“Music is my refuge.”
This is how Maya Angelou opens her third memoir, “Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas,” from 1976. When she was piecing together a life in 1940s San Francisco as a single teen mother, it was the need for vinyl — the blues of John Lee Hooker, the “bubbling silver sounds of Charlie Parker” — that drew her to the Melrose Record Shop on Fillmore. Her passion for records drove her to snatch two hours between jobs so she could rove its aisles. It was “where I could wallow,” Angelou writes, “rutting in music.”
Monday, August 10, 2020