I’ve always known that I’m kind of, sort of, psychic. It’s very weird because I’m tapped into something that I can’t control, and yet at the same time, it doesn’t really do me any good. I mean, why can’t I predict the Powerball numbers? Just once?
I have the sort of weird psychic thing where a person will pop into my mind, and I’ll think to myself “I haven’t heard from old so-and-so in years!” Then I’ll sit down at my laptop, and old so-and-so has just sent me an email. Or I’ll think to myself that I need to call someone, and literally thirty seconds later, that person will call me. Other times, I’ll think about something I need to look for or something I need to do, and five minutes later, I’ll find some little part laying on a workbench that I had been looking for so that I could do the thing I had just been thinking about. I seem to be partially tapped into some other dimension that doesn’t really do me much good. But there’s definitely something there. I’ve had it all my life.
Some of you may have seen my post a few days ago about Harmonica Frank Floyd. For some reason, he just came into my mind. I wasn’t sure why. I looked up that cool German documentary footage of Harmonica Frank on YouTube and posted about it. Didn’t give it a second thought at the time.
A couple of months ago, an acquaintance passed away and I was asked to unload a bunch of 78 rpm records for them. Now, I generally shy away from 78 rpm records unless they’re really good. They’re heavy as hell, they break easily, and they’re not really worth any money. And I have a few thousand of them already. But I wanted to help the family out, so I grabbed about twenty boxes of 78s and threw them in my storage unit without looking through them.
Today, I realized I needed to go to my storage unit and get the ol’ Christmas decorations out. I always sort of dread the Christmas season for that reason—it’s a lot of work on top of my already busy schedule. But I went over to my storage and loaded up all the Christmas stuff. While I was there, I thought—I’m going to look through these boxes of 78 rpm records.
Box after box after box was nothing but big band 78s—Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, the sort of stuff that isn’t worth anything at all (no offense, big band lovers, but these 78s are plentiful and value-less), and I started to get mad that I had crushed my lower back lifting all these boxes.
And then, there it was. It was like a mirage. Was I seeing things?
A freakin’ 78 rpm copy of Harmonica Frank Floyd’s “Swamp Root” on Chess Records. In the flesh. In case you don’t know, this record is RARE. It’s pretty valuable, too, but I’m not really concerned with that. I was just floored that somehow Harmonica Frank’s 1951 Eefing Opus (“Swamp Root” is the first recorded instance of hillbilly “eefing”) had made its way from Memphis to Chess Records in Chicago and somehow, seventy-five years later, to my storage unit in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles—buried in a box of Tommy Dorsey 78s, no less. It was as if Harmonica Frank himself was reaching out to me, from the past.
I’ll be damned. I’m pretty sure that strange, unpredictable, and nugatory psychic ability was working on the back side of my brain when I made the post about Harmonica Frank a few days ago. Now if I could only dial my psychic ability in just a few more degrees and get those Powerball numbers.
See videos of the record playing at Deke’s original Facebook post!
