*In The Beginning There Was……Jug- Songstress Maria Muldaur Goes Back Home

In Honor Of The 50^th Anniversary Of The Formation Of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band Celebrated At Club Passim (Club 47 back in the day), Cambridge On August 29 & 30 2013

http://rhythmandroots.com/rrblog/2013/07/12/jim-kweskin/

CD Review

Maria Muldaur And Her Garden Of Joy, Maria Muldaur and the Garden of Joy Jug Band, Stony Plain, 2009

The last time that I featured the femme fatale blues torch singer reincarnate Maria Muldaur (at least that is the way that she, successfully, projected herself in her recent blues revival projects) was in a review of her 2007 CD tribute to the great singers of the 1920s and 1930s, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sippy Wallace and the like. I might add that I raved on and on about the value of her project, the worthiness of the singers honored and her own place in the blues pantheon. Of course, for those in the know about the roots of the folk revival of the 1960s at least, the name Maria Muldaur is forever associated with another closely-related branch of roots music-the jug band. Maria was the very fetching female vocalist for the old time revivalist Jim Kweskin Jug Band (and an earlier effort in her home town, New York City, by John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful fame, The Even Dozen Jug Band).

Well, hold the presses please, because the red hot blues mama has come back home in her latest project, the CD under review, “Maria Muldaur And Her Garden Of Joy”. And if Maria was kind of thrown in the background somewhat in those days by the strong presence of Jim Kweskin and that of her ex-husband Geoff Muldaur she is front and center on this effort. One of the virtues of jug music back in the day was that it was basically zany, funny, send-off kind of music and full of, usually, high-spirited if coded sexual innuendos. This, on occasion, was a welcome break from the heavy political message songs that were de rigueur or the traditional ballads filled with tales of thwarted love, duplicity and murder and mayhem. In this CD Maria brings back the energy and just plain wistfulness of that type of music. And she does it on her terms.

As fate would have it, or rather by a conscious act, I happened to see Maria and her very fine new jug band made up of younger, well, Jim Kweskin jug band-types (along with guest performer, now blues/ragtime guitar virtuoso John Sebastian) in Cambridge (one of her old stomping rounds and an important secondary center of the folk revival in the 1960s). And, like the last time I saw her a couple of years ago when she was that femme fatale blues singer, she did not disappoint. The woman carried the show with the energy of the old days (that you can get an idea of by going on "YouTube" in a click from 1966).

The line between jug music and flat out torch blues sometimes is not that wide and the switch over thus is not that dramatic. At least in Maria's hands. Witness her version of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Richland Woman” which she did jug-style at the concert (she did a more lowdown bluesy version on her “Richland Woman” album). The example on this album that comes to mind is the little known but, currently, very relevant 1929 song “Bank Failure Blues”. Also the classic jug tune “Garden Of Joy” and another one “Sweet Lovin’ Ol’ Soul” (also done blues-style on a previous album of the same name). This is good stuff but begs the question. Jim Kweskin is still performing. Geoff Muldaur is still performing. Geoff and Jim occasionally perform together. Wouldn’t it be a treat if...?

Blues Lyrics - Mississippi John Hurt Richland's Woman Blues

All rights to lyrics included on these pages belong to the artists and authors of the works. All lyrics, photographs, soundclips and other material on this website may only be used for private study, scholarship or research. by Mississippi John Hurt recording of 19 from

Gimme red lipstick and a bright purple rouge
A shingle bob haircut and a shot of good boo'
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' your horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone
Come along young man, everything settin' right
My husbands goin' away till next Saturday night
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' you horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone
Now, I'm raring to go, got red shoes on my feet
My mind is sittin' right for a Tin Lizzie seat
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' you horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone
The red rooster said, "Cockle-doodle-do-do"
The Richard's' woman said, "Any dude will do"
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' you horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone
With rosy red garters, pink hose on my feet
Turkey red bloomer, with a rumble seat
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' you horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone
Every Sunday mornin', church people watch me go
My wings sprouted out, and the preacher told me so
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' you horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone
Dress skirt cut high, then they cut low
Don't think I'm a sport, keep on watchin' me go
Hurry down, sweet daddy, come blowin' you horn
If you come too late, sweet mama will be gone __________

Note 1: a woman's haircut with the hair trimmed short from the back of the head to the nape; Note 2: nickname for the Model T Ford automobile (1915), a small inexpensive first time mass- produced early automobile.

*Eveybody's Going Back Home To Their Roots- Mississippi Sheiks Move On Over- Geoff Muldaur And The Texas Sheiks Are In Town

In Honor Of The 50^th Anniversary Of The Formation Of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band Celebrated At Club Passim (Club 47 back in the day), Cambridge On August 29 & 30 2013

CD Review

The Texas Sheiks, Geoff Muldaur and company, Tradition and Moderne, 2009

Recently in reviewing Maria Mulduar's latest CD, "Garden Of Joy", in which she goes back to the old Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band tradition I noted that the tide seemed to be drifting that way. And ex-husband and jug band member Geoff must have heard the siren call because this little treat that goes back to old time, old time music hits the spot. This thing is like a part recreation of the famous "Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music", including some from that series, like "Poor Boy".

