Little Joe, the big band leader known for wearing bermuda shorts onstage and for his show’s rollicking party atmosphere, regaled the audience with family stories, like the time his son Ady, just a toddler, tapped a bass line while his old man puzzled out a song. I carried with me one simple question: was Texas still home to my heart or just the site of dead memories? My answer began to reveal itself through the music of Texas, beginning one night in June in a small club on the south side of town, where Little Joe y La Familia were making a special appearance.Īnyone who grew up in Texas, especially in South Texas, has heard Little Joe y La Familia playing somewhere-at home, at a party, or on the radio. In the summer of 2014, nearly a decade after I buried my ties to home, and discontent with my restlessness, I set out to make a life in Austin. Then I drifted, like the clouds over La Perdida, first to Central America and then to Mexico, burning with an empty fury. They offered us the ballads known to the generations who have grieved before us, our endless cry carried in the singer’s long wail.Įventually the music slipped away, and I fell into silence. My father had made me promise that a conjunto, a small band, would send him off into the next life, but they played for us.
#Hey pachuco joe brown cracked
Elderly veterans cracked their rifles in a final salute and, before the sound of the gunshots faded, the music began. I returned for holidays and twice, unexpectedly, to bury my parents, three years apart, in the family cemetery, in a spot I selected under a young mesquite. In time I followed the mesquites, oaks, and cactus north. At La Perdida, clinging to that windmill, I came to what some people search for in church or in the Bible: I came to know the infinite. My family calls the ranch La Perdida, the lost place. Rows of clouds stretched for miles toward the horizon, vast and empty. Time was marked by the creak of the windmill, a rifle shot in the middle distance puncturing the harmony of the bellowing cows, a dove’s cry, and the rustling brush. From high up on the windmill I gazed over the mesquite, to the north, where I knew my future lay. The words, in Spanish, I vaguely understand, but even in my child’s mind I know that his songs, like the day’s troubles, arise from love-for us and our South Texas land. His music belongs to simpler days, and it speaks of lost love and longing, and good days ahead.
My father’s song, a deep haunting melody, rises from a place past exhaustion and worry. I lay my head on father’s thick lap and listen to the country wind and sluggish engine until he begins to fill the tired silence with song. My brother sleeps slumped against the door. We reach the smooth county road by dark and set off toward home, guided by our tiny headlights and the brightening stars. No heat, no air-conditioning, no power anything. My father works the gears of a pickup truck that once belonged to his father. We travel slowly off the ranch and out of the brush country through twilight.
0 kommentar(er)
