Mustang Sally
Bright and early this morning on the day after Christmas Day my juke box brain kicked in with ”Mustang Sally” by Wilson Pickett. I have no control over this mental function and I can not turn it off. So I must endure it. Whatever song is decided there lies my fate. So this morning at 8:30 we are listening to Mustang Sally exactly like the record with all the flourishes by maybe Steve Cropper chopping away on his Telecaster and Al Jackson chopping wood on the drums. Every bar band I ever played with had to play this song. Its a great song.
Steve Cropper just passed, God rest his funky soul. He was a testament to the fact that white boys got soul. Al Jackson on the drums was always a treat. He was a prince of a man. Many decades later I met a white woman who had been helped by Al. He got her off the street in Memphis when she was a kid and got her cleaned up. She turned out real fine. Thank-you Al.
Soul music has a lot of “heart” In it as well as a lot of funk.
When Wilson Picket released “Mustang Sally” I was in a quandary about my life. Mother had remarried ten years after my father’s confusing death. He had been in Naval Intelligence and we had no closure as they say. She finally lowered her drawbridge and allowed a pharmacist to marry her. We immediately moved from Elkhart, Indiana, a nice middle class town on the Michigan Indiana border far enough East to not be a suburb of Chicago to the deep south of central Florida where the most exciting event was watching orange groves. I gravitated to the local radio station. “Oh Happy Day” and “Mustang Sally” gave me solace among the six thousand local Crackers.
At four years old I had been on our gentleman farmer’s plantation outside of Philadelphia when grandmother approached me as I played with my metal toy “buddy” brand truck;
“You’re father is dead. You are the Man Of The House Now.”
It was a sentence that I had to endure for the rest of this life. Soul music became the only balm that worked. People who live without their father’s love are to be pitied because they are missing a player in their personal band. The band still goes on but it’s not the full sound. So I am grateful for Soul Music.
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