Boy and girls, hear this thing if you want to know what music was like when you were left to your own devices and didn't have "MTV" or "YouTube" to make your selections from. The only question left, and one that I posed in reviewing Maria's album. Jim Kweskin is still performing. Geoff Muldaur is still performing. Maria Muldaur is still performing. Everybody's got a ton of great musicians to back them up. So I will let you guess what my next question was.

Below are some remarks that I made in reviewing some of Geoff Muldaur's earlier works.
CD Review

Over the past year or so I have been asking a recurring question concerning the wherewithal of various male folk performers from the 1960’s who are still performing today in the “folk concert” world of small coffeehouses, Universalist-Unitarian church basements and the like. I have mentioned names like Jesse Winchester, Chris Smither and Tom Paxton, among others. I have not, previously mentioned the performer under review, Geoff Muldaur, who is probably best known for his work in the 1960’s, not as solo artist, but as part of the famous Jim Kweskin Jug Band and later the equally famous Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Thus, in a way, I had no reason to place him in the pantheon of the solo performers from that period. But things sure are different now.

The following is a review of Geoff Muldaur's "Password" CD, Hightone Records, 2000, by way of an introduction:

“Since my youth I have had an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960's, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.

Geoff Muldaur took almost two decades off from the hurly-burly of traveling the old folk circuit. When I saw him at a coffeehouse upon his return to the scene I asked him what the folk revival of the 1960's was all about. He said it was about being able to play three chords to get the girls to hang around you. Fair enough. I KNOW I took my dates at the time to coffeehouses for somewhat the same reason. I guess it always comes down to that. Kudos to Freud.

Seriously though, Geoff Muldaur was and is about lots more than three chords. He has developed a style that reflects the maturation of his voice and of his interests. And beside that he has always, even in the crazy days of the 1960's, taken a serious attitude to the way that he interprets a song. And furthermore has a very deep knowledge of all sorts of music. Every time I think I know most of the artists in the blues genre he, at a concert, will throw out one more name that I have 'missed'. Example, "At The Christmas Ball" is an old Bessie Smith novelty tune. Geoff gives it his own twist. He likewise does that on "Drop Down Mama" the old Sleepy John Estes version of the tune (I think) and on fellow old time folkie Eric Von Schmidt's "Light Rain". Enough said. Listen.”

The above review was written sometime in 2006 several years after he had begun touring again and I had begun to attend his concerts again (Yes, in those small coffeehouses and church basements mentioned above). Recently I picked up at one of his concerts this following historically interesting CD, “Geoff Muldaur, Rare And Unissued-Collectors’ Items 1963-2008 (self-produced for a Japanese CD market of jug music aficionados)”. In this CD one gets all the sense of musical history, guitar virtuosity and wry humor that was mentioned in the above quoted review. There are many cuts from the Kweskin days like "Borneo" and Ukulele Lady", some later Butterfield work (especially a long cover of the blues classic “Boogie Chillin’”) and some dud stuff from the early 1980’s. A few others defy categorization like "Sweet Sue" and "Guabi Guabi". All in all well was worth the purchase.

The Answer Ain’t Blowing In The Wind- "Maria Muldaur: Live In Concert (2008)- A Film Review

In Honor Of The 50^th Anniversary Of The Formation Of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band Celebrated At Club Passim (Club 47 back in the day), Cambridge On August 29 & 30 2013

Maria Muldaur: Live In Concert, Maria Muldaur and other artists, BCD, 2008

The name Maria Muldaur has been no stranger to this space over the past few years. I have spilled a fair amount of ink in reflecting on my youthful musical interests. Those interests included an appreciation of jug music, one of the folkloric forms in vogue in the early 1960s urban folk revival centered on such places as the Village, Harvard Square and Berkeley. And Maria, along with then husband Geoff Muldaur and band leader Jim Kweskin (both who have also come in for a fair amount of ink here for their later efforts as well) were the central driving forces of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band that reigned supreme in those days, especially in Harvard Square

For those not familiar with the jug band tradition it stems, mainly, from a more rural, more poor boy, earlier time in America when dough was scarce (or non-existent) out in the hinterlands and hollows. But Saturday night was still Saturday night and the eternal need for entertainment was in the air. So, good old boys (and gals, but less so) got together with what was at hand, a guitar, almost always a fiddle, and then whatever else could be gathered up: wash tub, wash board, wash tub and broom to make a bass instrument, whistles, kazoos (Geoff is a master kazooist, if that is the right term), harmonicas, hell, pot and pans if that’s what it took. Oh ya, and a jug.

