Another Old Song's Stuck in My Head ...

The other day I was telling someone at the coffee shop the story about how Joyce and I met back at Kent State in the summer of 1969--about how we were in a class that neither of us had wanted. We'd each been closed out of a class--not the same one--and had ended up that July in that classroom in Satterfield Hall for a course in American Transcendentalism: Emerson, Thoreau, et al. We were married in December.

Anyway, as I was telling the story, an old song from high school days bubbled up in my soupy memory. I could remember a few of the lyrics, the tune. But I wasn't sure when it appeared--or who the performers were.

Google solved that very quickly--Google, my portable memory.

SONG: "Good Timin'"

YEAR: 1960 (Released in April.)

PERFORMER: Jimmy Jones (?) (1937-2012) (Link to obituary.) (Another obit.)

LYRICS: see below  (link to a YouTube performance)

April 1960. I was in the spring of my sophomore year at Hiram High School. Just a couple of months earlier I'd joined some classmates in a school play called Curtain Going Up (Feb. 13, a Saturday). I played a kind of clownish kid named Milt Sanders. It was a play about a bunch of high school kids putting on a play. A play-within-a-play. An old, old device (Shakespeare used it in the 1590s).

Some years ago, doing some research on this for a memoir (Turning Pages: A Memoir of Books and Libraries and Loss, KindleDirect, 2012), I acquired a copy of that old school play, re-read it, confirming a sad, embarrassing memory I'd had. The play-within-the-play was about the antebellum South. And in those scenes I played "the old family retainer"; I was playing the butler--a slave--in blackface.

I remember the small Hiram crowd roaring with laughter when I came out onstage as the butler that night some fifty-six years ago. I don't even want to talk about the speech patterns I used ... As the ghost of Hamlet's father cried, "O, horrible! O, horrible! Most horrible!" Hiram High School had no black students at the time, and I wonder now if we all would have been a bit less heartless if we had. I hope so. But I doubt it. It was pre-Civil Rights, and we were all (most?) still living in the murky cloud of cluelessness about worlds we knew nothing whatsoever about. Life eventually opened my eyes for me; I'd not even realized that they'd been closed.

Meanwhile, recordings of black musicians were popular at our high school dances and sock-hops-- Chuck Berry, The Platters, and so many more, including Jimmy Jones and "Good Timin', to which I surely danced (and not well--of that I'm certain).

And some of those songs are still the soundtracks for my memories. I look now at the final verse of the song--"What would've happened if you and I / Hadn't just happened to meet / We might've spent the rest of our lives / Walkin' down Misery Street."

And, thinking about that unlikely (impossible, really) meeting Joyce in 1969, I give a nod to Jimmy Jones, whose entertaining 1960 words and voice have revealed themselves to be prophecy.

JIMMY JONES
"Good Timin'"

(Ballard and Frederick)

Oh, you need timin'
A tick, a tick, a tick, good timin'
A tock, a tock, a tock, a tock
A timin' is the thing
It's true, good timin' brought me to you

If little, little David hadn't grabbed that stone
Alyin' there on the ground
Big Goliath might've stomped on him
Instead of the other way 'round

But he had timin'
A tick, a tick, a tick, good timin'
A tock, a tock, a tock, a tock
A timin' is the thing
It's true, good timin' brought me to you

Who in the world would've ever known
What Columbus could do
If Queen Isabella hadn't hocked her jewels
In fourteen ninety two

But she had timin'
A tick, a tick, a tick, good timin'
A tock, a tock, a tock, a tock
A timin' is the thing
It's true, good timin' brought me to you

What would've happened if you and I
Hadn't just happened to meet
We might've spent the rest of our lives
Walkin' down Misery Street

But we had timin'
A tick, a tick, a tick, good timin'
A tock, a tock, a tock, a tock
A timin' is the thing
It's true, good timin' brought me to you

Yeah, we had timin'
Whoa, whoa, whoa, good timin'
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, timin' is the thing
It's true, good timin' brought me to you

Yeah, we had timin'
Whoa, whoa, whoa, good timin'
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, timin' is the thing
It's true, good timin' brought me to you