Memories! You want memories!

Well, I don't remember a time without music around me. When I was born, my momma, who was humming "In the Pines" at the time, laid me into a Martin D-34 which had been disemboweled by a near sighted armadillo on the lookout for a charango. My daddy rode the blinds, which annoyed the deafs. The first distinct memory I have is of Grandpa pumping Grandma to an old Carter Family record about a flood that carried Tennessee into Kentucky. I was toilet trained using a glass fired bottleneck slide, and can to this day remember all those bass runs, and the fierce pride it instilled in me. My first real instrument was a Sousaphone that had swallowed a small child in the neighbourhood, and which they were thinking of putting down. I rescued it, tamed it, and sent away for lessons that never came. This all happened when I was drinking Nehigh to a grasshopper. Son House was the family retainer, and Muddy Waters used to plough for my paw, and when they left town, it seemed as if the life just went out of that world. I remember once Son coming up to me and saying, "Son, " And I said, Yes, Son?" and he said, "No, You Son, me Son," and that was how I began to get the blues. I had shots, but the blues kept getting to me. They came up my leg, and slowly covered my body like woad. I just kept singing, "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" until someone did, and I took the colours off that pallet and painted myself pink all over, so no one would ever call me whitey again. In 1947, Little Walter and his younger brother Smaller Walter and his youngest brother Big Walter and Goldilocks and I wandered the South Side of Chicago. We would play "Take the A-Train" while Little Walter played his B-harmonica, Big Walter invented the C-Drive, and Goldilocks played with her D-Cup. We played checkers with Leonard Chess, and backgammon with Chubby Checker, and never looked around to see where life was taking us.

Then when the Newport Festival came along, Joan and Judy and Mary and Jennifer and Trudy formed the Trio Five Quartet, and the rest is folk history. I can remember Pete Seeger pulling out the plug on Dylan's hairdryer, and revealing his roots; I can remember Crosby, Hope, Lamour, and Young; I can still see Joni waking up on a Chelsea morning in Scranton. The memories flood back, because the dykes have all been liberated. I remember Tim Hardin building "If I Were a Carpenter" out of Popular Mechanics; and Don McLean defining American Pie as "3.14, but for you 2.99". I can remember when Yoko and Yoda got together and broke up the Beatles and the Empire.

But all that is behind now, still gaining on me. Ah memory, and the wild Mountain Thieme.

Yours, Peter T.