Gaudy Patter

Sometimes, when I was actively engaged in trying to figure out who the hell my parents were, I'd go through their books and music. The turntable and receiver were in what might have been a den in a more social household. After my dad left, the room was claimed in the name of Mom. The walls were still lined with shelves of pulp and vinyl, but the floor was taken up by a sewing table and chair, drawers of sewing patterns, bolts of cloth and other domestic detritus. (For the record, I don't remember the woman sewing a damned thing.)

The first Lou Rawls album I found was Lou Rawls: Live!. I knew the name because of his disco hit, "You'll Never Find," and of course, his ads for the United Negro College Fund. In many ways, the album expanded my consciousness.

Reading the liner notes as the music played to an empty house, it was easy to picture a room full of black people wearing their best clothes, crowded around small tables to hear one of the great singers of the day. I could imagine a woman sitting for hours in a salon chair, casually informing anyone within earshot that her 'do was for a Lou Rawls show.

Except in movies, it hadn't occurred to me that people would get dressed up and bring their sweetie to a club to hear a favorite crooner. The audience reactions engaged me as much as the music; polite applause for his erudite cover of "The Shadow of Your Smile," as opposed to thundering acclaim that drowns out the first bars of a gutbucket favorite like "Stormy Monday."

I was mesmerized by the man's ability to tell a story. More than one of the tracks on this album are preceded by a monologue. I know he was a gifted performer and that these stories were honed by their telling. But listen to his rap before he goes into "Tobacco Road" and you'll learn that he had an emotional connection to these songs that the audience could borrow, if not share.

I was just a 13-year-old kid from the suburbs, but he chilled my bones with his description of "The Hawk," the cruel wind that cuts through Chicago's winters. I understood the concept of loss more clearly after hearing "St. James' Infirmary," and better appreciated the white-hot anger of poor men with big dreams in "Tobacco Road."

Today's music by and for African-Americans purports to keep it real, but it falls short in my estimation. The ice clinking in cocktails in the digitally remastered background of "Lou Rawls: Live!" belonged largely to southern blacks who'd moved north to get out of the fire and into the frying pan. Which is not to say that there weren't any pimps or drug dealers in the audience that night.

It's just they weren't interesting or authentic enough to sing about. They weren't strangers, nor were they representative of the collective experience.

His monologues could even expand into full-fledged raps. His sing-speak patter about the heartbreak of infidelity in the midst of "In the Evening When the Sun Goes Down" is just as picaresque, heartfelt and downright funny as anything I've heard out of Master P or Calvin Broadus.

In high school, I made a cassette copy of this LP. It moved with me around the country after college and played in the tape decks of two different cars I owned. It's still somewhere in this house, though I have no idea where. By this point, the oxide has worn and flaked off the tape anyway.

So, after I received news of Lou Rawls' passing this morning via email from a friend to whom I'd introduced him, I made my first purchase from Apple's iTunes store. All it's missing are the liner notes, and of course, the familiar pops and crackles.