
Song: Foxy Girls in Oakland
Artist: Rodger Collins
Year: 1970
Album: n/a
Genre: Rhythm & Blues
Style: Funk
Click Here to Play the Song
Here’s a song I’ve liked since I can’t remember when. My earliest musical purchases came at a flea market near my parent’s home. I’d buy 45s, because they were cheap. I’d sometimes get them for 10 cents each, which meant I could get a lot of music for a dollar. Depending on your age, you may not even know what a 45 is. That’s a term used to describe the small, 7″ records that played at 45 RPM, as opposed to a full album, which is a 12″ record and plays at 33 RPM. For whatever reason, no one ever called albums 33s, but we all called the 7″ singles 45s. A song released on a 45 would be one the artist thought could become a radio hit. The other side of the single, aka the b-side, was sometimes a song from the album that wasn’t expected to be a hit, and often a song that didn’t make it onto the album. I could go on and fill an entire post with more information about records and singles and formats, but that’s enough so that my younger readers know what I’m talking about when I say I bought a lot of 45s when I was a kid.
Today we give a funky shout out to the foxy girls in Oakland. And when I say funky, I mean it. Are you listening to the song yet? This track exudes soulful funkiness. Listen to the guitar solo that comes in at about 1:24 and tell me I’m wrong. It’s a crime that this song isn’t better known, but then again, if it were maybe I’d be sick of it. I know I’ve covered this before, but I often wondered while building the list if certain songs would be among my favorites had I not had to play them hundreds of times when I DJ.
I didn’t know when I first heard this song that I’d grow up to live in Oakland, but that’s what happened. I lived most of my adult life in Berkeley and Oakland, and although I have strong ties to my hometown of Hawthorne, and I currently live in San Jose, when I think of “my city” I always think of Oakland. Oakland made me, to paraphrase the great Graham Greene, and as a city it gets a bad rap. It’s nowhere near as dangerous as people make it out to be, and it’s truly the jewel of the Bay Area. San Francisco is a larger, denser city, and San Jose is bigger than both of them, but what Oakland lacks in size it makes up for in other ways. Oakland has a sense of community the other two cities lack. When I lived there, I had 50 to 60 close friends within walking distance of my apartment. We got together regularly, in groups both large and small, and we looked out for one another. Every Sunday anywhere from 30 to 100 of us would meet at Mosswood Park to picnic, play kickball, and relax together. I’ve never found anything like that anywhere else I live, and doubt I ever will. Oakland is also the hub of the Bay Area. If you imagine the Bay Area as a wheel with spokes, one spoke ends in Wine Country, another in San Francisco, another at the beach in Santa Cruz, another inland in whatever cities are out there that no one would ever go to, and the center of that wheel is Oakland. From Oakland, you can get anywhere else in the Bay Area in about an hour. Can you tell I hella heart Oakland?
I’ll stop before this turns into a love letter to my city and turn your attention back to Rodger Collins, who has already written that letter for me with this song.