Sound Scapes: A Bridge to a Soul’s Journey
By Deborah Desilets
Every road trip starts with a car. And for our suburban—which I christened Shamu—we have a two-toned black and white hard top (mostly for my shoes). When deciding on our road trip, my partner chimed into about a few must see museums. I agreed and countered with let’s explore the Old Spanish Trail; surely, we’d run into some very interesting architecture, people and food! So off we went. At the end of the third day we were marooned in Cameron as the ferry man said the ferry was “down for the day”—and in machine parlance that meant broken and come back in the morning. I suppose that’s how the universe gave me the break I needed to write about my first three days on the road. An amazing soul’s journey seeing three of the newest museums in America: two in Montgomery, Alabama; The Equal Justice Initiative and The Lynching Museum; and in New Orleans, The World War II Museum. All three inform your senses through sound and sight; and while riding they sloshed together in me, transporting me, and preparing me for the road trip along the Old Spanish Trail, The Chit’lin Circuit and the road to rock-n-roll.
In Montgomery the Equal Justice Initiative recreates the visual histories and the sounds slavery, segregation, and inequality. Voices unite in pain such intense pain, I recall one voice lamenting: “We were not prepared for the brutality (of Civil Rights Movement); our parents had made the soil safe”. And in New Orleans, where sounds in the street bustled, the WWII Museum filled every inch of space with the sounds and colors of World War II. Bob Hope’s exhibit is titled “ready for laughter” and his work shows the need for the soldiers to connect with home. I heard an English nurse comment the “quietness in the air; a stillness broken only by the sigh of the reeds”. What was all this to do with music? Just everything: Sound delivers emotion and transmits, transports and to recreates universe. Wow! Now with my ears were equalized to the world at that time, I took to the Old Spanish Trail and the lowlands of the Chit’lin Circuit.
It is fun just to ride. Just to be on the road and feel the crib and cradle of the blues; in a sense experience how, it’s sound became rock n roll. Remember those baby doll dresses and bobby socks with two toned shoes? Or those early exhilarating days after WWII? Think how on a given night many pairs of two toned shoes could be found tapping and dancing or how rolling into your town might be “a fine station wagon, newly bought and lettered with all his latest hits, to sure hit yokels in the eye” as Gatemouth rolled through on a Chit’lin Circuit gig. Just follow the jagged rhythm of the pot holed roads. This is Cajun Land where dust flies high in a heat wave, and a house on stilts is a high-rise, and crawdads are preferred over shrimp. It’s a land of distinction where the distant and the distinct meet: like in a billboard displaying eyeballs of every size and color being caught in a net. Here the more graphic the better and the energy; well it better be “Atomic”. The road is a living treasure of places beaten down yes but still alive; and I know somehow just over the next pot hole there will be a flower in a pot hole held just for rock n roll.
The Chit’lin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock N’ Roll is a book—OK. I know it’s not really a road trip—but if you are reading it while traveling the Old Spanish Trail it might be. Riding along the Old Spanish Trail alone is a world of history in place names; and in a car with the windows down the rattle and roll of a car on the road you can feel it. On the back of this living bridge of hallowed places the Chit’lin Circuit emerged bumping and sputtering like a ride on the back of an alligator——and with fire in its breadth. The making of the Chit’lin Circuit gave the Black race a place to exhale; to feel his own safe soil; the juke joints, to the parlors, to the saloons and back to the barn yards sounds rang out and glorified their struggle in the saxophone, with trumpets calling them home and with violent pulse to the back beat. The good news was out.
Now—Radio off, Windows open—I could go back to that school on the Bayou where sounds come alive through winds on wings of leaves that fall golden against the sugar cane rustling; where you taste the light and smell the salt that glistens in the waters so low. So low, so very low that you can barely hear the sound of the blades of grass being sharpened. Where crickets orchestrate a revival and the frogs grumble against the rumble of the engine; where the tweets of the red-winged blackbirds are held in tune by the stiff cat tails that mingle and merge with white thistle. This is the place where the smell of fish and the mix of mud and water lap profusely into your soul a lament for a coming together; a union, a fusion, a joining and a revival of sorts where the spirit is one with a place. This is the umbilical of rock n roll; Home. It’s meant to bring people together; bring each of us home. Yes Dorothy, sometimes you have to leave home to appreciate it. So, I learned too: It’s All OK in Kansas Just click your heels and you’re home. I knew I should back some ruby red slippers in Shamu! Happy Fourth of July! Signing off with a poem my dad wrote at 16, in 1948, that I set to music—as a “little rockin’ roller” as Cheryl Dowd once called me! It is simply called “America”; as a son of first nation French-Canadian’s this was Dad’s safe soil. http://soundcloud.com/daffodil007/america-17/s-H6bdj
