cherchez

I don't remember most of my elementary school classmates' names. I barely remember my teachers. I do, however, remember about five minutes of an early evening in the fall three decades or so ago.

I was walking down the darkened hall, hurrying to the safety of my bedroom.
The radio in the room next to mine was turned on. Passing the doorway, I heard a peculiar, tinny voice. I stopped.
It was this song:

I was hypnotized. I sat down in front of the radio, and drifted off to some other world, the 1940s through a disco prism.

I got up and didn't know what to do. No one announced the name of the song. It was gone. No matter how often I listened to the radio, I never heard it again. There was no one to tell about this discovery. I wouldn't have known what to say even if there had been.
My peers would have thought me weirder than they already must have.
The song was stuck in the back of my head, however.

Sometime, about eight years ago, I found out the artist's name (Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band), and in the intervening years I've found out more about them. I've found a couple of interesting articles about them, like this one. I learned how some of the members eventually split off to become Kid Creole. I've even listened to some of Cory Daye's own music.
(I see that a number of artists, most famously: M.I.A. Ghostface Killah, Miss Kittin, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, were somehow or another influenced. )

Anyway, when, thanks to the internet, I found the song again, I remember being surprised. It was not nearly as "different" as I remembered it being. If I'm honest, I didn't really even like it much any more.The other night, however, I found this video and bookmarked it. Since then I've kept replaying it. It's a glimpse of a lost world, maybe several lost worlds...nostalgia built upon nostalgia built on more nostalgia.
I think I've finally grown to love the song for real now, where I once just had a childish infatuation.

Anyway, finally, this past week I got a copy of the cd in the mail, and have been playing it every day to work, and fallen in love with this:




(thanks to the fabulous michael guy for prompting this rerun)