Jean Ritchie - Hangman (American folk song)- When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father Moment

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father Moment

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends “generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]    

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to five  important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the great jailbreak.”     

A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.) Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw connections bears separate mention these days.  

       

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.

One night Alex startled me while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe Every Times You Leave, when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Sons welded by twelve millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of  a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time now.                     

Alex had the advantage of being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster. All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play some fretted guitar).  

That night Alex also mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry, figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work in some hardware store in some small town down South.      

Here is the real shocker, well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So, yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.       

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.   

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]    

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-Our Mother, The Mountain- The Traditional Mountain Music Of Jean Ritchie

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-Our Mother, The Mountain- The Traditional Mountain Music Of Jean Ritchie

If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83

By Music Critic Bart Webber

Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, Josh Breslin, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square with the big names, some small too which one time I made the subject of a series, or rather two series entitled respectively Not Bob Dylan and Not Joan Baez about those who for whatever reason did not make the show over the long haul, passing through the Club 47 Mecca and later the Café Nana and Club Blue, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. Those are the places where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Collins and a whole crew of younger folksingers, some who made it like Tom Rush and Joni Mitchell and others like Eric Saint Jean and Minnie Murphy who didn’t, like  who all sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger got their first taste of the fresh breeze of the folk minute, that expression courtesy of the late Markin, who was among the first around to sample the breeze.

(I should tell you here in parentheses so you will keep it to yourselves that the former three mentioned above never got over that folk minute since they will still tell a tale or two about the times, about how Dave Van Ronk came in all drunk one night at the Café Nana and still blew everybody away, about catching Paxton changing out of his Army uniform when he was stationed down at Fort Dix  right before a performance at the Gaslight, about walking down the street Cambridge with Tom Rush just after he put out No Regrets/Rockport Sunday, and about affairs with certain up and coming female folkies like the previously mentioned Minnie Murphy at the Club Nana when that was the spot of spots. Strictly aficionado stuff if you dare go anywhere within ten miles of the subject with any of them -I will take my chances here because this notice, this passing of legendary Rosalie Sorrels a decade after her dear friend Utah Phillips is important.)

Those urban locales were certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.

Yeah, came barreling like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than lost loves and longings.  

Rosalie Sorrels could write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me at those moments)

Rosalie Sorrels as one would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and thoughst of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels 

CD REVIEW

Mountain Hearth And Home, Jean Ritchie, Rhino Handmade, 2004

The last time that the name of traditional mountain folk singer Jean Ritchie was mentioned in this space was as part of the lineup in Rosalie Sorrel’s last concert at Harvard University that spawned a CD, “The Last Go-Round”. At that concert she, as usual, she performed, accompanied by her sweet dulcimer, the mountain music particularly the music that she learned in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and that she has been associated with going back at least to the early 1960’s. Here, in the CD under review, “Mountain Hearth and Home”, we get a wide range of those traditional mountain songs from those parts that provide something for every palate.

The songs, simple songs of the mountains that befit a simple folk with simple lyrics, chords and instrumentation representing what was at hand, many of which have their genesis back in the hills of Scotland and Ireland, never fail to evoke a primordial response in this listener. The songs speak of the longings created by those isolated spaces; and, occasionally of those almost eternal thoughts of love, love thwarted, love gone wrong or love disappearing without a trace. Or songs of the hard life of the mountains whether it is the hard scrabble to make a life from the rocky farmland that will not give forth without great struggle or of the mines, the coal mines that in an earlier time (and that are making a comeback now) represented a key energy source for a growing industrial society. Many a tale here centers on the trails and tribulations of the weary, worked out mines and miners. Add in some country lullabies, some religiously- oriented songs representing the fundamental Protestant ethic that drove these people and some Saturday dancing and drinking songs and you have a pretty good feel for the range of experience out there in the hills, hollows and ravines of Eastern Kentucky.

