The Soul of the Soul of 1960s Soul
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Etta James, Freddie King, Barbara Lynn, Esther Phillips, etc., with the great Bill “Hoss” Allen, in Dallas, Texas, in 1966, on the greatest TV show ever made
We’ve got a remarkable piece of music history to share with you today, from the great Mary Cadwalladr. But first we have an appeal. Some of you will recall the occasional mention in Mary’s pieces of her loving partner Miguel. We are saddened to have to tell you of an incident that occurred last week, between him and two ICE agents at a gas station outside of Tucumcari, where Miguel had stopped on his way to deliver two orphan donkeys to a happy new home in Amarillo. The incident likely did not play out as you imagine. Miguel is a Mexican national, but he grew up speaking Plautdietsch in a Mennonite colony near Cuauhtémoc, and even there stood out as exceptionally leucous (in town the locals called him Gasparín el fantasma amigable). What really happened was this: Miguel entered a bathroom stall just before the two agents came in to pee beside one another. The gas-station employees had packed fresh snow, from the most recent freak winter storm, into the urinals, as business managers often do with ice, cubed or crushed, to keep men —who by nature yearn to destroy things—, singularly focused on hitting the frozen mass and causing it to melt with their warm streams, rather than to grow distracted and to pee on the floor. Now it seems these ICE agents were happy to rise to the challenge, and quickly found themselves in a lively snow-melting competition with one another. Miguel thought this was quite a sight, and so began to record with his phone. Soon enough, the one agent melted his entire pile, upon which, drunk on victory, he turned to pee on his partner’s pile as well. This upset the latter agent, who began in turn angrily to pee straight into the victor’s stream, as if to intercept it — and in no time the whole thing descended into full-on light-sabers. The two agents became so engrossed in this impromptu combat in fact that neither seemed to notice nor care when their cargo pants simultaneously fell down to their ankles and exposed their cleft and dimpled cheeks as if they were a pair of blissful 5-year-old urchins at that tender and liminal age when the males of the species have only just learned to relieve themselves from a standing position, but continue, out of old habit, to drop their drawers all the way to the floor. In the midst of all this, alas, Miguel dropped his vape pen, which brought the agents down from their giddy frolic. “Guden Dach”, he said in his native tongue after they’d kicked open the stall door, but even this did not sway them. Soon they figured out he had been filming, and charged him with “obstructing agents in the line of duty”. Most of us here, being of a more or less Kantian leaning, find this appeal to the notion of “duty” strained to say the least, but the fact remains that a member of our extended Hinternet community now has some pretty hefty legal expenses to worry about. The good news is we still have the recording, though so far we have withheld it from the public. After a private viewing here at our editorial offices in Quimper, staff members variously described it as “magnificent”, as “a rollicking romp”, and as “Robert Mapplethorpe meets Laurel and Hardy”. We’ll decide what to do with that sensational footage in due time.
Meanwhile, we hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber. In complete seriousness — all profits from today’s post will go directly to the Immigrant Legal Services and Defense Fund of the National Partnership for New Americans (yes, we will post receipts). Among other things, this is the only way you’ll be able to read this most recent installment in Mary’s truly jaw-dropping revisionist genealogy of post-war American musical culture (you can find some earlier pieces here, here, here, and here. —The Editors
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