And they made music for the folk. But then as America became more urbanized this stuff, this poor boy stuff, fell off the radar until roots music-crazed young people, mainly students, with some musical talent and a desire to break out of the Tin Pan Alley pabulum of the late 1950s ”discovered jug” along the way. Groups formed, and reformed, for a while digging up old Memphis Jug Band, Mississippi Sheiks, Arkansas Sheiks (and sheiks for other locales as well), country blues, and whatever else they could find. And guys, like this writer, could go to places like Harvard Square on any given weekend night with a date, stop at one of the eight zillion coffeehouses that dotted the landscape of the place and hear jug (or other forms of folk music: mountain, traditional ballads, some ethnic stuff, contemporary folk protest a la Dylan, Baez, Ochs, etc.) for the price of a cup of coffee and, maybe, dessert. Cheap dates for modern day poor boys, praise be. But that cheap date coffeehouse weekend scene too passed as fickle youth moved on to other musical forms, and other social concerns, for a while.

Maria (and Geoff and Jim, for that matter) , however, driven by that sound in every true musician's head kept up her musical career, mainly after the break-up of the Kweskin Band as a solo artist backed up by various bands, and other configurations. For the last decade or so she has immersed herself in a thorough going and deep revival of the music of old-time barrel house women blues singers. Names like Sippy Wallace, Bessie Smith, Ida Mack, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Victoria Spivey long lost are now resurrected through Maria’s voice in three CD compilations (whether more are coming I do not know). When the legacy of Maria Muldaur is mentioned this work may very well be her musical monument. And rightly so.

So now we come to a review of this Maria Muldaur: Live In Concert DVD, a concert done in the heart of the period of her blues revival work (2008) although it is mainly a concert in support of her CD featuring the love songs of Bob Dylan. And after all this build up about Maria’s musical roots, her place, righteous place, in blues history, and the rest this concert was an extremely uneven effort, particularly the first half. No question many people have covered Bob Dylan songs, including love songs, very well and have become standards on their own. One thinks of Ritchie Havens’ masterful version of Just Like A Women, for example. However the somber, jazzy, low-key renditions here, and their delivery were, well, ho-hum. Buckets of Love can serve as an example. Dave Van Ronk has, to my mind, done the best cover on this one with his grainy voice (I am being kind here) and wistfully bitter-sweet rendition. Frankly, until about a minute into the thing I did not know Maria was singing that song. And so it went for the first half.

But talent is talent and so it rose to the occasion in the second half with a great rendition of Cajun Moon and others, ending with a very nice version of Ride Me High, including Maria on fiddle. But Maria I hear Alberta Hunter calling. Bob has many people willing and able to cover his work but those old time blues singers need a voice, your voice.
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Out In The Kazoo-Driven 1920s Night- The Time Of The Cannon Jug Stompers- A CD Review
 

In Honor Of The 50^th Anniversary Of The Formation Of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band Celebrated At Club Passim (Club 47 back in the day), Cambridge On August 29 & 30 2013     

Cannon’s Jug Stompers: The Complete Works: 1927-1930, The Cannon Jug Stompers, Yazoo Records, 1989
So Jim Kweskin took a few jugs, a few washboards, a few kazoos, a penny whistle, maybe a couple of fiddles, and a washtub with a string and pole, got some friends like Geoff Muldaur, and Maria Muldaur (nee something else like Donato) to play the damn stuff (and sing too) and created jug music from scratch in the 1960s folk minute night. No, one thousand times, no. The folk minute was about “discovering” roots music. You know stuff from the hills and hollows of Kentucky, or some old labor songs from the 1930s hard class struggle, or some sea island s congregation spirituals from god knows where in outer Georgia (the United States Georgia, okay). So like Bob Dylan, Eric Von Schmidt, hell even Dave Von Ronk, they all torn up the backwoods, or at least the dusty Greenwich Village old records stores, and went hunting for some sound that would satisfy their roots needs (and provide a little cash in the coffeehouse crazed night). And Cannon’s Jug Stompers along with the Memphis Jug Band (and, as it turned out, about seven different state Sheik bands, you know the Mississippi Sheiks, and so on) were must hears if you wanted to replicate any old time jug sound.

Of course the Cannon Jug Stompers didn’t work the Cambridge folk scene back in the day, way back in the day, or some cozy Village club and certainly not some North Beach blow-out be-bop joint but worked the carny shows, the juke joints and the back road houses of the south to very segregated audiences. So while some black guys (and a few women) were wilding the joint up in café society New York or New Orleans with the latest high white not jazz riffs these brothers were working cheap street. So be it. Listen up to Big Railroad Blues, Cairo Rag, Pretty Money Blues and a few others and you won’t worry so much why you don’t miss the jazz notes. And be glad, glad as hell, that Harry Smith, the great American Folk Music anthologist whose anthology all the old folkies (including the afore-mentioned Jim Kweskin Jug Band members) knew by heart including them in his work.

