Her Voice Crack Just So

Two photos a day.  I’ve been keeping that up for years.  It’s not hard to do.  Everyone can manage a few pics a day or a trigger-happy barrage at some point that can be harvested over time.  Suddenly though I’m all blocked up.  My phone no longer syncs with my old Macbook Pro when I plug it in.  I think I know what’s going on.  The operating system is old and there’s a glitch that now prevents my more recent photo update to sync properly.  Updating the Macbook is free.  But I’m highly suspicious that it will work.  (In fact seems to have been a bum charger issue.)

I seem to recall the last time I did this, it simply wouldn’t start up afterwards.  I had to take it somewhere and magically they restored it.  Everything but a months of photos, etc. are backed up so it won’t be the end of the world. I’m just trying to get everything backed up before I go for it.  Just trying to get every single possible thing done before I actually undertake this risky operation.  I’ve just notice that the decade and a half’s worth of photos I have the screen saver draw from is no longer working either.  (Solved this, as well.)

My friend reminded me that WFMU was available on line.  It has a always been an an exceptional source of alternative music but unless I’m in the New York area I never listen to it.  Now I have the app on my phone and I have it on every day at the gym, every night at work.   There are way too many programs to cull through, but my chum hipped me to “This is the Modern World” with D.J. Trouble which serves up some interesting extremes.

The other day she threw on a live version of the old classic “Ode to Billie Joe.”  This was done by someone I wasn’t familiar with, Karin Krog, the Norwegian jazz vocalist.  But that sax in the background was either someone who had been practicing Dexter Gordon runs for years or it was the man himself.  Indeed, Dex was on the set.  This got me off looking up the original, which I still prefer. 

Who was Bobbie Gentry?  Raised in the Delta, near the Tallahatchie River, she was certainly beautiful and capable of writing a disturbingly evocative song that sold three million copies and of having her voice crack just so, when she said the words:“Choctaw Ridge.”  Seems as though she went through a few marriages and checked out of entertaining about a decade after her big hit and now she’s settled back in Mississippi, not far from the Tallahatchie Bridge.  I played the song for my daughters.  They took it in.  I played it a few times myself and it transports me be back to being a child in a car, with someone else controlling the radio, trying to make sense of the adult world. 

Thursday, 02/02/17