Soul Congress

I dropped Peggi and my parents off at the funeral home in Penn Yan where my aunt was laid out. The Menonnite family in this buggy had just paid their respects to my uncle and cousins. My aunt and uncle, solid Catholics, lived on a farm near Dundee for sixty years and the land around them was slowly bought up by Menonnites. They became quite close and shared more values then you might imagine. A Menonnite family eventually bought their farm and rented their 200 year old house back to my aunt and uncle.

I had to leave the funeral home as soon as we arrived because I had forgotten to buy a flower arrangement, something my father had asked me to do yesterday. I spaced it out. I found a florist on Google, a few miles out of town, called the “Garden of Life.” There was a sign in front of an old farm house but no flower shop. I pulled in their driveway to lookup a Plan B and I saw woman with her dog and a small shop behind the house. I told the woman that I was going to calling hours at the funeral home in town and she interjected, “Helen? She told me she had already paid her respects and said, “Come on in and I’ll get you something.” She picked out a coral colored Poinsettia and added some other oddball touches. It was perfect.

A man came in the shop and asked about microphones for an event he was planning. The woman told him to go to Musician’s Friend and get a Sennheiser, but not a cheap one, a good one. When he left I said, “that was some good advice you gave that guy.” She asked if I was in a band and I said I was. She said she and her husband played in a band and, as if on cue, her husband, a drummer, walked in the door.

He introduced himself as Richard and said he left school when he was seventeen. He studied at Berkelee when it was still in its original location and his teacher was Louie Bellson. He went out on the road with a big band right after school. He played with the Temptations for six months, the only white guy in the band. They played the same set every night in the same order. He couldn’t take it anymore and quit. His band, “Soul Congress,” backed a long list of soul and gospel groups. They were opening for James Brown on the night that Martin Luther King was shot. Mr. Brown played a long set and wore out his drummer so he asked this guy to sit in. He said, “I’d go out on the road right now. I loved being on the road.”

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