Who are we? We are our stories. We are our pictures

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay


In general, I like live performance recordings. Unfortunately The Dock was release posthumously. So....


In the mid 1960s I was drafted into the United States Army. A black guitar player named William Alexander, took me by the musical hand and introduced me to Soul Music. Being a rube from the smalltown white Midwest I didn't have an opinion on Soul Music. I didn't even know it existed. For me, other than jazz, Black music started and stopped with Huey Ledbetter. Alexander was an amazingly patient man. Of course the one thing we had a lot of was time. We had bunches of time and plenty of no money. He sang songs for me. He taught me structure and chords for Blues and Soul music. I wasn't a good student. I still can't play any of it, but at least I can recognize it when I hear it. So here's thanks to Alex, where ever you are.

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