Howdy folks:
Welcome to Michael Perry’s Voice Mail, episode 304. This one’s available to free and paid subscribers alike. Click the player above to listen.
In today’s episode I return to a piece I wrote about my daughter and the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins.
Thank you for listening,Mike
MARGINALIA
(Annotations from books Mike is reading, or annotations related to the episode)
Here’s the version of “Shaggy Dad” my daughter danced to:
The following exerpts are from a much longer and excellent piece from Sonic Cocktails.
The stories of Lightnin’s chord changes are profuse and legend. The late singer/songwriter Eric Taylor (who once bought me a ticket to his own show in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, because I drove three hours to get there and forgot my wallet) used to play bass for Lightnin’ and claimed he had a “tell” in which he’d stomp his foot slightly differently before a chord change…so Taylor spent the entire gig staring intently at Lightnin’s boot heel. Whenever Taylor told the tale, he quoted Hopkins as saying, “Lightnin’ change when Lightnin’ want to change. You just gotta be there when I get there.” I imagine my own band members nodding along (my guitar player has famously said I keep excellent time “but it’s never divisible by four”).
Below, my elder daughter right around the time I wrote today’s essay:
In 2013, I was asked to write the liner notes for the Blind Boys of Alabama album I’ll Find A Way. My daughter, by then a teenager as tall as I, accompanied me to one of the recording sessions, a profoundly moving experience I wrote about in the book Roughneck Grace and spoke about in Episode #145 (paid subscription required). Then we attended the album release concert together in St. Paul.
Been continuing to read the paper versions of Devouring Time, the new Jim Harrison biography, and continue to dip in and out of The Power of Myth, but I’m on the road and traveling light this trip so starting this one on my Kindle:
I read it way back in the mid-1990s when I was trying to figure out how to make it as a writer from the middle of nowhere with no connections. I’m reading it again now towards a piece I’m working on about folks you’d never guess were inspirational to me—the punk singer Henry Rollins among them. Later I would detour from a magazine assignment to see him perform spoken word in Seattle, one more step on my path to taking my books from the page to the stage.
I’ve barely dipped into it yet, but already made these three highlights:
My most recent book didn’t include Henry Rollins, but it coulda.
Devouring Time is available from BookShop.org and Amazon.
The Power of Myth is available at BookShop.org and Amazon.
Get in the Van is available at BookShop.org and Amazon.
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