Skylark, have you anything to say to me?

One of my sabbatical goals was to start voice lessons again.  I studied for about seven years in high school and college, and though it never "went" anywhere (obviously, I didn't become a professional singer), I enjoyed it immensely and have missed it ever since.  There's something about singing that's very Zen-like for me: it's effort, but from a totally different part of my brain and body than anything else I've ever done, and when it's going well I can slip very easily into that optimal sense of flow.

This time around, though, I didn't want to study classical repertoire like I did before.  While I enjoyed singing all those arias at the time, that music kind of leaves me cold now.  What I really want to do is sing jazz--not necessarily scatting (I'm not sure I'll ever loosen up enough to do that in a way that isn't deeply uncomfortable for me and any unfortunate listener)--but just a more relaxed, personal kind of singing that makes the best use of my range.

WVU offers private lessons through its community music program, and I found a local teacher who was willing to take me on, even though she's more classically trained.  I had my first lesson yesterday, and it was great fun--even doing scales and various silly exercises to loosen up the face and lips was a real blast from the past.  

But.

About midway through the lesson, I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of grief.  It caught me unexpectedly and swamped me for a few seconds, until I realized what it was about.

Dad.

In part, I'm doing this because at the end of his life, I saw how vital music was to him--it was, in many ways, the thing that most sustained him and gave him the deepest pleasure and peace.  And I realized that it's something I not only admired but envied in him, his ability to sustain that hobby and passion until the very end of his days.  I wanted to rekindle that love, which I shared with him, in my own life.

While my new voice teacher is excellent, I think it's fair to say she's not a pianist.  In fact, she pretty much "accompanied" me in the same way I accompany myself at home: by picking out the melody with the right hand, or just hitting the first note in a measure, and then going acapella from there.

Midway through the lesson, I wanted my dad.  My dad, who could play almost anything by ear, or in a pinch, from a fake book.

Dad at the piano(s)

Wanting to keep my own interest in music separate from his, we very seldom played together.  And now I'm sorry that we didn't play and sing every damn time we saw each other.

And it also made me miss my longtime voice teacher from all those years ago, Carol Marty. She died in 2012, and when I heard the news, I felt freshly guilty about having lost touch with her.  Not only was she my teacher, but she was also a good friend, and in addition to formal lessons, we frequently went out to sing old tunes from the 20s and 30s at a nursing home in east Columbus, often followed by lunch at the Kahiki.

Again, adulthood--or my theories about it--got in the way.  Though I doubt I could have articulated it at the time, I think that after I'd graduated from college and started working, continuing lessons was a final tie to my adolescence that I wanted to sever.  

But yesterday, I appreciated her in a whole new way.  Not only was she a great voice teacher, she was a remarkable pianist, and a very skillful, sensitive accompanist.  I know I wasn't as aware of and awed by that as I should have been at the time, but I sure am now.  In the midst of picking my way through Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark" yesterday, I wanted nothing more than for Mrs. Marty to be there, playing a lush accompaniment, the two of us gauging each other's tempo and phrasing so that voice and piano would not just synch, but together create something more full of life and movement than either alone could.

As a teenager and a young adult, I was blessed with two incredibly talented accompanists who took my interest in music seriously, nurtured it, and who went a step further and loved me.  And sometime between 4 and 5 p.m. yesterday, I finally understood that.  Too late to thank either of them.

In honor of the great Linda Ronstadt, who recently announced that Parkinson's disease has left her unable to sing a note, I'll post her version of "Skylark."  A nice reminder that if you've still got the pipes, you've gotta use and cherish them.  Will do, Dad and Mrs. Marty.  It's the best tribute I can make to you both.

(Not necessarily my favorite arrangement of that song, however...I prefer the spareness of this one.)

This one time, at band camp...

The Bexley High School Marching Band, Fall 1979

I opened the door to the screen porch one morning last week and one thought struck me:  band camp.

