#739: The Snake by Al Wilson
Peak Month: August 1968
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #2
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube.com link: “The Snake”
Lyrics: “The Snake”
Allen LaMar “Al” Wilson was born in 1939 in Meridian, Mississippi. By the age of twelve he was singing in gospel choirs. Meridian, Mississippi, was the same hometown where James Chaney, the Civil Rights worker who’s killing, along with two others, led to the infamous “Mississippi Burning” trial. Young Al Wilson was friends with James Chaney and the Wilson family knew the cost of living in segregated Mississippi. Alene Wilson-Harris, a daughter of Wilson, said of her father’s upbringing: “My father, well, he grew up in a very volatile time for a young black man. And, he was, unfortunately, in a position to have to know what it was to actually leave a place because there were life-threatening circumstances and hardships and all of those type of things in order to try and make a life for yourself somewhere else where those factors didn’t exist.”