I am very sorry about what is happening to your city right now. It is so sad as to be unspeakable. I can’t begin to imagine what you (and others) are going through, nor can I find words that would be comforting in light of something so tragic. All that I know to do is wish you peace and wellness….Scholar

Thanks for the Jerry Butler. As a child it was Jerry that my mother chose as her single musical vice on the turntable while the rest of us, my dad included, watched Saturday Night Wrestling, Roller Derby and The Great Hercules. Were it not for a bathroom break I would never have discovered her joy and love for the soulful, drowning depths of Brother Butler’s smooth and proper wail. As well, I would never have known to seek that same response from my own jaunts at writing poetry and little songs.

Jerry Butler was my intro into what is clearly a delicate cajole. My mother stroked her hair at the intro to this very song, then wiped her eyes twice before he finished the second line. By the time he reached …”but darling I failed to realize…” she was in full out repose. I, from that first saturday night occurrence, was on the other side of the door taking in the eloquence of the voice and the beat…the essence of the woo, if you will. It was also a time when the idea of song as ethos began to take hold. It was also a time when everlasting love drafted my young heart into its pitiful ranks.

This selection and the latter-year version, both beg the heart toward first love. “Love wider, deeper than any sea” is a line that yearns from the heart eternally. In youth you can’t imagine any other love. In the years that include marriage and the faltering love of that era, eternal first love is a reimagined bloom in the depth of nights when the back-to-back distance is paining you toward divorce as a real option to not having the hope of even empassioned kisses for another stretch of nights.

Jerry’s seasoning is finally as much in the lyric as in the interpretation and stylizations. Call it gravel or passion or any other selection, but the worth of it lays completely in the willingness to give it up again through the years. Reimagine. Remake. Regurgitate. All are worthy of the vinyl or whatever they make CD’s from. Hey, like the poet knows, just tell the folks that it is possible to know again what you knew was possible between two people…even if one was merely sitting astride the decisions of a life on a saturday night imagining the wealth of passion as it is played out through the combing of wails and laughter in a shotgun house with a pillow pressed against the breast until the music fades into tiny thunders of applause and the needle resets.