goin' to brownsville

forty years ago i sat on a plane

- a b.o.a.c. boeing 707 -

and put on a tiny pair of earphones to skim through the six channels of music.

on one channel my ears were caught and dragged under by a piece of music that i hadn't heard before.

i kept circling back to it.

over and over.

the way a piece of music

that's meant for your ears does.

that it was the blues was undeniable.

i didn't listen to the blues that much

but i knew enough from my exposure to rock and jazz to recognize it for what it was.

the lyrics stayed in my head for forty years

- "i'm goin' to brownsville, gonna take that right hand road"-

i'd be in the middle of all sorts of activities

in all sorts of places

and those words would sing their way into my mind's ears.

at one point i spent time trying to find the source of the lyrics.

i had no idea who the musician was,

what the song was,

nothing.

then,

as is the way with these things

i woke up this morning,

hauled up youtube on the macbook

and there it was.

so here it is.

do you remember what it felt like when you first discovered that

people were that good, that cool, that talented, that present and inside their craft.