That's how I first heard the Blues and R&B. I learned to pay attention to music and deciphered many of the finer points of baseball by listening to them on radios from SF to Boston. They were on the same station, sort of, when I lived in Albuquerque. We had the Albuquerque Dodgers, Texas League AA baseball and they were on the air most nights during the summer. I want to be careful here, I don't want to have to keep spelling Albuquerque.
I listened closely when Deloris, my stand in mom, played her Country and Western records. I was usually supposed to be somewhere else outside when she had them on but I figured out if I stayed quiet I could hang out and listen. She listened to Hank and Ferlin and all the Johnnys and Buck and George all day. It wasn't easy to stay still while they were on either.
At night I listened to the Dodger games in secret on a little nine volt transistor radio under my pillow. One night I fell asleep listening to a game vs. Tulsa and I woke up listening to Howlin' Wolf, Wang Dang Doodle. Some 50'000 watts of power Texas station took over the frequency at midnight, lucky for me.
After I heard that, I made a point of hearing more. I was a Shitkickin' Rythym and Blues Baseball Motherfucker and I still am.
Wow, the Mighty Wolf. I guess I became the hillbilly music lover I am today because of the radio. I grew up in New Jersey. It looked not unlike the opening scenes of the Sopranos. I recognized all of those places although I grew up north of there. It was not a place where it was easy to hear hillbilly music. In the daytime I got a steady diet of teen hits and Frank Sinatra and The Rat Pack. By night I could pull in the all night trucker's show on WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia. It was all night hard core country. None of that countrypolitan stuff. A lot of obscure acts who recorded on the Starday label. I've never heard a bad song that was recorded on Starday. In with the country was the romance of the open road. I would lie there in New York suburbia with my little transistor and my ADD and dream of flying across American highways while listening to The Willis Brothers singing "Give Me 40 Acres (and I'll turn this thing around)". WWVA reached all the way to All over the midwest and the east coast at night. They had ads from truck stops all over America and dedications to wives in hick towns everywhere. It was a voice from another universe.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I could not for the life of me figure out where or how you got to wherever "those guys" were. That Willis Brothers song was assigned to me by someone when I was driving a bus for the GT. Old and in the Way took me to Bluegrass. A guitar player friend told me once, "rock and roll is for kids, those bluegrass guys are all grown up." I miss the shit out of KFAT to this day. KVRE too. I love that old time shitkickin' music. My mother in law called it "meloupyus music" (me-loop-e-us) while she was sinking into Dementia. I can't spell it because it's not a word yet. She sure liked it when I had it on.
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