My husband, Bill, is very industrious. I tend to sit in one place or another, staring into the computer screen or a book, while he wanders around intent on his various projects– fixing cars, organizing things in the house or cooking, working in the garden. Lately he has undertaken a project which seems to keep shooting off in new directions.

He started by building a new bookcase for his office upstairs, but it’s not for books. It’s a deep case with 12" high shelves, and as soon as it was finished, he started bringing his old vinyl records and the related electronic components out of storage. That was how I got the number in the quotation from The Lovin’ Spoonful up above– I actually listened to the vinyl record on a real turntable. It’s really weird how much glee I feel from performing the familiar series of actions which add up to playing a record. Being older is different in quite unexpected ways, sometimes.

Anyway, once that was finished, Bill started shopping on E-bay for more vinyl records, which can evidently be bought at quite reasonable prices these days. Cardboard boxes of a distinctive shape have been showing up on the front porch in groups of two or three for many weeks now. This led him to buy a new amp and receiver on E-bay (for $59.95!), and to resurrect another turntable, and to buy a new needle for it, all to put in this room beside the computer. And now he is studying a program which will enable him to copy the vinyl recordings onto CD’s, so as to preserve the fragile 12" records even longer. This is typical of the kinds of things he does, and I expect that he’s pretty normal, and that it’s actually me, sitting still and admiring his industry, who is strange. But I find it all quite fascinating and utterly beyond my abilities.

So tonight, he was playing a Jimi Hendrix album while studying the computer program which will allow him to convert his records into CD’s once again. I sat here and listened for a while, and I thought it gave me a good excuse to share with you some of the new knowledge which I have recently acquired about Jimi Hendrix.

Jimi was in the army at one time, and he was stationed northwest of Nashville at Fort Campbell in Clarksville– home of the famous 101^st Airborne Air Assault Division of the army. After he was discharged from the army, Jimi moved to Nashville, where he played guitar with various bands in the "colored" clubs and on Printer’s Alley. We just learned about all this at the new Night Train to Nashville exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum downtown. In the exhibit, we saw a newspaper ad for a Printer’s Alley band featuring "Jimi Hendrix and his magic guitar" and some memorabilia from his other early shows in Nashville. I’ve been wanting to see this exhibit for a couple of months, and we finally got ourselves in gear and went down there Sunday before last.

Nashville evidently had a lively R&B scene in the forties and fifties, in clubs and the recording studios, and which carried over into a couple of early TV shows featuring R&B music– predecessors of the Soul Train show that you probably saw when you were young. All of the "colored" venues are gone now– casualties of the urban development of the sixties which carved up the black neighborhoods with interstates and razed the private businesses on the slopes downhill from our state capitol– but Printer’s Alley was a predominantly white district, and there are still music clubs, and maybe some strippers, there, mostly catering to tourists now.

One exhibit demonstrated the back-and-forth influence between country and R&B musicians in the recording community. This was perhaps the first "official" acknowledgment that I’ve ever seen of a phenomenon with which we are all familiar: a black musician does some truly groundbreaking creative work, and then a white musician copies it and becomes a millionaire. This exhibit showed some cases of black musicians covering songs written by white people, as well, but I believe, given the power imbalance in the country at that time, the former was a much more common (and profitable) occurrence. Another memorable item from the era of overt segregation was an advertisement which specified that a 7:30 p.m. performance by a black band at the War Memorial Auditorium was for ‘colored people’, and the 9:30 p.m. performance was for whites. Altogether it’s an interesting exhibit, and the CD gathers a lot of the Nashville recordings together, if you’re interested.

Curiously, the racism and segregation in music seems to persist more tenaciously than in any other part of our culture. You would think that the music industry would embrace integration and progressive values, but one of the few places you can still find things divided into "colored" and "white" sections anymore is in the record store– a practice which dates right back to the catalogues of the Nashville record companies in the thirties and forties, which advertised "hillbilly" and "race" music in separate listings. This led me to some confusion when last Christmas, after not buying much music to speak of for several years, I went to the store to locate a copy of an Outkast CD for a present. I stared at the Rock CD’s for quite a while before it occurred to me to check for a "colored" section in the store. I remember Ice T complaining, at a Body Count concert, that people didn’t want him to play hard core rock music, and some people regard Eminem, whose work is decidedly original, with the same contempt they might hold for someone like Eric Clapton, who blatantly ripped off Bob Marley by recording "I Shot the Sheriff"– as if it’s a violation for a white person to write any rap music at all.

On Bill’s shelves, the black musicians’ records are alphabetized right along with those of the whites, so I can always find the music I’m looking for quickly and easily. With this new program he’s learning, musicians of different races can share the very same CD’s. Somehow, that doesn’t seem all that controversial, anymore. So why do you think the segregation in our radio stations and record stores is still so fiercely maintained?

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