Songs On The Wind

Dear Larry,

Last night we got to a juke joint in Memphis where the music is loud and the heat is higher. The air is cut through like warm butter when I belt out a note, and spread through the room over glistening bodies with a touch of brown sugar. Going from town to town it doesn’t seem like anything really stays the same in our melodies. The hymnals in our hearts kept us warm after a hard days work back home in Louisiana from sundown until the stars shone. Although the timing may change from room to room our rhythms and voices keeps us moving, keeps the food and drink flowing from the delta until we land in Harlem.

We have to keep an eye on Bert squandering what little he gets on gambling. Sometimes it works out, but when it don’t it don’t. Damn well got run out of a juke joint before we got to Memphis. He sure knows how to play the keys though. There ain’t a note that churns inside of me that he can’t find the perfect match for on the keys. Meet me with a horn and stomp and it’s off into the moonlight fueled on moonshine and other spirits that make their way through the back door and leave languid imprints on our souls.

Most nights we sleep on the ole bus Teddy hammered back to life, sometimes there’s a room at the joint. Wherever I may lay my head I curl up in my blanket and write out the words looking for a means to be. They land somewhere in time just like these letters will land to you. By the time they reach you we’ll be off to the next juke house on our trail. The inspiration on the road is as free as the wind in our hair. Blowing on the breeze out in the horizon the dreams are as limitless as our rhythms and bebop will carry us.

My heart full of yearnings for you have taken to the blues trail and lifted us on wings of riffs and swerves. That’s how the beat is now- spontaneous as the roads are winding. The music starts in our soul and we move like ghosts in the night, and morning lights our way to the next shimmy and shake tavern of blues.

Until I see you again keep our songs close, what is in our hearts unites us and carries us together.

***

Dear Larry,

We’ve made it to the Cotton Club. The stars are the same up here as they are down south, they still shine as bright. And the mood has gone from between the walls of juke houses to the grooves of records.

The last I was singing about the road being wild and free, and leading me places where I didn’t know what was in store. They laid what was in our hearts on tracks so people can shuffle our rhythms and blues on jukeboxes in any old barrelhouse. The blues has caught fire and blazed along into a new day.

The sorrow and searching in the stories of our melodies are broadening my sights and the streets around me. Swerving and turning swinging and churning. What was wild in our hearts is moving the world. There’s a birth here, the renaissance they call it. The baby pressed out of his mamma’s womb is delivered in a world of jazz and rhythmic coos. I got a room that has a phone, and you can respond to my address. The bus is parked and we’ve found home for a while. I’m still singing about missing you, but the truth is my home has been in the blues.

From far away you’ve stayed with me from the heats of Louisiana spurring us to sing songs into the long days of summer and the nights too short cause we never wanted to stop dancing. The same blues in my heart I sang into being with you by my side is waiting for you here. You never are far away from home if you can hold the words that’s kept us close.

The themes seem the same but my have they changed. On a road that spun and turned, to a record where you can’t smell the smoke of the juke joint, but you sure can feel the whisky. Home is here and anywhere we can tell a story about what got lost when I left my baby, and where my baby left my love.

That love I left is you, and I’m ready to sing new chords. You still inspire me even though the distance has been between us. I can’t leave the beats in my heart to just the streets. The way the light shines you’d think there were no other. No shanty town where the work was rough and the play was as boisterous as the trumpet was loud.

If for some reason you can’t make it up here Larry, I know you’ll hear my voice in some old dive, and you’ll see that home is up here too. Maybe you’ll come join me or maybe you’ll be happy in another’s arms when you hear my voice and decide to press your cheek to another’s that isn’t mine. But, whatever the case may be I found myself in loving you and from myself it escaped as a song. In those songs, in that warble and step to a beat, somewhere there’s you and me. No matter the heartache, yearning and sorrow I may sing, you have always stayed there beside me, because you started the feelings. In the birth of music and poetry we’ve stayed alive, no matter how far and how wide.

When you hear my lullabies next, you could be beside me, you could be all around me in the world that was created from the blues waiting to take a life of their own, for so long between us. Now they take flight and always unite us.