Sam Parker sat up straight in his cider-damp chair and leaned forward, wheezing a little. It didn’t matter that the drummer couldn’t carry a simple beat. It didn’t matter than the bass had hands like wrought-iron shovels. It didn’t matter that the xylophone player ignored the others for his own private limbo. It only mattered that Willie Whitehorse played—and sang.
Sang about what it was like to be like the brown eagle, to be alone. Sang how love was like snow-melt on hot winter days. Sang about smooth rocks and small crowded bird bowers and fresh green holly sprigs, about the crusty feel of tree bark under your palms and the smell of dry firewood and old histories. Sam Parker missed a lot of it, but he missed none of the crowd.
When the black-eyed singer sang- happy, the audience laughed, and strangers nudged their neighbors. When he sang sad, the cynical students cried. When he sang angry, just a little, there were frightening mad mutterings from the far blacknesses of the club, and somewhere a glass broke.
He was skinny and tired and all alone up there. But there was something in him and in his music that reached out and toyed with the souls of those who listened; grabbed and twisted and tweaked and hung on tight, tight without letting go, till it had flung them twice round the white moon and back again.
Yes, it even touched Sam Parker. And for thirty-five years nothing, absolutely nothing had affected Sam Parker. But there was a strange wildness at work here that passed the ramparts erected by decades of Dorsey