AUDIO Alley Pat says take your car to Holt’s, but only if he’s sober!

Here is some sage advice from James ‘Alley Pat’ Patrick in an ad-libbed radio commercial for Holt’s automotive. The clip is taken from the documentary Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded and features Alley Pat at his best while DJing for WERD-AM, the first black-owned radio station in the United States located in Atlanta, Georgia. Here’s the clip followed by a transcript and a bit about the film:

“You can get any kind of part you want, foreign or domestic, at Holt’s rightchya! Let me tell you another thing about Holt’s, they’re in your neighborhood. If you got an air conditioner dat ain’t coolin’ or if you got a heater dat ain’t heatin’ you better take it to Holt’s and let my man Charlie fix it. It’s alright to leave it with him, if he is sober. Now, if he ain’t sober you take the car on wid you. And today is Friday. today is the day he usually goes down to Pascal’s and get tucked away, you know (laughs). And any time you can go to Pascal’s and drink enough liquor to get drunk you done spent a fortune – anybody knows that. But he goes down there e’ry Friday night, messin’ wid all the ladies and drinks all the liquor up in the house, but he still my man. Yeah, I mean, I like dat – dat fella – he’s a nice guy. And he would do whatever he can to help you, that’s one thing about him. Nice guy! And you go ’round there and take your car to Holt’s ’cause Holt’s will do it right. If he don’t. they’ll do it over again!”

They just don’t make commercials like that any more!

From AlleyPatTapes.blogspot.com:

Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded celebrates the daring and outrageous era of classic Rhythm & Blues radio with a rich profile of the man who helped start it all, Atlanta trailblazer James ‘Alley Pat’ Patrick. This laugh-out-loud film is full of infectious music, vintage graphics, and a trove of loopy, barrier-breaking ”airchecks” by the last surviving DJ from the first black-owned radio station in the USA. WERD-AM signed on in 1949, with studios in the center of Atlanta’s historic Auburn district.

Alley Pat sang and screamed over classic 50s jazz and blues, and imprudently improvised his way through hilarious live commercials. But the film shows that beneath Pat’s clowning was some deadly serious business; civil rights pioneers including Andrew Young reveal Alley Pat’s quiet but pivotal role in their shared struggle.

And just so you know that Alley Pat’s charisma and humorous charm stayed with him well past his DJing days, here he is speaking at the funeral of Civil Rights leader Hosea Williams in 2000:

Sadly, the film may never see the light on day on DVD because of how much it would cost to pay for the rights to the music used in the film. Occasionally the film pops up at screenings – the next being at the Cox Capitol Theatre in Macon, Georgia as part of their “Second Tuesday Rock ‘n’ Roll Picture Show” series. (It’s definitely worth the drive if you live in Georgia!)