my god i had forgotten all about this song. heard it yesterday on the radio, and with it came the nostalgia of the memory i associate it with… or rather have associated it with since 2012. this is what i most love about a great song; if you discover or rediscover it in some unique circumstance that will forever be relived every time you hear it.
the immediate image that comes to my mind is working with the inmates in the horticulture ‘department’ (really just a small fenced in warehouse and an area for gardens and shit). specifically one summer afternoon when we were digging an irrigation area out with shovels and shit. but this is what did it. the instructor of the program - who, by the way, would later be fired and charged for smuggling K2 into the prison - had this boombox that he let us listen to. this was a real treat because the only source of music you had was a pair of headphones.
the prison is situated in swan quarter NC, which is as close as the state of NC gets to producing a climate similar to that in southern lousiana. a very humid and swampy region isolated out in the middle of no fucking where. there was no natural shade anywhere, and when the sun got above that place in the summer, it was hotter than’uh muhfucka.
you already know what’s coming, and it was exactly like you picture it… i shit you not. this fuckin guy beside me (who looked just like that o’toole serial killer) in for manufacturing meth, looks over at me and in a rich souther drawl sings with fogerty ‘don’t let the man getcha, do what he done to me. cuz he’ll getcha… cuz he’ll getcha nah-nah’
i would struggle to find the right words to describe the pristine nature of that moment, really, so i’ll just call it transcendental for brevity. there was a goodness of human will there that was so profound because it was so ironic. even the black inmates were grooving to it, eventually falling in time to the music with their digging. at that moment, or i should say for the few minutes the song played, we were all equally in the grit toiling under that hot sun. everything that we thought put at us odds with each other was immaterial for at least five minutes. proud men, born on the bayou, every one of us.
lol i can’t remember that guy’s name, but i’ll never forget how simply fantastic he was when he looked over at me and did that.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIjUY3pjN8E[/youtube]
