It's time for the closing ceremonies of Esquerita Awareness Month, so if you start listening to this as soon as it's posted, it'll end right on time a few seconds before midnight. We're going to play you out with the B-side of Esquerita's last single (the flip can be heard here), his version of the 1931 standard better known for Dooley Wilson's version from ten years later, as heard in Casablanca. I was going to offer up my 78 of that version as well, but I can't seem to locate it, and I have a vague memory that it might have cracked beyond playability some years ago. C'est la guerre. And it's not as if you haven't all heard it, anyway.
Self-indulgent personal note: As a kid growing up in upstate South Carolina in the '70s and '80s, there wasn't much evidence of anything good ever having happened there, so getting my copy of Kicks #3 and learning that Esquerita was from right up the road in Greenville... well, that was pretty gratifying. At last, a fellow South Carolinian who wasn't an embarrassment. I've learned a lot more about local music history since then , -- maybe sometime I'll tell you about the Monstabuckings, from Anderson, for instance-- but that was the first indication that maybe my homeland had spawned something greater than the Marshall Tucker Band*. And for that I'm grateful.
Magnificent Malochi - "As Time Goes By"
*To be fair, there's a lot worse to be found along the "Southern Rock" spectrum, but growing up in a redneck college town (the worst of both worlds!)gave me an exceptionally low tolerance for all AOR music, whether British- or Southern- accented, which has remained with me throughout life.
*To be fair, there's a lot worse to be found along the "Southern Rock" spectrum, but growing up in a redneck college town (the worst of both worlds!)gave me an exceptionally low tolerance for all AOR music, whether British- or Southern- accented, which has remained with me throughout life.