At 6:30 a.m., it was already 74 degrees and humid, and I could hear crickets chirping contentedly.  It was the crickets, really, that put me over the edge:  I'd forgotten that they were about the only other creatures up and making music so early on an August morning.

Unlike the flute player from American Pie, however, I have very few happy memories of band camp.  She obviously went to one of these new-fangled "camps" they have at colleges, where you stay in a dorm, with air conditioning and television.

No, the Bexley High School band camp, at least my freshman year, was about as far at the opposite end of that spectrum as possible:  latrines, cold-water-only showers in a cement-block building with no roof, and a hog farm across the road from the practice field, so that when we weren't playing, you could hear the sound of squealing pigs in the distance.  All very Lord of the Flies-esque.

I will say that we got a new band director that year who promptly moved the camp to another location, with far less rustic cabins that had indoor plumbing and hot water.  Let me tell you, that made our sophomore year at camp seem like a week at the spa, comparatively.

Despite the material improvements, however, the basic routine was still the same:  up at 6 for breakfast at 7 to be out on the field by 7:30.  Several hours of marching followed by lunch, more marching, section practice, maybe an hour or two off, then dinner, more marching, and whatever "entertainment" was scheduled for the evening.

What really strikes me now is that pretty much all the stuff that constituted "entertainment" would probably fit the legal definition of hazing.  The first night of our freshman year we were all, of course, "initiated," which meant performing some kind of humiliating task at the whims of upperclassmen.  I somehow managed to fly under the radar and must've been let off easy, since I don't remember (or have blocked out) what I had to do.  But my friends Christina and Kristin were given the charming task of cleaning the floor of the dining hall with sanitary pads. 

Thursday night, every year, was invariably "kangaroo court" night, where the rising seniors called out everyone else on whatever indiscretions they'd committed during the week:  being too mouthy, being too funny, not being funny enough, you name it.

At the camp before my junior year, my friend Jay was "initiated," since somehow he'd managed to miss band camp the first two years of high school and was attending for the first time.  He was slathered in shaving cream, and I remember having to lead him to the showers to rinse it all off because he couldn't see.  I also have a vivid memory from that year's kangaroo court of another guy in my class, a drummer, being "sentenced" to stand in a trash barrel full of slop--all the food scraps and leftovers from the previous three days.

I quit band at the end of my junior year, and missed the last year of band camp.  Crazy, right?  Because of course, your last year is when you finally get to be the abuser rather than the abused.

I'd like to say I quit on moral principle, that I didn't want to participate in such a system anymore.  But the truth was, I wanted to sing in the show choir the next year, and my senior-year schedule was too full for band.

Living only a block away from Morgantown High School, we're regularly treated to the marching band practicing its parade formation up and down our street.  And I have to say, despite my less-than-stellar memories of band camp, my memories of marching band itself are sweet enough that I still get a thrill when I hear the shrill, short blasts of a whistle that indicate the musicians are about to play. 

And even 25+ years later, not having to go to band camp makes August mornings like this one--when I can sit on my screen porch with a cup of coffee, listen to the crickets, and know that I can retreat from the heat and humidity whenever I choose--still feel like a luxury.

MHS band on Simpson Street, Fall 2010.  "Watch your files," indeed!  Those lines are pretty sloppy.

The Pittsburgh (area) jazz scene circa 1948

I had no idea that my dad had been the music editor of WVU's humor magazine, Moonshine, until my mom unearthed a file folder with several issues in it.

In my last post, I wrote about the demise of WDUQ's jazz programming.  Here's a little taste of what Pittsburgh's jazz scene was like back in the day, courtesy of this column from February 1948 (click on the picture to see a larger version):

Woody Herman playing a dance in Morgantown?  Sigh...

(And no, I have no idea what the inside joke about "Boone-Jug" Waldo is at the end.  But I do know that Boone-Jug, aka Ray Waldo, went on to become principal of one of the largest county high schools in the state.  And his staff still called him Boone-Jug.  That's so West Virginia.  Here's a nice little anecdote about him from the Martinsburg Journal.)