Several time over the past year or so I have mentioned, as part of my remembrances of my youth and of my political and familial background, that my father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner in the hills of Hazard, Kentucky (a town mentioned in a couple of the songs here) in the heart of Appalachia. I have also mentioned that he was a child of the Great Depression and of World War II. He often joked that in a choice between digging the coal and taking his chances in war he much preferred the latter. Thus, it was no accident that when war came he volunteered for the Marines and, as fate would have it despite a hard, hard life after the war, he never looked back to the mines or the hills. Still this music flowed in his veins, and, I guess, flows in mine.

My Boy Willie

Traditional

Notes: This song has the exact same tunes as the song "The Butcher Boy" and is of a similar theme.

It was early, early in the spring
my boy Willie went to serve the king
And all that vexed him and grieved his mind
was the leaving of his dear girl behind.

Oh father dear build me a boat
that on the ocean I might float
And hail the ships as they pass by
for to inquire of my sailor boy.

She had not sailed long in the deep
when a fine ship's crew she chanced to meet
And of the captain she inquired to
"Does my boy Willie sail on board with you?"

"What sort of a lad is your Willie fair?
What sort of clothes does your Willie wear?"
"He wears a coat of royal blue,
and you'll surely know him for his heart is true".

"If that's your Willie he is not here.
Your Willie's drowned as you did fear.
'Twas at yonder green island as we passed by,
it was there we lost a fine sailor boy".

Go dig my grave long wide and deep,
put a marble stone at my head and feet.
And in the middle, a turtle dove.
So the whole world knows that I died of love.

"The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore"

When I was a curly headed baby
My daddy sat me down on his knee
He said, "son, go to school and get your letters,
Don't you be a dusty coal miner, boy, like me."

[Chorus:]
I was born and raised at the mouth of hazard hollow
The coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door
But now they stand in a rusty row all empty
Because the l & n don't stop here anymore

I used to think my daddy was a black man
With script enough to buy the company store
But now he goes to town with empty pockets
And his face is white as a February snow

[Chorus]

I never thought I'd learn to love the coal dust
I never thought I'd pray to hear that whistle roar
Oh, god, I wish the grass would turn to money
And those green backs would fill my pockets once more

[Chorus]

Last night I dreamed I went down to the office
To get my pay like a had done before
But them ol' kudzu vines were coverin' the door
And there were leaves and grass growin' right up through the floor

[Chorus]


Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies

Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They're like a star on a summer morning
They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story
And they'll make you think that they love you well
And away they'll go and court some other
And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks were black as ink
I'd write a letter to my false true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

I wish I was a little sparrow
And I had wings to fly so high
I'd fly to the arms of my false true lover
And when he'd ask, I would deny

Oh love is handsome, love is charming
And love is pretty while it's new
But love grows cold as love grows older
And fades away like morning dew

"BLACK IS THE COLOUR"

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I love my love and well she knows
I love the ground whereon she goes
But some times I whish the day will come
That she and I will be as one

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I walk to the Clyde for to mourn and weep
But satisfied I never can sleep
I'll write her a letter, just a few short lines
And suffer death ten thousand times

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

Blue Diamond Mines

I remember the ways in the bygone days
when we was all in our prime
When us and John L. we give the old man hell
down in the Blue Diamond Mine

Well the whistle would blow 'for the rooster crow
full two hours before daylight
When a man done his best and earned his good rest
at seven dollars a night

In the mines in the mines
in the Blue Diamond Mines
I worked my life away
In the mines in the mines
In the Blue Diamond Mines
I fall on my knees and pray.

You old black gold you've taken my lung
your dust has darkened my home
And now I am old and you've turned your back
where else can an old miner go


Well it's Algomer Block and Big Leather Woods
now its Blue Diamond too
The bits are all closed get another job
what else can an old miner do?


Now the union is dead and they shake their heads
well mining has had it's day
But they're stripping off my mountain top
and they pay me eight dollars a day


Now you might get a little poke of welfare meal
get a little poke of welfare flour
But I tell you right now your won't qualify
'till you work for a quarter an hour.