A Voice of Resolve on Sidewalks of N.Y.

NEW YORK — The afternoon heat is thick and blue, like automobile exhaust. The occasional pedestrian moves through it as if in a dream. On West 62nd Street in Damrosch Park, just south of the Metropolitan Opera House, a few people, collapsed on benches, fan themselves dispiritedly.

In the eerie stillness, a man can be heard singing several blocks away.

This love of mine

Goes on and on

Though life is empty

Since you have gone.

The baritone voice, strong and plaintive, permeates the thick atmosphere, as ink does a paper towel. The vowels are ripe and protracted. In the 1940s a lot of crooners sounded like this--lush and romantic.

I cry my heart out

It’s bound to break

Since nothing matters

Let it break.

Then the singer rounds the corner. Only he’s not immediately visible, because he is pushing what appears to be an oversize grocery cart stacked with loudspeakers. The voice is coming from the speakers. The man is bent over, shoulder against the handle, intent on keeping the pushcart on an even course over the sticky pavement.

Green lettering on the black T-shirt he wears announces: “The person you hear singing is me.” For 72-year-old George Jackson--late-blooming vocalist, entrepreneur, Father Courage on the isle of Manhattan--it’s another workday.

Street vendors are common here. But Jackson has the only established, permanent, floating CD store in New York. The CDs are his.

Two years ago, Jackson decided to make good on his ambition to become a singer.

“If I could have got a recording contract or a contract with a shipping line--you know, where I would go out nine months a year, singing on ships--that would have been great,” he explains. “But I couldn’t find a job. No recording company was going to invest $100,000 in me. They figure I may die next year, so how are they going to earn their money back? Fine! If they won’t do it for me, I’ll do it for myself.”

By borrowing on his credit cards, Jackson financed his first CD, “That Old Feeling”--15 standards, including “Begin the Beguine,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” and ending with “The Lord’s Prayer.” He recorded it in a Manhattan sound studio with professional musicians and had 5,000 copies made at a cost he estimates at $10,000 to $15,000. “Most people thought I was out of my head,” he chuckles.

In February he went back into the studio and recorded a second CD, “All My Tomorrows.” Its 18 songs include “Body and Soul,” “Once in a While,” “Time After Time” and the version of “This Love of Mine” that signals his approach. This run was 2,000.

Jackson knew that the pushcart, which he built in his living room, would be how he would “get my music out there.”

From early spring to late fall, every day it doesn’t rain he sets out at 94th Street and Broadway, heads toward Columbus Circle, makes a jog to 7th Avenue, then continues south sometimes as far as Greenwich Village, where he reverses direction. He’ll spend the whole day (and some of the night) on the street, always moving, pausing only when someone stops to buy a CD ($15) or tape ($10). By the time he returns home, he and the cart, which weighs several hundred pounds, have logged as much as 10 miles.

“It’s hard work,” he says, toweling sweat off his forehead. “I’m defying old age now, doing something I really shouldn’t be doing. I’m out on the street every single day, seven days a week. But I need seven-day money.”

Jackson is reluctant to say how much he earns. A day in which he sells “15 units” is apparently a very good one. Some people give him money and don’t take a CD. What touches him most are the homeless, who slip him quarters because they like his music.

After starting with a boombox in the spring of 1995--”that boombox just didn’t give me enough boom”--Jackson installed a $900 sound system, which operates on two marine batteries. “I’m not out to disrupt anybody’s life,” he says. “I’m just trying to sell my wares. If people are going to buy my music, they gotta hear a little of it first.”

He came north from Daytona Beach, Fla., in 1941, still in his teens. Over the years he delivered laundry, washed dishes, worked as a janitor and hotel porter, and packed clothes in the garment district. In 1946 he married and subsequently had three children. His wife is deceased, and the children have moved away.

Jackson entered amateur night at the Apollo Theatre a number of times and “never came away without a prize of some sort.” But “the only nightclubs I sang in were fourth-rate, where you might get $10 for the weekend,” he says. In time, he gave up on his dream.

Then, a few years ago, Jackson realized he couldn’t postpone it much longer. “I thought, ‘If I have any voice left at all, I better use it now or I never will,’ ” he says.