The day the music died

For me, personally, that would be today, the final day of jazz programming on Pittsburgh public radio station WDUQ.

Earlier this year, Dusquene University sold the station to Essential Public Media out of Boulder, Colorado.

Presumably (or so listeners were told during several pledge drives), this was because the university could no longer foot the bill.  Members, myself included, pledged diligently to keep the station going, and specifically to keep jazz on the air.

WDUQ's official slogan (as per the mug) was "News, Jazz, NPR."  So, between "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," it was wall-to-wall jazz, with local hosts and guests and frequently, local performers (and national ones making a stop in the city).  The station aired over 100 hours of jazz a week.

When Essential Public Media took over, they vowed to honor the station's legacy...and I suppose they have, in their own cynical, paltry way.  Jazz will still be on WDUQ.  For six hours a week, on Saturday nights.

The other 94+ hours that used to be devoted to jazz?  Wall-to-wall news and talk radio.

"NPR ate my local public radio station" is the name of a Facebook group formed by and for "members of public radio stations that have been taken over by the NPR borg."

I'm now one of 'em.

Don't get me wrong:  I love NPR and have always been a pledge-paying member of whatever station I listen to most often, wherever I've lived.

But I love local culture more.

Essential Public Media's rationale for the change is that Pittsburgh is the only city of its size in the U. S. without an all-news public radio station.*   So by EPM's bizarre logic, that means they're required to junk their new acquisition's successful format so that we can have one.  EPM insists on defining what the public wants by what they think we lack, rather than by what we've already got, and what loyal listener-members want to keep.

Pittsburgh is of the very few public radio stations in the country with a jazz format (my old member station, KUVO in Denver, is another).  DUQ members shelled out to keep jazz on the air, largely because jazz is such an integral part of the city's history, and Pittsburgh has been a mecca for the genre pretty much since its inception.  Just look at this list of jazz musicians who've come from, or been based in Pittsburgh compiled by the Carnegie Libraries.  Even if you know nothing about jazz, you'll undoubtedly recognize a few names on there.

The format isn't a lack.  It's a celebration of what's important locally, which the folks a thousand miles away in Boulder don't seem to be able or willing to comprehend.  Pittsburgh has three NPR stations, and WDUQ has always had the largest membership.  So what, exactly, is "missing"?

To say I'm upset is putting it mildly.  But more than I'm angry, I'm heartbroken.

I listened earlier this week as Tony Mowod, who's hosted "Jazz on the Nightside" in the evenings for 23 years, talked with one of the many local jazz musicians he's had on his show this week.  Tony talked about growing up feeling like a weirdo for being into Stan Kenton when other kids didn't even know who that was.  His guest joked, "Try telling your friends you were listening to a Sonny Stitt record last night!"  And they talked about how much harder it will be for young musicians to learn about the genre when there's so little of it on the airwaves.

The guest played several tracks from his own CDs, including the last number at the end of the show:  "Goodbye," which was Benny Goodman's traditional closing number.  If ever there were a tearjerker of a torch song, that's it.  I first came to know it through Linda Ronstadt's version, on the big-band album she recorded with the Nelson Riddle orchestra, What's New.

Sure, it's sentimental, mawkish, and over the top.

But it wrenched my heart again to hear it at the end of one of Tony's last broadcasts, and to hear him get choked up when the guest said afterward that he played it "to say goodbye to you, Tony, even though I don't want to."

Such a loss.

Thanks ever so much for listening to the "public" in public radio, Essential Public Media.  You've taken away the part of WDUQ that truly was "essential" to me.  My NPR pledge will go elsewhere from now on.






*Correction:  one of two, according to former DUQ host Katherine Fink, whose post better explains the business end of this change.

I let a song go out of my heart

As the song goes, "Little things mean a lot."  And they can also add up to a big meltdown.

