“Hollywood” is that acquittal, that glorious quitting of sorrow in search of the pleasure boat. He upholds a sense of dignity about working the fields, but no sense of disdain for his Ol’ Man River, who exposes how absurd it is to be exploited, and promises a future abdication of all that. He is Ol’ Man River Goes to Hollywood, a pulp fiction I unpack again and again until I can comprehend the lucid delirium he must have endured to live through those two opposing circumstances. He plays the laborer and the free-spirited drifter who would never succumb to the burdens of economic hardship. Hollywood survives on this longing for the idea of it in the minds of men exactly like my father, and one in a million of them make it there and then really make it once they arrive.Īs a singer, my Jimmy Holiday embodies both the movie star and river man being carried by the momentum of hard labor. I can’t wait, I can’t wait to get to Hollywood, he declares in earnest. I would leave this town today, if I only, only could. I’m gonna save my money and take a very fast train/ and I’m not gonna leave until I have myself a name. In 1965, when he was signed to the Everest label, my father wrote and recorded an homage to “Ol’ Man River,” for which the B-side was the song “Hollywood,” a glorious entertainment-industry spiritual that projected all of his personal charisma onto the star map. Later, their sad parts were endlessly euphemized until they could be mistaken for happy endings. They had invented themselves in Hollywood, using the momentum of stubborn hope and daydreams, and they were the life of the party. What mattered most is that they were there and had witnessed that other America. They were fearless, fearsomely exploited, vengeful and devoted to the image of them that could be sold. Even the ability to retain such a fantasy was unspeakably bold at the time, but the gall to act on it is what made some of the first stars: Sam Cooke, Tina Turner, Sammy Davis Jr. My father fit the description he was among those men and women who heard about Hollywood while working the field and refused to relent until he belonged to its star-making engine. Hollywood, California, wasn’t just a muse in the minds of residents in the Deep South where my father grew up it was where you could self-exile from that destitution and turn work songs and praise songs into pop songs in exchange for access to the materialism that was at once owed and dreaded, glorious and taboo. There are lost years between his upbringing as a sharecropper in the Delta and his arrival at Ray Charles Enterprises in Los Angeles, and I invade those years with a remix of his own music and the Technicolor acoustics of films from the ’50s and ’60s, which is to say I occupy that absence with myths.Īfter half a century of hard living and hustle, the flamboyant storyteller from Pomona is learning to live with regrets and find peace. Jimmy moved from place to place in the style of an unapologetic and relentless fugitive, trying to escape what he knew in order to do justice by it. Instead, it became home to those who were brave enough to audition for leading roles in their long-harbored fantasies. Had it not been cast as a land of second chances in a state with an idyllic climate, Hollywood may have remained a splendid desolation of abandoned studio lots. At the time he moved to Hollywood, it was one of the few coastal destinations that promised Southern Black sharecroppers like him, one generation away from chattel slavery, a chance at the so-called American dream they had been sold on the radio. Jimmy Holiday was a Black cowboy-musician who migrated from the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans to Hollywood in the late 1950s. I grew up knowing that anything you create that becomes too famous is no longer yours, even your father and especially his music. (Photo of Jimmy Holiday courtesy of Harmony Holiday) Love the vocals!!! TURN UP THE LOVE :-) Comment by HAMZA BĪwesome stuff Comment by GROOVE Thanks Lex! Ill check it Comment by GROOVE My Pleasure! Comment by SUPER COOL BESTDAYFOREVīoa muito boa parabens good work. Leave a comment and tell me why the song sucks or why you like it.
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