any trained sense; they were a pack of adolescents who gathered in front of the candy store to croak out the hits of their culture, as the narrator puts it, in a spirit of defiant joy aimed at the old world cockers upstairs. The name itself carried a faintly Chinese ring in certain ears, like Tin Pan, and the narrator glosses it with a playful etymology: Tin Pan say love is pop song in heart. The group's rough, untutored singing of popular standards constitutes the narrator's first artistic community and the formative ground of his lifelong devotion to song, even as its dissolution becomes his first deliberate act of self-distinction.