Earlier this week, there was a story on the WVU homepage about "Hot Rod Hundley," a legendary basketball player here in the 1950s, whose number was being retired.  My dad had often told stories about Hot Rod's antics, and when I saw the story, I immediately thought, "Oh, I've gotta send this link to Dad!"  And then, I remembered:  Dad's dead.

A couple days later, I got a call from the "digestive specialties clinic" saying that they were ready to schedule my colonoscopy.  Though I'm only 44, I get the thrill of having this procedure every five years thanks to the fact that both of my parents had (and survived) colon cancer in their late 40s/early 50s.  I realized after I hung up, though, that I can't say my dad survived it anymore, apparently, since the doctors believed that the brain cancer he died of had probably metastatized from the colon cancer he had thirty-five years earlier.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, then, that watching WVU play its arch-rival Pitt on TV Wednesday night kind of put me over the edge.  It was the first time the reality truly hit me:  I'll never see my Dad again.  

Often since his death, I've become conscious of certain tunes being stuck in my head--and not because I've heard them recently, and they've simply gotten lodged there.  These tunes seem to float up from my subconscious, somehow.  On the morning Dad died, it was "When I Look in Your Eyes."  Later, "The Song is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On)."

That these songs would be archived in my brain isn't too surprising; Dad had his own dance band while in college in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was a lifelong jazz afficionado and musician.  I grew up with this music as a soundtrack, piping through the radio on WOSU's Big Band Saturday show, or from Dad's collection of 78s and vinyl.

When Tom and I first started dating, he was astounded by the fact that I knew all the lyrics to so many of the old standards, but after many years of visiting my parents' house and hearing them continually himself, he's pretty good at recalling titles and lyrics himself. 

I'll never forget the tone of Dad's voice once when he told me about finally discovering a place he could go to hear (and make) music when he was in Army basic training in Texas.  Having been away from home--and his instruments, and the church choir, and whatever other musical outlets he had there--for months, he was, as he said, "So hungry for music!"  In many ways, I think it was the first time I genuinely understood how much music defined my dad--what a near-religious centrality it had in his life.

That was echoed again in his final days, when my brother and sister-in-law created a slide show of some old negatives that Dad had been meaning to scan and identify for a long time, and--almost as an afterthought--added a soundtrack with classics from Harry James, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and others.

We figured out how to connect Mark's mp3 player to the TV in Dad's room at the rehab center, and as Dad watched, I was astounded at his instant recall both of the people in pictures he'd taken sixty years earlier, and also of the title, artist, and lyrics of every single song that played.  When he tired and we got ready to leave, he asked us to leave the music running:  "I'll just drift off on that tonight."

That was just a couple of days before he died.  I'm glad to know that there was music in his life even toward the end of it, and I'm even more glad that even though I won't ever be able to enjoy watching him listen to and play music himself, he's left me with an enormous repertoire of melodies to remember him by.

Sometimes, in my more woo-woo moments, I even think his spirit is communicating with me through some of these songs.  I had one such experience this morning.  I'd actually been dreaming about Dad, and woke up with "Serenade in Blue" stuck in my head, for no apparent reason.  As I lay in bed slowly coming to consciousness, I tried to remember the words...When I hear that Serenade in Blue....da da da da da da da da daaaaa--to you?  Couldn't recall the exact lyrics.

An hour or so later I got in the car to drive to the gym, and turned on the Sirius satellite radio, which was tuned to the "40s on 4" station.  As I turned right onto High Street, what should start playing but "Serenade in Blue"?  I listened, carefully, to the lyrics I'd struggled to recall:

When I hear that Serenade in blue
I'm somewhere in another world, alone with you
Sharing all the joys we used to know
Many moons ago

Once again your face comes back to me
Just like the theme of some forgotten melody
In the album of my memory
Serenade in blue

Whether I choose to believe that there's some kind of supernatural communication happening through the music, or that it's a total (if pleasant) coincidence, or that I'm just in a place where I'm bound see what I'm looking for everywhere, it doesn't matter. The songs make me think of Dad.  They make him live, and they remind me that he lives on in me.  All I have to do is tune in and listen.

