POT LUCK
Spooner Oldham and the texture of our lives
Probably the first Spooner Oldham song I ever heard was “Cry Like a Baby,” by the Box Tops. My Pop loved the Box Tops. Their greatest hits was the first 8-track he ever bought, and anytime “The Letter” or (to a much lesser extent) “Neon Rainbow” came on the radio, he would crank it all the way up.
Organ owned and played by Lindon “Spooner” Oldham, preserved in the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, Tuscumbia, Alabama (Polaroid SX-70 / July 2026)
I didn’t know who wrote the songs, had really no idea that songs were written. Some songs simply seemed to exist, much as the sky or the red Alabama clay underneath my Stride Rites. I now am conceptually aware that human beings wrote, recorded, produced, and sang “When a Man Loves a Woman” — made shatteringly incarnate by Leighton, Alabama’s very own Percy Tyrone Sledge — but that’s like saying someone made up cardinals or pecan pie or Chevrolets. The idea that that song hasn’t always been with us, just part of our shared reality, is almost baffling.
While it’s supposed to be a love song, Spooner opens it up with the saddest chords you could weave together, on a Farfisa or a concert grand harp. This isn’t romance, this is a funeral, the same meditative, droning notes you’d hear the family walks to the front of the cathedral for one last viewing. This is gonna kill him, the song tells you before a lyric is sung, and the dour tone is cemented by the rhythmic, wordless lament of the background singers, so subtle you might never notice them.1
The curtains in Mama’s front room, Clay County, Mississippi (Polaroid SX-70, July, 2026)
He didn’t write that song, but he wrote plenty of others, and lent color to dozens of artists far and wide. The great troubadours of Greenwich Village, sure, but you might have also accidentally caught him in a 150 person club when you went to see Frank Black or even the Truckers. And to wind our way back, he did write “Cry Like a Baby,” and just like “When a Man Loves a Woman,” it begins with his organ — but this is just a sustained riff, anticipatory, nervous, the vibratory regret of teenage heartbreak.
These are the songs that taught me how life was supposed to feel. I’ll leave you with another he wrote, brought to life by the Sweet Inspirations, for a sunny Sunday summer morning.
My late summer recommendation — take a couple of days and spend some time in the Shoals in North Alabama — tour the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, have the best tomato pie of your life at Odette, spend a couple of hours at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, hike Dismals Canyon. Here’s Rainbow Falls — I mean — come on:
Franklin County, Alabama (Polaroid SX-70, July 2026)
GORJUS is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. If you liked thinking about these songs and thought the photos evoked a haunted place you haven’t thought about in a long while, haunted but not scary haunted, but like peaceful haints, consider forwarding this letter to a pal. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
Once you hear them though, you can’t stop hearing them—one of the mourners being Donna Jean Godcheaux! I just learned she sang on this and also Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” (!!).