When Captain Jim first brought this record up to the Club, I guess they call them CDs nowadays, we were all pretty skeptical. The old Captain had been talking about making a music tape for his mounted drill team and quadrille classes for so many years that nobody paid much attention anymore when he yapped on it. Plus everyone here at the Club knows that even though Jimbo loves opera, Puccini mostly, he has a tin ear. He can’t sing worth a darned, a real handicap for a whiskey drinking Irishman, and he can’t even play “Home on the Range” on the harmonica, but that’s just how it is. He’s so bad that nobody comes to the Club for the annual “St. Patrick’s Day in the Summer” party anymore because when he got deep into the Irish whiskey, instead of bourbon for that one day, he’d start hollering old Irish Revolution and drinking songs in an off-key tenor that run the eagles off their nests across the river. The party was always held in July, because the Club is closed for the winter now that most of the boys skip down to Florida after deer season to get out of the cold and snow. Anyway, we all thought that we should get pretty far into the bourbon before we let him stick it into the old player, not knowing what expect.

     The old Captain was a few horse lengths ahead of the boys as usual. He offered to sell copies of the CD, before he played it, for five bucks, but after it was played it would cost full retail of $16.95. Of course nobody bit on that. Old Uncle Alphonse said that if we all held out we could get one for free soon enough, owing to Jimmie being be too embarrassed to charge anyone after it was played and out in the open. Uncle Alphonse is wrong most of the time, so why we listen to him, I just don’t know.

     So anyway, once we banged on the player a few times and turned one of the speakers on its side, which is the only way anything comes out of it, Captain Jim spun up the volume and hit the “play” button.   Well, most of the boys were primed and hoping for the worst, so they could start right in on their helpful critiques. You could see by their smirky looks that most of them had already searched their repertoires for the best of their lowest comments. Only what came out of those ruptured woofers wasn’t all that bad. In fact it was quite good.  It appears that Captain Jim had spent considerable time and dough on getting this thing made. He hired real musicians and used a real recording studio. The whole thing is cavalry music that he had arranged for a fourteen piece brass band. He even had the tempo arranged to match the gaits of horses.

We were amazed. First the boys got real quiet, and then they started tapping their feet. Before you knew it they were all clapping and trotting and cantering around the lodge in time with the music. It wasn’t long before Captain Jim had them all formed up in sets of fours and they were trotting out onto the porch and down the two-track in a column of twos. Captain Jim in the lead calling the evolutions like he was back on the street with his mounted cops. By the time the boys got back they were all out of breath and pretty thirsty, so the Old Fashioned crock got filled again and everybody did a “water call”.  Everybody wanted to buy one of these CDs, which has the catchy title of, “The Brass Mounted Army, Music of the Old Horse Cavalry”, so the boys were pulling five dollar bills out of their money clips. Only, Captain Jim, who can be uncompromising and true to his word, told the boys that the price was $16.95. The $5.00 price was pre-introduction, and it was now post-introduction, in other words, $16.95 each.

The boys thought that he was kidding a bit, but he held firm. Some of the boys grumbled about it not being fair, and if it hadn’t been for Old Uncle Alphonse convincing them that they would get one for free anyway, they would have ponied up before hand. Blaming Alphonse is the usual, and often true, fall back when things don’t go right. It took a while, and another crock of Old Fashioneds, but by the end of the evening’s poker game most everyone had dredged up $17.00 for a CD, Captain Jim didn’t make change.

Like I said Captain Jim can be uncompromising, but he can also be generous. Once he had collected everyone’s cash, except for Lester’s who never has any when it’s needed, Captain Jim took the whole pile and put it into the grocery jar. That’s a big Mason jar that’s on top of the fridge that everyone is supposed to keep stocked with cash for incidentals like dish soap, toilet paper, mixes, onions and other sundries. The jar was just about empty and getting the boys to put a few bucks into it can be a real tough deal. But as usual Captain Jim found a way to get everyone to kick in without going to the gun rack. It cost the Captain a few extra bucks and some CDs, but there’s $170.00 in the Mason jar. That should last a few weeks, if we can keep Old Uncle Alphonse from pilfering it for beer money.

Go to the bottom of this page to listen to a selection from the CD