Swinging Taps

I quote a lot of British poetry when I'm teaching the Brit Lit survey, and perhaps no lines get quoted more often than these lines from the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 55: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

The irony, of course, is that the fragile paper on which the poem is written seems to have little chance of outlasting the marble and gold of a princely tomb. Blogs would seem to have even less enduring power.

Still, the blog seems the place, in some ways to tell a story or two about Dave Hathaway, who seemed to love to tell stories in his own way. So I'll tell a story about him and a story of his.

First, the story about him: I'll never forget when Rosemary and I first got engaged, Rose's folks were, I think, really delighted (so was I). They had always been very welcoming to me, and always made me feel like part of the family. But after we told them we'd gotten engaged, Dave made an effort to tell Rose and I how pleased he was, and finding us together that evening he said to us, "You two deserve each other." I knew what he meant, but I've always loved the memory, because that phrase seems so often to be used for exactly the opposite effect--it's something you say to people who are (as the Wife of Bath would phrase it) one another's purgatory here on earth.

For his story, I'll tell one I only heard him tell once, although I always meant to get him to tell it again. It was one of his stories from the war, which Rose says he never used to tell when he was younger. But anyway, though he was ultimately a radio operator during the war, before his unit got to Italy, he didn't have much radio work to do, and (in the army way) he either found something to do or was given something to do. Anyway, somehow he wrangled his musical background into being assigned as a bugler.

In northern Africa, apparently, being somehow dissatisfied with the bugle as he found it, he took a blowtorch to it, apparently thinking he could maybe reshape it somehow: of course, the solder joints just melted away, and he was left with a handful of unconnected pieces. When he took it to the quartermaster, he didn't have any real explanation for what happened, and he was understandably disappointed when the brass bugle was replaced by a plastic one. The sound quality was, apparently, not very good.

Still, on the night before the unit was supposed to head off to Italy, the captain, I guess, was away on business of some sort and Dave, when it came time to play taps, couldn't resist the temptation to "swing" it, and he did, and he never got in trouble for doing it, either.

But the story doesn't end there. Some forty years later, when he went to his first battalion reunion, he told the story of swinging taps, and another old soldier came up to him afterwards with a tear in his eye. He told Dave that he remembered hearing taps that night, and hearing it swing, and it made him feel a whole lot better about getting on the boat and going to Italy the next day.

If you ever doubted that music--or breaking the rules--could sometimes do real good, I can't think of a better example.

The last time I saw Dave Hathaway, he was listening to jazz, and I think it made him feel better, too.

Commerical jingles you won't hear on TV these days

So, awhile back I'd dried some sheets on the line in the basement, and asked Tom to come help me fold them, if he had the time.

As he came down the basement stairs, he was singing "If you've got the time, We've got the beer... Miller Beer."

For some reason that touched off a whole nostalgia fest about bad beer and wine jingles we remembered from our 1970s childhoods:

"Here's to good friends, tonight is kinda special.... Tonight, let it be Lowenbrau."

"Head for the mountains, Head for Busch Beer."

...and of course,

"Riunite on ice, Reunite--that's nice. Riunite, Riunite, on ice!"

and the immortal slogan, "We will sell no wine before its time." Sadly, an entire generation only knew Orson Welles from those Paul Masson wine ads. It was kind of a shock to see the handsome young version of him in movies later on.

Which leads us to wonder: thirty years or so from now, will the kids of today be folding sheets and singing "Viva, Viagra"?

The pleasure of things done beautifully

Question: What do the following have in common?

