Some of the most impressive soul music collections are in the hands of Chicanos. He lives in the predominantly Hispanic agricultural community of Salinas, and since graduating from high school just months ago, he’s been working at McDonald’s to support his record habit. When we met in October of 2010, Sal proudly confirmed that his 45 collection was exactly forty-five records deep. He’s still working on getting that lowrider, but he’s got all the other bases covered. “If you’re a Chicano, you’re supposed to listen to oldies, have a lowrider, just dress like I’m dressed right now with the Pendleton, your brim hat, your Winos with your pantelon all creased up.” Soulero Sal is the youngest, at eighteen, of the informal Northern California network of Chicano soul music collectors. Swirling in and out of laughter and conversation at a family BBQ, lovingly dedicated by a wife over the radio for her incarcerated man, or drifting out of a slow-rolling, shimmering lowrider, oldies are the unofficial soundtrack to the Chicano experience. “The car attracted the girls and the music got them in the mood,” writes Ruben Molina in The Old Barrio Guide to Low Rider Music, “so the neighborhood record collector was just as important as the neighborhood grease monkey.”(1) But you don’t have to have a lowrider to appreciate these songs. For more than fifty years, lowriders, neighborhood record collectors, and local DJs have collectively cataloged an unfathomably deep canon of R&B, doo-wop, and harmony soul, collectively known as oldies. Chicano lowriders in search of the perfect musical mood to enhance their slow procession look to the past and present for a certain sound and feel: desperate and delicate harmonies proclaiming love, hate, or reconciliation set to dramatic arrangements and a tough R&B rhythm track.
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