Two Cities Moving to Different Beats

This is a tale of two cities, and two families.

One is the Brashlers. They live in Branson, Mo., a city that, for all intents and purposes, was built by country music.

The second family is the Jaffes. They live in this city that incubated jazz.

New Orleans is by reputation a sinful city, sanctuary for pirates, vampires, voodoo and streetcars named Desire.

Branson is a godly city. Or at least as wholesome as all get out.

We pulled into Branson late at night and for the first time I realized that my wife, Pam, is neither as tolerant nor as adventurous as I am. I’ve long known about her secret fear of clowns. We’ve managed to compensate. But there is a certain category of comedian that transforms her fear into loathing. Perhaps because her father was a dentist, Pam’s bigotry against toothless hillbilly clowns knows no bounds.

“I ain’t gon’ watch no hillbilly clowns,” she said as I sat in our family’s RV, poring excitedly over the multitude of country shows in Branson, a good number of which proudly advertises precisely the entertainment commodity that Pam doesn’t understand.

Branson is, by any standard, an intriguing success story and, at least in my mind, was well worth a stop on our summer-long investigation into the state of the American family. Back in 1907, writer Harold Bell Wright published a best-selling novel, “The Shepherd of the Hills,” that launched a tourist migration to this neck of the Ozarks. But the real boom started a couple of decades ago when a couple of Branson families opened music halls featuring country and gospel music, and comedy that played off the area’s hillbilly roots.

What followed was as impressive a display of institutionalized nepotism as this nation has to offer. Families that had been pickin’ and strummin’ on front porches for generations took to stages in increasingly elaborate theaters, while their cousins and uncles went to work doing publicity or selling Branson T-shirts and coffee mugs.

As country and middle-of-the-road music junkies swarmed the place, national acts that had tired of touring (or, in the more cynical view, had tired out their following) started moving in. Now Branson has more family-run and -oriented musical theaters per square foot than Los Angeles has strip joints.

I awoke in a family-run campground with a strong urge to paint “Sipchen Family Theater” on the side of the RV and to start charging admission. After all, I noted, we do have three violins, a clarinet, two harmonicas and a Native American drum purchased at Mesa Verde National Park on board.

But the kids vetoed my plan, pointing out that the only song I’ve managed to write is a rousing number penned while Pam whipsawed the RV down a country road as I toiled at my latest dispatch for this series:

If I can keep from barfing,

I’ll get this story wrote.

So instead we caught a shuttle into town, where we were tempted by a dazzle of marquees for the Anita Bryant Theatre, the Baldknobbers’ Hillbilly Jamboree, the Bobby Vinton Blue Velvet Theatre, the Boxcar Willie Theatre, the Charley Pride Theatre, the Jim Stafford Theatre, the Mickey Gilley Family Theatre, the Osmond Family Theatre, Tony Orlando’s Yellow Ribbon Theatre and the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre, to name a few.

Our choice was the Brashler Family Theatre, the lobby of which displays this motto in a glass case: “God respects me when I work but he loves me when I sing.”

The Brashlers’ white theater looks, from the outside, as saccharine as those wide-eyed Precious Moments figurines that are made in a nearby town. That’s pretty much how it is inside too. And that was cool by Pam and me, since we couldn’t be more bored with the super-duper-hyper-hipness of pierced-tattooed-and-branded L.A.

*

We were concerned, however, about the reaction of our kids, who offered sincere resistance to the evening’s entertainment.

As it happened, the show, featuring a combination of Brashlers and hired hands, was a slick production of gospel and country tunes with a few pop oldies blended in. It was vulgarity-free, and doled out just enough cleavage to precisely balance propriety and down-home prurience.

Good thing, too, since the audience on this weeknight was packed with tour busloads of senior citizens and a huge Baptist youth choir from Texas--none of whom responded more enthusiastically, it turned out, than Ashley Sipchen, 12, her sister, Emily, 10, and their 7-year-old brother, Robert.

Clearly designed to entertain rather than impress, the show’s gentle sincerity worked. The kids bobbed their heads to the straight-ahead harmonizing. They laughed hard at comic Homer Lee, who in typical Branson fashion whipped out his wallet to show the audience family pictures--and who atypically, but to Pam’s great relief, maintains a full set of teeth.

After the show, Cliff Brashler, the patriarch and singer, told us that he and partner Johnny Walters were co-pastors at the First Church of God for almost three decades before they decided to turn their gospel singing into a show, joining just a couple of other families who had theaters in Branson at the time.

Walters, who plays keyboards, said he links Branson’s success to concerted resistance to the increasingly risque and hard-edged trends in contemporary entertainment, both from musicians, who appreciate playing to crowds that aren’t drunk, and from the Southern and Midwestern families who come to support the shows.