1) A great performance of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors at the Globe in London


2) An equally amazing performance of Croatian tamburitza music by Jerry Grcevich and his band in Chalk Hill, Pennsylvania


The answer? Both have been recent reminders to me of how pleasurable it is to watch a performance so masterful that it seems effortless. The kind of performance that makes you forget the prodigious amounts of talent, practice, inspiration, and energy required to spark such a magical chain reaction.

Tom is planning to blog about The Comedy of Errors, so I'll simply say that it was brilliantly staged and performed with incredible clarity and wit. Pure proof of the show's success: the fourteen-year-old boy sitting next to us who not only got it, but who laughed his ass off throughout the show. A real reminder that "masterpieces" needn't be serious or incomprehensible.

That reminder goes double for Jerry Grcevich. I have to admit, when I saw the scheduled entertainment for the first night of the Mid-Atlantic Folklife Association retreat, my friend Don's famous quip that "folk music is annoying" ran through my head. But tamburitza is anything but annoying; in fact, it reminded me of the great Gypsy music tradition that produced one of my favorite jazz musicians, Django Reinhardt.

Jerry is an NEA Heritage Fellowship winner who's regarded as the world's greatest prim player, and something of a music superstar in Croatia, where he collaborates with other musicians, tours, and records. But more crucially, he's also a consummate showman and a man who is clearly in love with the tradition he's engaged in.

It was a tremendous treat to be able to hear him perform in such an intimate setting...and by intimate, I mean not only small (there were only about 30 people there), but also up-close and personal. On at least two occasions, he came right up to me and played his prim about eight inches from my face. I'm not quite sure what that was about, but it was probably precipitated by the insane grin of delirium plastered across my face.

At one point he picked up another, smaller stringed instrument (I can't remember the name), which he said was sort of the ancestor of all the other tamburitza instruments, and explained that it might've been played by a shepherd out with his flock, as a way to pass the time.

To say that Jerry's playing is merely a way to "pass the time" would be a grave injustice. Nevertheless, his comment struck me: isn't it incredible that so much of the beauty in our world--art, music, drama, even gardening and great cooking--has stemmed from leisure? In saying that, I don't mean to diminish those activities. Quite the opposite: I am inspired by the fact that it's play, not work (or rather, the ethereal place where the two merge) that produces the most satisfying human accomplishments.

I am grateful for both of these recent experiences for reminding me of that, especially since my annual "holy-crap-I'm-not-getting-enough-done" summer panic is already gearing up. Note to self: play is essential, too.

Shutup in aisle five

I don't think I've mentioned here how much I hate Bob Seger. Mike blogged recently about the songs that trigger an autonomic push of the radio scan button, and for me, any Bob Seger song has the same effect. It's hard to link my response to any single thing about his music; I just think he is and always has been overrated, to continue a thread Jim started on his blog.

Because I don't often hear a Seger song all the way through, I was dismayed this morning when the usually ignorable background music at Kroger's started playing "Against The Wind."

Since I still had shopping to do and couldn't sprint for the self checkout, I had to endure this sentimental claptrap as I perused the bread aisle...but then, to add insult to injury, a guy in the next aisle over started singing along. Loudly, and quite emotionally.

Now, this guy had a decent tenor, and since one of the reasons I hate Bob Seger is that while I despise his songs, they always get stuck in my head, I figured: hey, maybe my fellow shopper thinks that singing the song while it plays will exorcise any urge to hum it later. But he really seemed into it, like this was a song that meant a lot to him thirty years ago when it was first released, and hearing it opened up some deep pocket of grief right there in housewares.

And I think that's what irritates me about Bob Seger: he's really just as mawkish and bombastic as Air Supply, but he has this kind of macho credibility that I don't get. And don't give me that "He's a great songwriter" bit. I mean, this is a man who wrote lyrics like "She was a black-haired beauty with big dark eyes/And points all her own sitting way up high/Way up firm and high."

That has to be one of the yukkiest metaphors in all of pop music.

But if you must, here it is. You can even hold up your damn lighter if you want.