*In The Beginning Was...The Jug- The Music of Jim Kweskin And The Jug Band- An Encore

In Honor Of The 50^th Anniversary Of The Formation Of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band Celebrated At Club Passim (Club 47 back in the day), Cambridge On August 29 & 30 2013

CD Review

“Garden Of Joy” (1967), “America”(1971), Jim Kweskin and various musicians, two CD set, Warner Brothers, 2006

There is something of a joke on the folk rock circuit that Bob Dylan is on a never-ending tour. (Probably fairly close to the truth these days.) Apparently, in my reviews of the folk figures of the 1960s, I too am on never-ending tour. So be it. Today I go back to the now familiar question of why various male folk artists didn’t rise to Dylan’s iconic status. Except here on the subject of this review, Jim Kweskin of Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band fame (that also included two performers, ex-marrieds Geoff and Maria Muldaur, that I have spilled plenty of ink on in this space as well), I will not belabor the point for he simply made a choice to stay with his day job.

Except now some forty plus years later one Jim Kweskin has been making something of a revival in the Boston area,sometimes along with the afore-mentioned Geoff Muldaur. I recently attended a performance by the pair at a locally famous folk club (aka coffee house, for the nostalgically-inclined). Do these guys still have it? Oh, yes. Jim is still finger-picking with the best of them. Geoff (off a recent CD done with the Texas Sheiks) still is in good voice. Plus, a big plus, they are working the dust off the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music in their sets. Wow! Thus, I felt duty-bound to pick up the two CD set under review.

The set includes one old Jug Band album, including the classic Clifford Hayes jug number, “Garden Of Joy”, a nice monologue by the late Jug Band member (and jug aficionado) Fritz Richmond, and Maria on Lead Belly’s “When I Was A Cowboy.” This, my friends, is history. The second CD is a little later after the original Jug Band members went their separate ways. Here we have covers of Mance Lipscomb’s classic “Sugar Babe”, The Memphis Jug Band’s “Stealin’”, and Merle Travis’ “Dark As A Dungeon” to feast on. The question still remains open though, one that I have posed before-Jim, Geoff and Maria are still performing, and performing well in their respective venues. Therefore…well, you know the question, right?

From The Marxist Archives-Lenin on the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie

Workers Vanguard No. 935  24 April 2009 TROTSKY LENIN Lenin on the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie (Quote of the Week) V.I. Lenin, the leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought the working class of Russia to power, explained how bourgeois democracy serves as a mask for the capitalist class’ bloody dictatorship, enforced by its courts, cops and military forces. At the founding congress of the Third (Communist) International, Lenin presented theses defending Soviet rule against the reformist leaders of the Second International, most of whom had sided with their own bourgeoisies in the imperialist slaughter of World War I. The bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Condemnation of dictatorship and defence of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments…. Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of “democracy in general” and “dictatorship in general,” without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism, namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognise in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilised capitalist country does “democracy in general” exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy, and it is not a question of “dictatorship in general,” but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.... The Paris Commune...showed very clearly the historically conventional nature and limited value of the bourgeois parliamentary system and bourgeois democracy.... It was Marx who best appraised the historical significance of the Commune. In his analysis, he revealed the exploiting nature of bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system under which the oppressed classes enjoy the right to decide once in several years which representative of the propertied classes shall “represent and suppress” (ver- und zertreten) the people in parliament.... The significance of the Commune, furthermore, lies in the fact that it endeavoured to crush, to smash to its very foundations, the bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucratic, judicial, military and police machine, and to replace it by a self-governing, mass workers’ organisation in which there was no division between legislative and executive power. —V.I. Lenin, “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (March 1919) **********

No Limit-Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He, Roy Bluff, real name, Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just then and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man, then could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest. Reason: Roy Bluff, a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basement replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-folk-rock became a craze around the turn of this century. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.

And of course being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff one night. It wasn’t that he was handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. So, yes, he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city.

Until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, to give her a name, although he called her “sweet angel,”called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes.

Right then, right that pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, he was in a sly grin mood and so, as he set himself up for the day’s work, actually night’s work since he was giving a concert later that evening, he was going through the maybes. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.

The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses and his frailties, his rages against the night (although she tried like hell to temper them). Roy laughed to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.

Christ, as Roy thought back to that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms (no more dank basements and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff) throughout the country. Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly. Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day he responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along.

She gave Roy a look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, ditto on the attraction look. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself.

Yeah, yeah that was the start. After he had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All he knew now was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway.

Maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Funny, he was still then grabbing whatever caught his eye before she said that, and what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never took her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened.

Maybe it was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She said if what they had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as their saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”

Maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.

Maybe it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.

And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…

***Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Our Lady Of The Mountains-The Music Of Hazel Dickens"

A YouTube film clip of Hazel Dickens performing the evocative, haunting Hills Of Home.

