I’ve loved music even longer than I’ve loved words. I think most of us have. We don’t need to learn anything to listen to music it could be reasoned. But… you actually do need to learn to listen. The world around us is filled with music. The sound of the breeze rustling trees, a city’s traffic, a lone saxophone player heard from an unseen window. These things could escape us if we didn’t open our ears and minds to it. Walt Whitman opened me up in more conscious ways to the sounds of the world in his poems. I started playing music with friends in bands around my hometown when I was about 19. But even long before that we sang in our home. It was me, my maternal grandmother, mother and two sisters there. The women and girls sang with open abandon and it gave me the freedom to join in. We had a stereo. It might have come from Sears. My mom had a stack of records that went from Hank Williams to Nat King Cole. Nana loved opera. We went to a church that sang at least four songs each and every service and we sang along with great energy, smiling at each other and our beloved Reverend Fletcher at especially loved passages. To grow up with music is to grow up with hope. To grow old with music is to not grow old … in your heart.
Here is what I’m listening to on my turntable these days.
Note: If you hit the links you might have to put up with a short commercial. That’s is what the ‘off volume’ switch is for.
“Come On In My Kitchen” / Robert Johnson
Well, it’s goin’ to be rainin’ outdoors
Ah, the woman I love, took from my best friend
Some joker got lucky, stole her back again
You better come on in my kitchen
It’s goin’ to be rainin’ outdoors”This song just cheers me up. As a person who’s done some fair amount of ‘kitchen time’ … it’s one of my long standing lyrics to love. And additionally… this was written by a man who’s said to have sold his soul at ‘the crossroads’.
“The Weight” / Aretha Franklin
“Rebels” / Tom Petty
Tom Petty’s death had a resounding wake up effect on me. I did enjoy the music he made. I bought a tape of perhaps the earliest album Tom and the Heartbreakers released from the record shop in Key West I was going to in 1978. But truthfully I didn’t really know his catalog of work during his lifetime. Of course I loved the songs that burst through the charts and were (and are) played on the radio. But after he passed I started to listen to his work via the Tom Petty Radio Station on ‘Sirius XM’. And I have not stopped listening to that station yet. I am blown away by the depth and range of the man’s work. And let’s not forget his band. Jesus! What a fucking load of talent that gathered around Tom. In the song ‘Rebels’…. one which I never heard until after his passing.
I’m too drunk to follow.
You know you won’t
feel this way tomorrow.
Well, maybe a little rough around the edges
Or inside a little hollow.
I get faced with some things sometimes
That are so hard to swallow.”