Here are songs with Broadway in the title. Stylistically, they are all over the map. “The Funky Broadway” came out when I was in high school in Baltimore. On the local radio, they played the Dyke and the Blazers version and I assumed they were referring to Broadway in Baltimore, which is truly funky. They weren’t—though, they might have been referring to Broadway in Buffalo or the one in Phoenix where members of that band hailed from.

Of course, I knew that when most people referred to Broadway, they were referring to the one in New York. When I moved to New York, I worked for a while as an usher in a movie theater on East 34th Street. Once in a while, I had the job of taking the tickets, receipts, or sometimes the reels of film in big cans to the chain headquarters further uptown. I loved those trips—and from my POV, I was getting paid to be a tourist—to walk down Broadway. Broadway! This street was famous, I thought to myself, it’s in songs and movies, and now I’m walking on it!