In The Cool (2005)

Available as CD only

Memphis is a mirror for something way down inside. Some mysterious place where childhood days spent in Iowa could meet with a teenager's Alabama ways. A place where Buzz Fountain with his long white beard could take his fiddle out of its case and play a Midwestern Old Timer's melody against the blues drifting from my mother's record player . . . and I could dance along holding my father's hat turned upside down collecting change for us all. Grampa Honey and Gramma Honey and my father and Cousin Roscoe and country men and women whose names I've long forgotten would all join in. Mouths moving . . . hands and feet moving. The 2nd hand piano from my mother's Birmingham apartment would be sitting there by the Mississippi and a familiar stranger would be there to play it. Muddy Waters . . . The Carter Family . . . Elizabeth Cotten . . . Carl Perkins . . . Loretta Lynn . . . Bobbie Gentry . . . Thelonius Monk . . . Bob Dylan . . . ZZ Top . . . Tom Petty . . . Jimmie Vaughn . . . Jeff Buckley & a 1000 others would be blasting song after song from the radio sitting on top of the piano . . . plugged into endless electric fields. Bo Ramsey and the Backsliders would get up and rock us all till dawn . . . "keep on reaching in . . . keep on reaching out . . ." and in the cool morning I would sit down with the old Maybell guitar my father gave me and let the songs in. And there in the cool the daily news and a country's face I hardly recognize would slip away for a while . . . slip off down some old road back in to the cool.
pieta brown - 2005

In The Cool was recorded live at Ardent Studios in Memphis, TN.

Reviews of In The Cool

The Players

• Pieta Brown - acoustic & electric guitar, lead vox
• Bo Ramsey - electric guitars, national reso-electric, background vox
• Dave Jacques - acoustic & electric bass
• Brian Owings - drums & percussion

Copyright © 2003 Pieta Brown. All Rights Reserved.