CD Review

It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song, Hazel Dickens and other artists, Rounder Records, 1987

A few years ago I spent some time "running the table" on the mountain music genre. From the pioneer work of the venerable Carter Family, who leader A. P. Carter scoured the hills and patches of Appalachia, black tenet farmer, and hard-bitten coal miner, searching for material once RCA gave his trio their big break in 1927, or so through to Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson and other legendary figures and on to the “revival” brought forth in the early part of this decade by such movies as Brother, Where Art Thou? and Songcatcher I have paid more than passing tribute to this quintessential American musical form, complete with fiddle, mandolin and lonely Saturday nights gathering in the folk in some hardly built, or half- abandoned barn out in the hills and hollows of Appalachia and other rural environs. And, moreover, in the process ‘discovered’ that yankee boy I that I am, my roots are firmly steeped through my father down in the wind-swept hills and hollows. That said I have, thus, pretty much exhausted the milieu, right? Wrong. No homage to the modern mountain music scene can be complete without paying tribute to the work of singer/songwriter Hazel Dickens (and, at times, musical companion Alice Gerrard, among others).

There was time when, if one was given a choice, the name Hazel Dickens would be the first to come up when naming the most well known voice of the modern mountain music tradition. Her voice spoke of the hardships of the rural life and of ticky-tack, no window, hell, no door tar-paper cabins; the trials and tribulations of trying to eke out an existence on some hard- scrabble rocky farmland probably played out generations ago in the first treks west; or, more likely, sweated, underpaid labor in the coals mines or textiles factories that dominated that landscape for much of the second half of the 20th century. Hers was the pure, almost primordial voice that spoke of the sorrows of hill life, but also the joys of coming to terms with a very personal (and, apparently) angry god by way of singing away those working women blues, and you can add in a few tunes for those hard-bitten farmers and coals miners as well.

So, needless to say, this little Rounder CD from 1987 is filled with original work and covers on just those subjects mentioned above. From a cover of Bob Dylan's Only A Hobo to the classic haunting Hills Of Home that evokes, passionately, the roots in those hard life hills and on to the necessary religious- themed Will Jesus Wash The Bloodstains From Your Hands that has formed the underpinning for the mountain ethos for eons.This is what mountain music is like when it is done right. Listen and see if you agree.
******
Hazel Dickens - A Few Old Memories lyrics

Lyrics to A Few Old Memories :
Just a few old memories
Slipped in through my door
Though I thought I had closed it
So tightly before
I can't understand it
Why it should bother my mind
For it all belongs to another place and time

Just a few old keep-sakes
Way back on the shelf
No, they don't mean nothin'
Well I'm surprised they're still left
Just a few old love letters
With the edges all brown
And an old faded picture
I keep turned upside-down

Just a few old memories
Going way back in time
Well I can hardly remember
I don't know why I'm cryin'
I can't understand it
Well I'm surprised myself
First thing tomorrow morning
I'll clean off that shelf

Just a few old keep-sakes
Way back on the shelf
No, they don't mean nothin'
Well I'm surprised that they're left
Just a few old love letters
With their edges all brown
And an old faded picture
I keep turned upside-down

Hazel Dickens, West Virginia My Home Tabs/Chords

Hazel Dickens is one of my favorite singers, and one of my favorite people. I
have had the pleasure of meeting and singing with her several times at
Augusta, and she is as genuine a person as you're likely to encounter. Her
testimonial to her home state is my all-time favorite song, one that I sing
every day. I learned it from her album entitled "Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-
Hit People," and I am constantly amazed that a lifelong Illinoisan like myself
can identify so strongly with the bittersweet reverence with which she packs
this powerful ballad. Just as the Everly Brothers, Louvin Brothers, and Blue
Sky Boys did with "Kentucky," Hazel evokes a universal sentiment with this
geographically specific song.

John (a.k.a. "West Virginia Slim")
Chicago

WEST VIRGINIA MY HOME by Hazel Dickens

Chorus:
D G
West Virginia, oh my home.
D A
West Virginia, where I belong.
D
G
In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet I slip away like a bird
in flight
D A D
Back to those hills, the place that I call home.

It's been years now since I left there
And this city life's about got the best of me.
I can't remember why I left so free what I wanted to do, what I wanted to see,
But I can sure remember where I come from.

Chorus-----

Well I paid the price for the leavin'
And this life I have is not one I thought I'd find.
Just let me live, love, let my cry, but when I go just let me die
Among the friends who'll remember when I'm gone.

Chorus-----

Bridge:
G A D A
Home, home, home. I can see it so clear in my mind.
G A D
A
Home, home, home. I can almost smell the honeysuckle vines.

[Repeat last two lines of chorus.]

