Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell - "(Let Me Wrap You in My) Warm and Tender Love"

The best way to hear this song, in my – ‘humble’ is not the word… correct opinion, is as the end of an epic negotiation. It began simply enough: in a bar, with a whiskey on the rocks in hand, a man approached a woman. He asked if he might be able to wrap her in some wrapping paper he had left over from the previous Christmas. She refused. It might have been over then had she not made a bold counter-offer: why not, she proposed, allow her to wrap him head-to-toe in tensor bandages, as if every muscle in his body were sore. He liked this, and thought it over quite seriously, but declined in the end. Perhaps it would be better, he suggested, for him to wrap her in rice and seaweed, as if making sushi, and then dip her in soy sauce and wasabi. She initially accepted this offer, but then received a call from her lawyer who advised her to pass. She offered to knock on his front door while he freestyled on the other side of it, but they both knew this wouldn’t work – she without hands, he without rhythm and the ability to rhyme. The negotiation went on like this all night. The bar closed, but the man and the woman and the bar band remained. When the sun came up, the band – eager to get home to their families - started in on a tune. Raunchy blues organ, lightly distorted tremolo guitar, brushes on a snare – a dusty, alt country ballad. The man and the woman, now both unbecomingly drunk on whiskey, simultaneously recognized the song as Percy Sledge’s soul classic, “(Let Me Wrap You in My) Warm and Tender Love.” They knew just what to do.

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Blind Willie McTell - "Statesboro Blues"

Blind Willie McTell is goin’ to the country. This blues isn’t a lament; it’s a promise. Don’t believe him? Just listen to how he makes the notoriously phlegmatic Major blues progression move like Baryshnikov. No, I assure you that he’s goin’.

The City of Statesboro, GA: Well, we sure will miss Blind Willie.
Groucho Marx: McTell me about it!
Audience: (Laughter, applause)

fin

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