The Sting (1973), directed by George Roy Hill. Streaming at home, Tuesday, April 18.

We didn’t see a lot of movies in the early 70s. For starters, I was born in 1968, my brother in ’69. Then there was the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere, in a town called Freeland, near Saginaw, Michigan. Freeland is a town that seems to be built only on rural roads where people drive fast. We lived in an old, melancholy rented home that faced a farm, and was flanked on either side with death–go past the ditch and you’d get killed by a car, stumble down the overgrown banks and you’d fall into the Tittabawassee River, which flowed through Midland, where Dow Chemical was, and it was so polluted you’d drown or dissolve if you fell in. We had gypsy moths squirming in the trees and a wildcat under the home. And we had chaos inside, a series of events that upended us, involving depression and being sent away to live with our grandparents.

Movies literally had no place in my life at this time–I didn’t have many friends in kindergarten, so I didn’t even really talk about movies at the schoolyard, Dad didn’t take us at that point, thanks to our situation and our age. We watched Sesame Street and The Electric Company and would be baffled at a show called Lillias, Yoga and You on PBS. In 1973, when I was five, The Sting came out. I didn’t hear anything about it, but it would become very important to me.

In 1973, that year of Watergate and the conclusion of Vietnam, The Sting took the world by storm. It was the biggest box office draw of the year, won a ton of Oscars, and its soundtrack was a top seller. The score involved Marvin Hamlisch playing Scott Joplin tunes, which, I later discovered, were totally incorrect for the time period in the film (Joplin’s really turn-of-the-century, The Sting should’ve been Big Band stuff, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman). That music was all over the radio, and I just loved it. In 1974 I received the soundtrack album as a birthday present, and I remember listening to it on our stereo, which sat on a shelf by the stairs, in the hallway by the front door.

There is a track on the record, called “Solace”, which really meant a great deal to me. It was one of the first two songs that I could listen to and be comforted in times of extreme pain and confusion. The first song was Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now”, which I heard on the radio. That song came out a few years earlier, so it was only fleetingly on the radio, which we didn’t listen to that often anyway. But I got a lot out of it every time I heard it, inspired by the singer’s suggestion that with clarity he “could see all obstacles in my way”. I liked that it seemed honest, the way Grandma would try and comfort us–it was warm, and it wasn’t fake emotion, it suggested that things will get better, but they won’t totally go away and the aftermath won’t be perfect.

Problem was, I couldn’t ask for the song on a 45 or LP because I never heard who sang it and thought that Nash was a woman. I didn’t figure it out until college, and then only hearing it on the radio and obsessively waiting in the hopes I’d hear who sang the damn thing.

The other song was “Solace” by Scott Joplin, from The Sting soundtrack. There’s two versions, one a piano solo, the other with the orchestra. I loved them both, and though I listened to that album endlessly (probably to Mom and Dad’s chagrin–I’ve always had a habit of listening to things over and over and over again when I first like them). But that particular song spoke to me of sadness, and didn’t spell anything out. Whenever I was confused, whenever I was deeply sad, I would put on “Solace”. I remember asking Dad what the word “solace” meant, and, as usual, he told me to look it up, a habit of his which helped me to learn to spell and enjoy dictionaries. Online I see that it means “comfort or consolation in times distress or sadness”, and I’m guessing the dictionary we had at the time said pretty much the same thing. So I got to know that this song was giving me comfort, I could feel it when I heard that plaintive piano. When the setting sun was too bright and illuminated the impending divorce of my folks, when a dog was laying dead in the road, I would put on whatever side was facing me and go right to the track (I got to be very good at laying the needle down in just the right spot) and listen to “Solace”. It really saved me.

Later, when I saw The Sting on TV with Grandma I couldn’t even remember where the song was in the movie, and lately, watching it the other night and being disappointed (even after reading Matthew Specktor’s impassioned defense of it) I found it slick and, frankly, dumb (these scam artists sure start with a pile of money right from the start, they kill the Black man and there’s no other Black character left to pull this off?). Perhaps most disappointing was how little genuine emotion there is in the movie, which left me feeling strange considering how much that song means to me emotionally. I mean, I think I listened to “that song”Solace” for two full years, or more, before I watched the film, and it was a good forty or so years before I watched The Sting as an adult and could appreciate (or not) the movie.

But I still love “Solace”. It has long given way to other music that moves me (including Johnny Nash, whom I can now access instantly), in part because it conjures up a lot of bad memories. I’m always amazed though at the power of a song, even a “lesser” track on a popular album, can move you.