 

***I Fall To Pieces Each Time I Hear Her Sing- Pasty Cline Sings The 1950s Standards -A CD Review-Take Two

A YouTube film clip of Patsy Cline performing She's Got You.
CD Review

Pasty Cline: True Love- A Standards Collection, Patsy Cline, MCA Nashville Records, 2000

For those of us of a certain age, those growing up in the early 1960s meaning of course that we are those phantom post- World War II baby-boomers everybody keeps worrying about, worrying about that we, now AARP and Social Security worthy, will live too long but back then nothing but hell-raisers and we were going live forever, the timeless voice of Patsy Cline, whether we were aware of it or not, formed the backdrop to many a school dance or other romantic endeavor. You know that last dance chance at the school dance, the always gym Saturday night school dance that parents invented to keep an eye on hormonal teenagers although it never stopped the adventurous. That last dance to dance a slow one, a two left feet slow one with that certain other wallflower you were eying, or whom you had kid flirted with in class. Yes Patsy time would tell whether your clever little asides had hit pay dirt, or whether you were walking home in the dark wondering was it your breathe, deodorant or something because it certainly could not have been your lame patter that you had honed to perfection in front of your bedroom mirror. But enough of that. Back to Patsy.

I was not a fan of Patsy Cline’s, at least not consciously, growing up because between an undeclared but very real war against my parents’ music, particularly my Appalachia mountain born father’s Hank Williams/Ernest Tubbs/Grand Ole Opry stuff, and my DNA-embedded love of rock and roll (now classic rock and roll, you know Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley) she fell on the other side of the line. But recently I have come to appreciate her talent and her amazing voice since then. In another earlier review in this space I have called her the ‘country torch singer’ par excellence. And she does not fail here. I believe that this compilation does justice to her work, work cut short before her full maturity by a fatal accident, but that reflects her move away from a countrified sound to a pop status. Patsy, like many another torch singer, Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday come to mind, needs to grow on you. The best way to do that is grab this album and sit back. You won’t want to turn the damn thing off.

Stand out covers here devoted to the themes of love, lost love, found love, misplaced love, and perhaps, hate if things every got that far out of hand are Always; You Belong To Me; I Love You So Much It Hurts (a personal favorite); and, the title song, True Love. But listen to the whole thing when you are in the mood.

***I Fall To Pieces Each Time I Hear Her Sing- Pasty Cline Sings The 1950s Standards -A CD Review-Take Two

A YouTube film clip of Patsy Cline performing She's Got You.
CD Review

Pasty Cline: True Love- A Standards Collection, Patsy Cline, MCA Nashville Records, 2000

For those of us of a certain age, those growing up in the early 1960s meaning of course that we are those phantom post- World War II baby-boomers everybody keeps worrying about, worrying about that we, now AARP and Social Security worthy, will live too long but back then nothing but hell-raisers and we were going live forever, the timeless voice of Patsy Cline, whether we were aware of it or not, formed the backdrop to many a school dance or other romantic endeavor. You know that last dance chance at the school dance, the always gym Saturday night school dance that parents invented to keep an eye on hormonal teenagers although it never stopped the adventurous. That last dance to dance a slow one, a two left feet slow one with that certain other wallflower you were eying, or whom you had kid flirted with in class. Yes Patsy time would tell whether your clever little asides had hit pay dirt, or whether you were walking home in the dark wondering was it your breathe, deodorant or something because it certainly could not have been your lame patter that you had honed to perfection in front of your bedroom mirror. But enough of that. Back to Patsy.

I was not a fan of Patsy Cline’s, at least not consciously, growing up because between an undeclared but very real war against my parents’ music, particularly my Appalachia mountain born father’s Hank Williams/Ernest Tubbs/Grand Ole Opry stuff, and my DNA-embedded love of rock and roll (now classic rock and roll, you know Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley) she fell on the other side of the line. But recently I have come to appreciate her talent and her amazing voice since then. In another earlier review in this space I have called her the ‘country torch singer’ par excellence. And she does not fail here. I believe that this compilation does justice to her work, work cut short before her full maturity by a fatal accident, but that reflects her move away from a countrified sound to a pop status. Patsy, like many another torch singer, Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday come to mind, needs to grow on you. The best way to do that is grab this album and sit back. You won’t want to turn the damn thing off.

Stand out covers here devoted to the themes of love, lost love, found love, misplaced love, and perhaps, hate if things every got that far out of hand are Always; You Belong To Me; I Love You So Much It Hurts (a personal favorite); and, the title song, True Love. But listen to the whole thing when you are in the mood.

Unfinished Business Of The Black Liberation Struggle-In Honor Of Emmett Till

HONOR THE MEMORY OF EMMETT TILL

The following is an appreciation of the life the martyred civil rights figure Emmett Till. It was originally printed in Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League of the United States and reprinted in their Black History series. The beginnings of my personal awareness of the central role of the black liberation struggle in any fight for fundamental change did not stem from the Till tragedy but rather a little latter from the attempts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. The main political point of the article- the centrality of the black liberation struggle to the overall revolutionary struggle against American imperialism and for a socialist solution to the problems of modern society is also my own position on that question. Although the particular case of what happened to Emmett Till may be resolved before that solution occurs it will take such black liberation in order to do proper justice to his name.