“Everybody has a right to their lifestyle and all that,” Brashler said. “But people also have a right to have a place like this, where families can come and enjoy themselves.”

Branson’s attitude, Walters said, “is relax, kick back, enjoy life.”

In a way, that’s the philosophy of New Orleans too.

*

We pulled into the Big Easy on a stormy afternoon, about a week after leaving Branson. As we proceeded though the Garden district, Ashley and Emily marveled at trees that, months after Mardi Gras, still looked as if they had been toilet-papered with plastic necklaces.

School already had been out for a couple of weeks. But the reality of the season hadn’t sunk in till we strolled up St. Peter Street, stuffed full of gumbo, and were greeted by the sound of street musicians playing Gershwin’s “Summertime” just outside Preservation Hall.

Benjamin Jaffe, who runs the hall, greeted us through a wrought iron gate and led us into one of those hot, damp brick courtyards that add such steam to the local writing.

That romantic aura may have been what got to Jaffe’s parents, who arrived here from Pennsylvania in 1961 on a quick honeymoon and never left.

At the time, the traditional jazz that New Orleans had spawned was fading rapidly. “The only person still playing it, really, was Louis Armstrong,” Jaffe said.

That hadn’t sat well with his father, Allan, who blew a tuba himself and thought the old-school players deserved a place to play and be heard. So in 1961 he and his wife, Sandra, took over the lease on a friend’s art gallery where some of the area’s traditional jazz musicians would come to jam. They turned it into Preservation Hall.

The name, Jaffe said, often is subtly misconstrued. “I always thought of it in reference to the musicians, not the music. That was my parents’ priority. This has always been a place where musicians could come when they were in need and play the music.”

With our kids hovering nearby, and a crowd growing outside the gate, Jaffe painted scenes from his boyhood, when he would hang out in the dank hall with New Orleans legends and tour different parts of the city with his mom or dad to deliver paychecks or food baskets to musicians and their families.

Over time, most of the original musicians passed away, and a new crop, including the first generation’s children, moved in to take their places.

Likewise, when their father died in 1987, Jaffe and his brother stepped in to help their mother with Preservation Hall.

Jaffe, who plays double bass, grew up cranking out rock ‘n’ roll or the more cerebral jazz of his own era. But the hall’s influence had seeped in. Today the 26-year-old plays in one of the four Preservation Hall bands, each of which rotates through the small performance room (admission: $4 a head) and records and tours nationally.

“This is my calling,” Jaffe said. “It incorporates so many different influences. I perform with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 70s, 80s. You don’t find that in many settings.”

*

That night, he took the floor with a hall band. As usual, the place was redolent with the aroma of moist wood and closely packed bodies, which only added to the flavor of the sense-drenching jazz.

Pam and our two younger kids were content to stand swaying in the back of the hall, where an occasional whiff of fresh air washed in. But Ashley, who plays violin in a jazz ensemble and recently took up double bass herself, squeezed in up front beside a mother and daughter from Australia and scrutinized the band’s--and Ben’s--every riff.

“What’s unique about the hall,” Jaffe told me, “is that it sustains itself on music. We don’t have to sell drinks. . . . The greatest thing about [the music] is, it’s meant to be entertaining. I’ve never played a night here that the audience hasn’t been appreciative or left happy.”

That observation made my mind Ping-Pong between the two musical cities we had visited.

Branson is insular, drawing families into clean, air-conditioned theaters for shows that are similarly clean and self-contained.

New Orleans lets its music spill into the streets. Jazz improvisations intermingle, while snatches of R & B boogie with the blues and rock jumps with zydeco, turning the thick air into an acoustic jambalaya.

The Brashlers mine a rich vein of traditional music that focuses on the hereafter:

There’s a better

world a’ waitin’

in the sky, Lord,

in the sky.

New Orleans revels in the here and now.

Indeed, the kids got an eyeful of N’yawlin’s-style earthiness as we crisscrossed Bourbon Street and headed to bed a bit unsettled and overwhelmed--and that was well before women started ripping off their tops and wagging their breasts for drunken frat boys who seem to view the French Quarter as Fort Lauderdale with pretty balconies from which to slobber.

For the most part, though, this city’s raw revelry has a streak of genuine reverence. As Octavio Paz observed about Mexico’s sometimes orgiastic festivals, the chaos is cathartic. The partying purges pent-up demons.

The next morning, people were out early, scrubbing away the previous night’s excesses. After a breakfast that included crawfish etoufee and dirty rice, we came upon three men standing in the street singing a cappella, their voices booming in the canyon of mottled stucco walls.

The kids, open again to sensory input, listened grinning. And my thoughts again juxtaposed New Orleans and Branson, as the singers harmonized on the Louis Armstrong classic “What a Wonderful World.”

* Monday: The 4,000 mile mark.

* ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https: //www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.