Baby, What Do You Want Me To Do?

Below is something I wrote back in 2011. Often we never know the pain and difficulties others are experiencing in their life.
 
LA

http://www.yodaslair.com/dumboozle/wlac/wlacdex.html

Just some thoughts:
 
“BABY, WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?”
 
Earlier this evening my wife, along with our good friends, “Cohort” and his wife, Phyllis, went to see the play “Memphis,” at the theater for the Performing Arts in downtown Nashville.
 
The theme of the play is about a disc jockey and the music of that time, the 1950s’. For you young folks, the term, disc jockey, applied to a radio personality who was sitting live in a studio talking and playing records. In our home area Mike and I well remembered a local DJ named J.A. on station WBOW.  J.A. ( Jim Austin) was a piece of work.

The play took me back to growing up in Indiana in the late 50s’. About ten p.m., especially on Friday and Saturday nights, we all gathered at some local car-hop-drive-in place. We backed our cars in, turn the car off, but not the radio. All the cars along the row would tune their radios to the same station. Hey, early stereo! From the tallest building in the south at that time, the L&C building in Nashville, Tennessee, 1510 on your dial (AM of course) we would hear Hoss Allen or Big Hugh Baby broadcasting from WLAC. They would be playin’ those sounds we loved and selling that White Rose Petroleum Jelly.  Each night about that time this station would increase its power and their signal went into about thirty-five states, all in the mid-west, up the east coast and into parts of the west. One time when I visited Cohort in Nashville, he and I walked into the studio while Hoss was live on the air; he even talked a bit with us. It was something like straight out of American Graffiti and Wolfman Jack.

For thousands of white kids it was our first exposure to black culture, or what was then called, “Race” music; we loved it and still do. Today I still love to hear Jimmy Reed with songs like, “Baby, What Do You Want Me To Do,” or “Honest I do.” Sitting not far from me right now in my record collection is every album Jimmy made on the Vee-Jay label.

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http://www.biography.com/people/jimmy-reed-40889

Jimmy Reed kind of typified many of the black artists of his time. He was born poor in rural Mississippi and in 1955 he moved from the south and took a job in a meat packing factory in Gary, Indiana. None of us had any idea of his life and the issues he had faced. We just knew we loved his music. Alcohol and other matters were issues for him. So bad, in fact, that his sister would often have him arrested the night before a show to keep him in jail so he would be fit to perform the following day. He stayed on the music scene for only a short while and his fans never knew that in the 60s’ he was institutionalized in a Veteran’s hospital for three years. He was almost twenty years younger than I currently am now when he passed at age fifty.
 
Isn’t that often the case, we hear another’s “Music,” but we know nothing about their “Pain.”
 
That happens far too often in life; we enjoy another’s gift, but seldom listen or think past their talent and know nothing of their needs.
 
November 15, 2011
Keep on
Larry Adamson