P. S. Jim, I know that in saying this I run the risk of subjecting Bob Seger to the Curse of the Overrated. But maybe that's just your superpower.

Too Much Zappa

When Rose and I got satellite tv here (a first for us, who've never even had cable before), it came with a number of Sirius satellite radio channels, way up in the 6000s. We've spent some time listening to Outlaw Country, First Wave, The Big 80s, Soul Town, and Pure Jazz, but my secret vice, I have to admit, is The Vault.

So, if Rose is out of town, or out of the house, or even simply upstairs, I sometimes put the tv on The Vault and wallow in the lost seventies jams and classics that live there. They play The Who, Yes, as well as occasional songs from Springsteen, Petty, and the Dead--you know, all the kind of music that (at least for someone my age) seems like the kind of stuff that a cooler older brother would have listened to. And an occasional Rush song, too--The Vault has a thing for longer songs that no one else ever plays.

But as far as I'm concerned, The Vault plays just a little too much Frank Zappa. Somehow, I don't know why, I've never acquired the Zappa taste, and the occasional Vault offering doesn't really work for me. Ah well.

Repetition kills you

Like Mike, I'm more or less completely tuned out of the contemporary music scene. But one of the advantages of a three-hour road trip on I-70 is the chance to listen to the odd radio stations that pop up in eastern Ohio. Yesterday we heard this on the Muskingum College radio station. I love its 80s vibe, though Tom thought it sounded more like The Kinks. Either way, we're decades off: apparently, it's on an album that the Black Ghosts just released today. Wow, for once, I'm ahead of the curve!

Go, Jim Dandy!

A couple of months ago, I was sitting in Rose's sister's CRV, while Rose, Pam (sister), and Justin (nephew) were in some store, doing some shopping. I was sitting there listening to Outlaw Country on the Sirius satellite radio, when I realized I was hearing a real classic: Black Oak Arkansas's "Jim Dandy," (a song named after the lead singer, if I'm not mistaken). It was, almost literally, a blast from the past.



Picture me, some twenty-five years earlier, trying in my own quietly desperate way to develop some sort of individual identity, living in a dormitory housing more freshman students than there were in my whole high school. Worse, I was attending an east coast Ivy League university where I first heard rap music (although I admit I'd have an almost equally powerful blast from the past if I listened to Grandmaster Flash's "White Line" about now). It was a world very foreign to me.

Now, I had a single dorm room (no roommate), and back in those days, one of the things you could do was play records on your turntable, and I had a whole collection of obscure rock lp ("long-playing," that is) records scavenged from yard sales all over Licking County (this collection is long since dispersed on account of my conviction that "vinyl records are the piano rolls of the future," meaning eventually unplayable and hence valueless: I gave Jim the Grateful Dead records, I believe). Among the records I had, and played (I'll admit it), was the self-titled (or is it eponymous?) Black Oak Arkansas record. (I just looked it up on Amazon, and every song title was like the familiar name of nasty, cantankerous, straight-shooting old neighbor, the kind you're glad you moved away from, but that you still miss somehow, mostly for the straight-shooting).

So, once in a while, when I was in a funk and wanted some real country roots rock, I'd put the old Black Oak on and crank it up, to the frustration, no doubt, of my dorm mates. I suppose the only thing worse would have been if I'd been listening to the Osborne Brothers. I'd never say it was a great record, and I'd never say it was ever really a great favorite of mine (I probably listened to Thomas Dolby's Golden Age of Wireless a whole lot more), but I could probably listen to it with pleasure again--but mostly out of nostalgia, I'm sure. Warning--before you download anything from the Black Oak album, be aware that it has none of the smooth sound of "Jim Dandy": but of course, it's the rawness that you want when you listen to Black Oak Arkansas.

I'm not a fan of country music, in the main, I have to say, but Outlaw Country, on Sirius, is worth a listen: not only for the occasional oddity like "Jim Dandy," but for a lot of other reasons, too.