My mother is visiting for a few days - and she's from Mississippi so when I say "visiting" I mean to use the very act of visiting in the very present participle tense of the verb - we visit. Especially when it's raining and kinda cold and I get a little under the weather to go hiking....we visit (which is technically the imperative if I recall, but I digress). Anyway, I was finishing the edits on this monster volume of Barrio Music earlier this week and she instantly noticed the opener "Knock Three Times" (TONY ORLANDO & DAWN) - she said that her mother had disapproved of the implied infidelity in the track...but she paid a little closer attention to the tape after that (and I bumped the volume accordingly). Soon it became hit after hit after hit and she had stories about several of them as we cruised through other Barrio volumes; one was her deceased brother's favorite song, another was the soundtrack to her first ever slow dance on her first date, and several were just in the glorious category of "oooohhhh, that's a good one!" as we listened, eventually moving on to (and through) the East Side Story comps). And I started to think about the universal nature and appeal of these tapes. The context is cool no matter how you look at it - popular tracks (and under-the-radar would-be standards) from a bygone era created and/or appropriated by low rider and inner city subcultures, then collected by fans-turned-bootleggers from Mexico in the 1980s....yeah, that's a story. But really, the shit is just timeless. And while the songs and the collections tell a story, so does each song tell its own. Stories of love and loss and excitement and heartache and heartbreak and of happiness and innocence. And I like stories....a lot. It's part of the joy of visiting.
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