In an email to us today, a friend of ours mentioned her parents listening to the Mills Brothers singing Yellow Bird…

This brought back a rush of memories. My father loved The Mills Brothers and listened to them a lot when I was growing up. That is when he wasn’t listening to Kid Ory playing the Muscrat Ramble…

….and the fabulous Jimmy Rushing, Mr. 5X5 singing Good Morning Blues

He played Jimmy Rushing until I never wanted to hear Jimmy Rushing again. I knew every word, every note on those records. And of course, it was my dad’s music. I couldn’t like my dad’s music, could I? But later, years later, when I moved out of the house and I was living in a storefront studio on Ossington Ave – this is way back before Ossington was restaurant alley and even back before it had all those Vietnamese coffee joints with the blackened windows and the pink and black signs – I was there living away from home and it was an exciting time for me. I was making paintings like a mad thing – working until midnight at my job and then painting until 4 in the morning and then sleeping until the crack of noon. Well, it turns out I missed Jimmy Rushing. So I called up my dad and said, hey, you still have those Jimmy Rushing records? Think maybe I could borrow them? He was right. Jimmy Rushing was a fabulous singer.

My dad taught me to love music of all kinds. I remember how he could listen to a jazz piece from way back in the 20s and tell me who was on trumpet and who was on trumbone. And I remember a story he used to tell about going to see Wingy Manone play at the Colonial. He had the waiter bring Wingy a drink up to the stage, and Wingy said to the band, “take it away boys, I have a sponsor” and he went and sat down and had a drink with my father. My dad told me they called him Wingy because he was a one-armed trumpet player.

Here’s Wingy Manone and his Cats playing the Tar Paper Stomp. Ah, that’s nice.

My father bought me my first record. Remember records? It was a 78 rpm recording of Ernest Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, playing Walking the Floor Over You. I listened to it on a junk store record player, the kind that needed a penny balanced on the stylus so it didn’t skip all over the record.

Let me share one more childhood musical memory. I’d be in the back seat of the car, and my dad and my brother Salvelinas would be in the front seat and we’d be on our way up to some little trout stream somewhere. We were always chasing trout. Now maybe my memory of this is clouded by time, but it seems to me my dad and my brother would be singing Wreck of the Old 97 off key at the top of their lungs as we’d catapult down the highway. To this day I still know all the lyrics to Old 97. Here’s the great Hank Snow.

That was yesterday. I wouldn’t trade a minute of those days.