Maybe she thought of the river as she walked to the studio to get to work. And the Mississippi Delta, where the men she played with in St. Meander down the Mississippi River and you can trace your way back to Arkansas, where her grandmother came from. The bends and turns in a river are called meanders, named for the Maeander River in Asia Minor. Louis was about two miles from the Mississippi River. The neighborhood she grew up in back in St. The dusty Italian word diva doesn’t feel so dusty anymore as Fontella Bass struts down the street, feeling the breeze off Lake Michigan. In August, the day after Watts began to burn, the Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago erupted into several days of violent protest after Dessie Mae Williams, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman, was killed in an accident with a firetruck.įontella is twenty-five years old, raising her first child, trying to make it in music, trying to make ends meet. That summer, Johnson committed another 50,000 troops to Vietnam and signed the Voting Rights Act into law. That spring, civil rights protesters had been beaten and gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma President Lyndon Johnson launched the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in North Vietnam. She knows this much: When the boys at Chess Records are woodshedding, just fooling around, and she comes in to sing-something happens. The songs that Fontella has been recording with Bobby McClure, including a couple of sure-enough hits-that’s just “Mickey Mouse music,” Lester says. Later, he will try to explain: “Chicago is a place where music is created. Her husband, trumpet player Lester Bowie, says Chicago is where the new music is. Later, she will try to explain: “I went to seek the world.”Ĭhicago! Just the word has a charge. Louis, died in January, and maybe that is part of what prompted her to finally make the move. Her grandmother, who helped to raise her in St. They all know the words, even the little boy, automatically, without even thinking: “Can’t you see that I’m lonely? Rescue me.”įontella Bass is walking down Michigan Avenue on a warm late summer day in 1965. Because it feels good to dance, feels good to sing with strangers. And the customers in the ice cream shop or the bar or whatever-in Asbury Park or in the south of France or in Paris, Tennessee or wherever-they are singing along now, too, because how could they not? Because everyone knows this song. And a woman walking alone stops and she doesn’t dance, she is not in the mood to dance, but she is in the mood to sing, and she sings along. He reminds the old couple of their grandson, and they take his hands and shimmy. And a little boy comes to join them, his mother watching and laughing. That is not a figure of speech, it is literally true.
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They have heard the song a thousand times.
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The point is that there is a song playing, and they can hear it from the boardwalk. Or at a shop hawking trinkets and need-nots.
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They are pristinely attentive to every astonishing detail of their hands. A year of distance, of possibility foreclosed. But today, on this particular bright summer day, it feels once again as new. It is so familiar, the folds of skin, the little pocket of moisture. They have held each other’s hands nearly every day since. The first time they held each other’s hands was on a bright summer day many decades ago.
#Jumpin jack flash movie images skin
The point is that they are holding hands, and they are conscious of the way that feels, skin on skin. A little bit sunburnt, but he says they’re too old to worry about that and she feels too old to try to change his mind. There is an old couple on the boardwalk in Asbury Park.