Workers Vanguard No. 852 5 August 2005

The Lynching of Emmett Till and the Fight for Black Liberation
50 Years Later
"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears.... I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought."
—Anne Moody, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Organizer, 14 years old in 1955, in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)

Fifty years ago this month the name Emmett Eouis Till became synonymous with the brutal American tradition of lynching. Till was only 14 years old that summer when he left his home in Chicago to join his cousin on a trip to stay with relatives in Mississippi. Within days of his arrival, young Emmett was kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Till's gruesome murder, and his mother's courageous campaign to ensure that the world saw at first hand the stark reality of race-terror by displaying her son's mutilated body at his funeral, provoked horror and outrage against racist oppression in America. The lynching of Emmett Till, along with Rosa Parks' defiant stand in Montgomery, Alabama in December of that same year, were key in galvanizing many thousands to join the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Today, a half-century later, black people still sit in the cross hairs of this bloody capitalist ruling class. The explosive struggles of the civil rights movement smashed Jim Crow segregation in the South and broke the back of the anti-Communist McCarthy era. But the social reality remains—black oppression is the cornerstone of capitalist class rule in America. Contrary to assertions that the worst abuses against black people are a thing of the past, a quick survey of the massive prison population, unemployment, miserable ghetto conditions, poverty, deteriorating health care and increasingly segregated schools proves the opposite, not only in the South but throughout the country.

The current federal investigation of the Emmett Till atrocity is one of a handful of decades-old cases reopened beginning with the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. One reason these cases are being opened is to polish the tarnished image of the South. But union-busting "right to work" laws, attacks on black voting rights, Ku Klux Klan terror like the cross-burnings in Durham, North Carolina this May along with Confederate flags, monuments and Dixie anthems still mark the landscape of the "New South." Meanwhile, Northern ghettos trap black people into holding pens, and kill-crazy cops stalk the streets.

Bush's Republican regime pushes ahead to wipe out the remaining gains of the civil rights movement that had been under attack by Democratic as well as Republican administrations for the last three decades. On the heels of the government launching a vindictive IRS tax investigation of the NAACP, the chairman of the Republican National Committee cynically professed at the NAACP's convention in July, which Bush refused to attend, that the Republican Party's decades-long campaign of courting the racist Southern vote away from the Democrats by opposing civil rights legislation, the "Southern Strategy," was "wrong."

The re-opening of Till's case was largely sparked by the determined nine-year effort of a young filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, and his 2002 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. The Feds recently exhumed Till's body to seek forensic evidence, additionally claiming it is necessary to verify that it was indeed Till in the grave. The only people who ever cast doubt on this question were the defenders of the lynchers. For America's capitalist rulers, such re-investigations are nothing more than hypocritical attempts to foster the illusion that today's FBI and Department of Justice are different from the very same state institutions that worked hand in hand with the Klan in the South. By the mid 1960s, nearly 20 percent of Klan members were FBI "informants" serving as loyal double agents of both organizations. Even when the Senate passed a meaningless resolution this June apologizing for never passing anti-lynching legislation, several senators, including the two from Mississippi, refused to sponsor the bill.

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation of labor, and, in the U.S., a unique and critical mainstay continues to be the subjugation of the black population at the bottom of society. American Trotskyist Richard Fraser wrote in the same year that Emmett Till was murdered: "The dual nature of the Negro struggle arises from the fact that a whole people regardless of class distinction are the victims of discrimination. This problem of a whole people can be solved only through the proletarian revolution, under the leadership of the working class" ("For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Struggle," January 1955). We of the Spartacist League base our program for black liberation upon Eraser's perspective of revolutionary integrationism, premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. One of our founding documents written at the time of the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s states:

"The Negro people arc an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. Because of the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black people as a group have special needs and problems necessitating additional and special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution."
—"Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," 1967, Marxist Bulletin No. 9

The Lynching of Emmett Till
By all accounts Emmett Till was an amazing kid. He was bright, fun-loving and considerate. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (earlier known as Mamie Till Bradley), and her family had migrated from Mississippi along with hundreds of thousands of other black farmers and sharecroppers fleeing the Jim Crow South in hopes of finding a better life in the "Promised Land" known as Chicago. She knew firsthand the strict social and racial codes of the South that literally spelled life or death if not followed to the letter. So, when she reluctantly allowed Emmett to accompany his cousin Wheeler to Mississippi, she did her best to instill some sense of the dangers and she recounted that she held "the talk that every black parent had with every child sent down South back then" (Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America by Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, 2003).

By the summer of 1955, white racists in Mississippi were seething in bitterness in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which opened the door for integrating schools, albeit hedged with limitations and the reservation of "deliberate speed." The Supreme Court decision to allow school integration was a reflection of a growing movement for black civil rights, for the right to vote and for integration. Black men fought on the front lines in World War II, a war proclaimed to make the world "safe for democracy." Black women migrated to the cities to toil in defense plants. When the soldiers returned, they were determined to have a better life. The end of the war ushered in the beginning of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the preparation for new imperialist wars to "roll back Communism" everywhere on the planet. Most black people were concerned about the "cotton curtain," the iron grip of the racist Southern police state here at home, and were less likely to buy into or embrace the American bourgeoisie's propaganda about an "Iron Curtain" Soviet threat.

