28th
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Week of Waller: Day Three
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child (1943)
The first time I went to college, fresh out of high school, I was excited to learn that the college library had a record collection. And while you couldn’t take the records home, there were listening stations set up with these great, square-looking stereo receivers. Big, awkward knobs and switches. Backlit VU meters. When you borrowed a record, you had to write your name on a beige card that was eventually slipped back into a pocket glued to the album sleeve. Very high-tech, indeed.
Anyway, the first record I checked out was an album of Fats Waller at the organ. I was pretty excited for a number of reasons. One, I had yet to hear these recordings, having recently read about them in a Waller biography. Apparently, Waller loved the organ more than anything. He honed his skills accompanying silent films on massive movie house organs. But as they were rather unwieldy, he made relatively few recordings on the instrument. Two, it contained his only known recording of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Again, according to the biography, he made several attempts to record the song throughout his life, but each time broke down in tears. And finally, these recording were to be his last, made for V-Disc only two months before he died of pneumonia on a train in 1943.
At the time, I found the record highly upsetting. His speech slow and slurred, the once ebullient Waller sounded tired and drunk, ill even, as if death were a slow process that had already started. His playing is sloppy and inarticulate. I listened once and decided that I would never listen to these recordings again. Two semesters later, I dropped out of college.
Five years later, I found myself working in a factory that made batteries for implantable medical devices. An adult job. It offered insurance, vacation time, and even tuition reimbursement. I took advantage of the latter only once, returning to the same state university for a night class in early British lit. One night, I drove out to class only to find that it was cancelled. Not wanting to waste the trip, I headed over to the library to hear that Fats Waller record again.
It sounded totally different to me this time. I mean, he still sounded awful, but there was this added dimension of vulnerability that I didn’t pick up on before. The organ, recorded with little ambience to smooth out the volume swells, sounded harsh and volatile. It was as if all the songs were spirituals that had been drained of their faith. I found the effect so compelling. Haunting, sad, honest.
It was really strange, sitting in the same library five years later, listening to the same record, yet feeling so different, so changed, my perception of things so radically altered after just a handful of years. How unreliable we are.
After the record finished, I gathered my things and took the record back to the desk. When the librarian slipped the beige card back into the sleeve, I spied my handwriting on the card from five years ago, not another name in all those years to come between that stranger’s name and mine.
