For as long as I can remember I’ve preferred vinyl records to all other means of listening to music. Perhaps it’s because my earliest introduction to music was my parents playing records when I was a very small boy. When I was eight years old I got a stereo for Christmas with a turntable and my first record….Electric Breakdance. I still have that record, along with hundreds of others that literally span a hundred years. The oldest records in my collection date to the 1920’s and I also have records that were released brand new this year. It was Pegasus Records in Florence, Alabama during my freshman year of college that ignited my passion for vinyl hunting. What I loved the most as a broke eighteen year old was the fact that two or three dollar last could acquire you a handful of music that would last for hours. In reality, those two or three dollars could last you a lifetime if you were willing to box up those records and haul them with you around the country as you moved from place to place…which I gladly have for thirty years. There are cheaper and more convenient means of listening to music, but I’ve reached a stage in life where low price and convenience don’t always equal value. Most of the world seems like an endless droll of background noise these days, like so much muzak played over loud speakers in department stores. Vinyl records require your full attention. They have to be handled with care, started with gentleness and attended to regularly if you want to enjoy them. You can’t put on a record, walk away and have music blaring for hours on end, periodically you have to flip the record and start the other side or replace the record when you are ready for something new. There is no shuffle on a record player. Whereas streaming services offer unlimited options, curated by algorithms that will fill your ears endlessly while you do any number of other things, from cleaning house to driving, playing records is an event unto itself. Records have to be attended to, so you tend to choose one carefully and then sit and listen while it plays. I have found that records force me to be in the moment and therefore in the music much more than any other format. This alone can transform the evening from just background music to soul singing.
I woke up thinking about you this morning thinking about records in part because I woke up thinking about you. That may not make a lot of sense to you, or anyone else for that matter, so let me explain what makes my brain go around. Most folks just assume time is like a straight line, linear, always moving forward with the impossibility of moving backwards, and maybe that’s so, I’m no scientist so what do I know. But sometimes time feels more like a record that keeps spinning around and around, with well worn grooves that capture people, places and events that happened at a particular time and place, and just like you can lift the arm of the record player and drop the stylus on a particular groove to relive that melodious moment, so to it is with life. We know that this world, heck this entire solar system, is spinning around and around in a giant cosmic circle, so is it really that much of a stretch to think that time itself might just be a circle going round and round too?
This morning, the cosmic dj dropped the needle on what has already become one of my all time favorite heart songs, the day you were born. When this day came around I was in Nashville again, just like I was one year ago. You were so excited to be here that you showed up six weeks early and apart from being worried about your health and safety, I was thrilled to get to meet you sooner. Just before 1:30 am your nana exploded into the quiet, dark, secluded waiting room where Honey and I were camped out trying to get comfortable and take a nap, and she shouted “He’s here!” Just minutes later I got my first glimpse of you via a picture your daddy sent to me. After all the months waiting and watching you grow inside your mama, I finally got to see you and the best way I know to describe it is with a line from a hymn, “then sings my soul.” The hardest part of that night, and the next few days, wasn’t the hospital chairs we tried to sleep in, but not being able to see you and hold you. Perhaps that’s why in the year since that night I’ve spent countless hours just looking at you, holding you, talking to you, reading to you, singing to you. Like a night spent listening to a beloved vinyl record I love to just stop everything and sit with you and do nothing else, then sings my soul.
Happy Birthday Rougarou
