Classic of a Bygone Era

While working on my listing in Leimert Park, I was pleased to meet a neighbor who introduced himself simply as Percy. Only later did I understand who I was speaking with. Percy Burrell, a touring musician, a man who played with many of the greats, and who has called Leimert Park home for decades.

My clients had spoken often of their neighbors, and with real sadness about leaving. Not just the house, but the life around it. The particular nearness of things. Music drifting through the neighborhood, sometimes from musicians of astonishing caliber, a kind of ordinary magic that had become part of the day. In their new location, that would not happen. After meeting Mr. Burrell, it was easy to understand why the leaving felt so tender. You do not meet people like Percy often, if at all.

He told stories the way some people set a table, generously, without hurry. Coming to Los Angeles from Louisiana, a country kid, then life on the road as the music changed shape around him, from the lockstep formality of big bands to something looser, hotter, more improvisational. James Brown, Lou Rawls, Earl Grant, Chubby Checker, Marvin Gaye. Names that sit in history now, though in Percy’s telling they returned to life as scenes, as rooms, as sound.

There were stories of neighbors too, of Ray Charles, of parties that stretched deep into the night, of View Park houses bought for sums people once thought absurd. The kind of details that reassemble a city for you. As Percy showed me through his home, I found myself a little stunned, by what I was seeing, yes, but also by what could still be felt there.

He was kind enough to let me photograph him in the house. Inside, the rooms read almost as a living ledger, each surface carrying some trace of a life fully inhabited. Photographs, tributes, objects gathered and kept, not as decoration exactly, but as evidence, of friendship, of travel, of music, of being present for the moment while it was still becoming memory.

What moved me most was learning how he collected. On tour, in town after town across the country, he made a point of meeting local artists and artisans, buying something to bring home, something made by hand, something of that place. Over time, the house became not only his, but a map of those encounters, a record of attention, generosity, and return.

Percy has many stories. His home seems to have been keeping pace all along.