Virgil Brown Music

Recorded at Jim Brady Recording in Tucson during the early months of the Covid epidemic in 2020. Having lost my job due to the outbreak of the Covid virus I was a little bit lost and a little bit homeless for awhile, though I wasn't living on the street, I spent many nights in a campground or two, with my two little doggies Pinky and Emma who kept me warm by climbing into my sleeping bag with me. At the recording studio in Tucson, Jim used an incredible array of microphones, most notably a 1955 Neumann U-87 for the vocals. I'm playing a Lee Oskar Harmonica that was given to me by Lee Oskar himself. Lee was in the band WAR and wrote many of their big hits including Low Rider. I'm playing Jim Brady's 1962 Martin D-18 on this song. At the time, my Thompson acoustic guitar had succumbed to the dryness of the Arizona desert and was cracked and in need of repair. The song was inspired by a stop I made at a Tucson gas station on my way to see my cousin Willis and his wife Kathleen in Wilcox Arizona. I had all of my belongings in my Honda Civic and also had my Harley on trailer that I was towing. At the gas station there was a homeless woman who had all of her belongings in a shopping cart that she was trying to fix because one of the wheels had fallen off. The gas pump at this gas station had a TV built into it and on the TV there was a video of the cops in Minneapolis slowly killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. When I got to Wilcox me and cousin Willis were having a late night smoke and looking at the incredible stars way out in the darkness of the desert. They were so bright that night. Cousin Willis thought he saw a forest fire burning bright red on a mountaintop across the valley in the Chiricahua Mountains. As time went by the fire kept moving up the side of the mountain. Much later it had move up into the sky, and then we realized it was not a forest fire. It was Mars rising into the night sky as the earth rotated on its axis. We had a good laugh about our misunderstanding! This song is dedicated to my cousin Willis and his wife Kathleen