My Dad got me the Aretha Franklin double disc set “Aretha Franklin: Jazz to Soul” for Hannukah when I was in high school.  I had a mustard yellow Mazda 626 that I really think was worth around $600.  I worked all summer long as a receptionist/hair sweeper at Checkers Salon so that I could afford to buy a CD player with detachable face and killer speakers for my car that was probably worth 1/3 of what the car was. (Keep in mind, minimum wage back then was like $4.50/hr.)

I got the best one that I could afford and bumped that shit hard.  The only downside to the ‘best one that I could afford’ was that it didn’t have a memory, so to speak.  If you shut the car off and you were in the middle of listening to track number 6, the system didn’t care. When you’d start the car again, you didn’t get to pick up where you left off… instead you were back at Track 1 0:00 .  I got very familiar with ‘first tracks’ and could probably rattle off a ton of albums and their opening songs right now because of that. I won’t bore you.

‘Today I Sing the Blues’ was the first track on disc 1 in Aretha’s double disc set.  Every time the disc player reset itself back to track 1, with this particular album, I never felt the need to skip ahead and return to whatever song I had last been listening to.  This song is always brand new to me…never gets old.

Enjoy a free mp3 download of a live performance from my show at Le Poisson Rouge back in December.

You got the blues? I got your back.

http://treats.shoshanabean.com/