the day color came into my life

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i am sometimes accused of being racist--a charge i dispute, since skin color isn't a criterion i've ever thought about twice when choosing those i've befriended, slept with, dated or looked up to.

tell you the truth, my thoughts about the whole race thing are a tangled knot in my head--i suspect, when it comes down to it, i'm more of a culturalist than anything else--and i've decided this blog is a perfect place to explore some of those thoughts.

here, for your illumination (and, hopefully, mine) is installment no. 1 in said exploration.

a caveat: this post is a musical one. you wanna get what i'm saying here, you have to commit at least 60 seconds of your time to each of the tracks below--trust me, they weren't thrown in haphazardly--and, more importantly, try to put yourself back to where i was then.

if you can't do those two simple things, then don't bother reading further, because it'll just be meaningless words.

* * * * *

i grew up in a time and place--a shiny, lily-white, brand-spanking new subdivision in early-60s houston--where it was possible to go for years without ever seeing a single black person. and for large swaths of my childhood, that's pretty much the way it went.

think about it a second, and imagine what it must've been like: there were no black people in my neighborhood, or in my school, or in the stores we frequented, or on television, or on the radio stations my parents listened to--it's not that black people were good, bad or indifferent; it's just that they simply didn't exist in my world.

[in fact, the first black person to whom i ever personally spoke was a housekeeper we employed for several weeks while my mother was bedridden after my sister's birth--i was six, her name was viola and she made incomparably good sandwiches--and it would be five years before i spoke to another.]

but the other place in which no black person was ever found was on our living-room stereo.

see, my dad ruled the roost when it came to the music in the house, and dad was a die-hard country fan--i'm talking hank williams (because, of course, he was god), hank thompson, roy acuff, lefty frizzell, ernest tubb, marty robbins, rose maddox, webb pierce, jean shepherd, johnny cash, patsy cline--i could go on and on. this is the sort of music i grew up with: hard-core country, almost always twangy--and invariably white.

and that's the way it was.

until the day dad walked in with one of those familiar brown-paper packages from the record store under his arm, flipped off the tv in the middle of the cartoon i was watching, called out to my mother, "get in here, ann--you gotta hear this," and yanked his latest acquisition outta the bag.

and all i saw--not only against a very red background but against all reason--was an album cover featuring a very black man in sunglasses with very white teeth. and all i remember thinking--even though i didn't know the word back then--was, "what the fuck?"

what the fuck, indeed. because when the needle dropped on this most improbable new record, i sat spellbound as i listened to country-western songs i'd heard all my young life interpreted in ways i'd never even imagined possible.

to really understand what i heard that day, you first have to get a sense of what i'd been exposed to up until then, so i'm gonna give you a couple examples.

for instance, roy acuff wrote and recorded this song--an enduring country classic--long long before i was born:




even at six, i'd always found "worried mind" trite, one-dimensional and stupid--until the following hit me like a ton of bricks, and my eyes were opened forever:



sublime, ain't it? i could listen to this over and over--and often do (in fact, i'm doing it right now).

but the one that really nailed it for me was this strange new black man's cover of a song i'd always actually liked.

see, unlike most of my dad's favorites, don gibson wasn't twangy--he wrote great songs (such as "sweet dreams" for patsy cline), and favored subtle, low-key arrangements that featured his 12-string-guitar virtuosity rather than the pedal-steel excess that was so common back then. the following is a perfect example of his consummate skill (and one i have on my ipod to this day):





but as good as his version was, "i can't stop loving you" didn't truly come alive for me until that fateful day in 1962 when i first heard it like this:




yeah, a paradigm-shift at six--how about that?

* * * * *

a year or so thereafter, two notable things happened: (1) i was given a record player of my own for christmas; and (2) the station manager for the no. 1 rock & roll/r&b station in houston moved into the house next door and started feeding me all the new records--and new musical experiences--i could ever possibly want.

but i still have to thank my uber-white, reactionary dad for first showing me that black folk might not only see things different, they can even see things better.

you wanna go further in the story, click here.