She Made a Spectacle
Of Herself
It was a jumpin'
It was a jumpin'
You never seen such jumpin' an' a-bumpin'
'Til the break of day.
My world came to encompass Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, Ray McKinley, David LeWinter, and countless unknown recorded artists from that day. But what is more important is that my vision of the world expanded greatly. Of a sudden I was not an isolated boy in North Florida, in 1946, unknowing and unknown by those surrounding him --- but, rather, a party to the transmission of generations. Bob Poole and the other radio voices reformed my ideas of myself. Through Poole's anarchistic humor and juxtapositions of sound and anarchy --- he created an existential bond between me and the world. There was, somewhere in the dark night just off the Mississippi River a six hundred foot tower that vibrated in harmony with the ground wires buried in the mud, a spider-web of copper stretched out suns' rays at the feet of that base: and that tower and its ground vibrated together against and with each other to create a new electronic abstraction in my head. They came together in that Philco (antenna, ground) to vibrate in a magic sequence of relationships, the voice of R. Poole could lean over the foils and loops of this growing mind, whisper the absurd truth of the ages, that I was growing up in the moss-backed culture of North Florida and still didn't know who I was.
A voice leaned out of the night to whisper secrets to me, speaking around the rose-glow of a dozen tubes and the whisker-thin coiling wires arched around the paper cone connected to the tympani in my own head through anvil and hammer some 1200 miles away and I would know and understand a schemata being transmitted by black magic through the cows and trees and houses and, birds and dogs between raucous New Orleans and staid acculturated dark-lighted white upper-class mixed-mind mixed-metaphor mixed-up child me:
We'll now hear the music of Dick Rubber and his Band.
Or:
Here's Joe Banana and the Bunch. [Shrieks, laughter and shots].
And:
You got 'em rolling in the wayside
A feelin' I ain't gonna know
You came a long way from St. Louis
And baby, you still got a long way to go.
