Our Heartbeat

Our heartbeat has been a wonderful communications rhythm.
Mothers have laid their child against their breast in a soothing manner since time can remember.
Man has communicated with other men by pounding on a near surface.
Messages have been sent across our air space of canyons.
Wives Tales of Wonder have survived through the mind and the pounding of a rhythm.
Spoken words and chants have deciphered the rhythms of man for centuries.
Today the pounding is still heard.

Music & Suppression

Before I could understand its meaning, music was heard in my ears.
The first memories of where the music came from came though via an old RCA Victrola
with a hand crank at its side and a stainless steel needle.
My mothers family the Arellanes’s (silent lls’) had this machine in their living room.
A serape was always used as the living rooms couch cover. Mexican records were stacked near the Victrola.
Toreador, matador, a bullfighter. Early childhood musical images.
 

I do not remember the names of the tunes played, but I hear them from time to time. Some of the recordings were Spanish flamenco; Malagueña moved me at an early age. It was played on a Spanish guitar. I wanted to be a bullfighter, standing tall and proud, back swayed in elegance, asking the bull to come and dare harm my soul. That pride I understood early.
Christian Christmas carols.
 

The radio was next, followed by a round T.V.
I guess these musical interludes had meaning. These were only background music.
1950-1955
The next music that I heard that moved me was “Shaboom” by the Chords. “Life could be a dream Shaboom if I could take you out up in paradise up above, shaboom.” This was first taste of rhythm and blues music for me. This was music that I had never heard before. This was music from a different area of life. Someplace that I had never been. Why was this music kept from me? A new world was being placed before me. This was moving my soul, this music was crying with grief. This new music was pounding in rhythm with my soul. I soon learned where to find this music on the am radio dial. This was not the music that I could listen to on our living room floor. This was music I had to listen to at some friends’ home or out in some remote area.
My emotional body was tugging for love and knowledge at these times. I could lose myself in the emotional rhythms of early rhythm and blues. I was hooked, why was I not told of this musical genre.
Bill Haley Rocked Around the Clock and Elvis Presley burst upon the scene singing the rhythms of the Memphis Blues.
I was so happy to realize that someone had the courage to sing the rhythms of the South.
Everyone around me was swept up in the new wave of Rock and Roll.
Elvis was singing the songs of Little Richard, Little Richard sang his songs so much better than Elvis.
We never heard the sounds that we are hearing now.
The am radio sound was scratchy, fading in and out with the weather.
There was no surround sound or the beautiful clarity of our FM radio systems.
Everything we heard was not very clear in those days.
The nineties CD brought the original clarity to the music of the forties, fifties and sixties to our homes.
This is something very new, very new.
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I later learned that my father was listening to Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, The Mills Brothers, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Paul Robeson, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, The Ames Brothers, Billy Eckstine and Lena Horne.
He had a particular fondness for Nat King Cole, The Mills Brothers and Billy Eckstine.
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We listened to popular music on the car radio at that time in our lives. I did not know that my father liked all the above.

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Just like the R and X rated movies are suppressed from our children today so was the black music suppressed from our homes in those early days of WW2, McCarthyism and the Atomic Bomb propaganda era. We are suppressing our children from the entire content of the new Internet. The V2 Chip flies above our living room and bombards our children when they watch the wrong channel.
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My favorite song, "Good Golly Miss Molly", by Little Richard

Why am I Writing?
 Subtle Changes
Music
Walking on Rip Rap
Moon

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Words & Graphics by Tomas