The response of the racist Southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats) to the Brown ruling was one of organized terror and defiance from the highest-ranking officials on down. Francis M. Wilhoit described the role of the Democratic Party in The Politics of Massive Resistance'.
"For it was, after all, the region's political parties—particularly the dominant Democrats—that bore the chief responsibility for politicizing the segregationist masses and getting them to the polls on election day to vote for anti-integration candidates. Furthermore, since membership in Southern parties overlapped with membership in the Klan, the Councils, and other resistance groups, it appeared for a time that the segregationists would get a stranglehold on policy making in the racial area, and prevent even tokenism."

White Citizens' Councils, the suit-and-tie incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, formed to terrorize blacks through vigilante violence and uphold Jim Crow segregation, flourished throughout Mississippi. These councils, claiming a membership of 60,000, were headquartered in the very county that Emmett was preparing to visit. In May that year in Belzoni, Mississippi, Reverend George Lee, local NAACP organizer, was shot to death from a passing car. Just days prior to Till's arrival, WW II veteran Lamar Smith was gunned down in broad daylight on a crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi for urging black people to vote. This was the murderous atmosphere that a lively, self-confident teenager from the North journeyed into that fateful August.

On August 24, after picking cotton all morning, Emmett, his cousins and some friends drove into Money, Mississippi to purchase some candy and sodas at the local grocery store that serviced the black population. The white owner, Roy Bryant, was out of town and his young wife, Carolyn, was tending the store. There are conflicting stories of what happened at the store. Did he whistle? Was he trying to control his stutter? Did he speak up? The only thing that happened that day at the store for sure is that Emmett Till was seen as having "stepped out of line," ignoring "the customs of the South" in the presence of a white woman where this was punishable by death. On August 28, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Mi lam, came looking for Emmett at his relatives' home, kidnapping him in the dead of night. Three days later the hideously battered corpse of Emmett Till was found in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Mose Wright, Emmett's great uncle, was able to identify his body only by a ring belonging to his lather that the child wore on his finger.

For the vast majority of unnamed lynch mob victims that have filled American history, the story would end here and would have also for Emmett Till if not for the courage and determination of his mother and family. Mamie Till-Mobley immediately alerted the press upon hearing that her son was missing. She fought to have her son's body returned to Chicago after the local sheriff hastily tried to bury the evidence—literally. She defied the Mississippi authorities by opening the padlocked and sealed casket. Most courageously, she insisted that the casket be displayed openly for the world to see, and ensured that graphic photos circulated internationally. An estimated 100,000-250,000 people waited in line for hours at Chicago's Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ to view the open casket. So shocking was Emmett's horrifically mutilated body that an estimated one out of every five individuals needed assistance out of the building. Emmett's death was transformed from "just another lynching" into an internationally known scandal. Although there had been thousands of Southern black men, women and children that met such horrible deaths, this was one that would spark a generation into action.

Mamie Till-Mobley set the tone by immediately demanding an investigation and publicizing the case. Although President Eisenhower and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover stonewalled her requests for an investigation, she persisted in bringing national attention to her son's lynching. Till-Mobley, her father and her cousin Rayfield Mooty, an Inland Steel worker, traveled to Sumner, Mississippi for the trial of Emmett's murderers and braved a gauntlet of white racists each morning as they entered the courthouse. Her uncle, Mose Wright, who had pleaded with Bryant and Milam not to take his nephew, did what virtually no black man in Mississippi had dared to do for nearly a century. He stood up in court and identified the two white men as the kidnappers. According to Wright's son, Simeon, who was in the same bed when Emmett was dragged away, Mose Wright was determined to testify. Knowing full well that he was risking the same fate as Emmett, he told his family that he didn't know if he would live or die, but he knew for sure that he was going to testify. Before Wright testified, the rest of his family had to be spirited away to Chicago. He joined them immediately following his testimony. Similarly an 18-year-old field hand, Willie Reed, came forward as a surprise witness for the prosecution to testify that he had heard Emmett's screams coming from Milam's barn. As soon as Reed stepped off the stand, he went directly to the train station and left for Chicago, rightly fearing for his life. He suffered a nervous breakdown upon arriving in Illinois. It took a tremendous amount of courage for these black witnesses to stand up to white racists in Mississippi, knowing they might not live to see another day, knowing that the only way to save themselves from the lynch rope was to leave everything behind and escape North. Their actions were not unlike slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad nearly one hundred years earlier.

At this time, Medgar Evers, a Mississippi NAACP organizer, gained national attention. Evers understood that the only way a case would be built against Bryant and Milam was if he took it into his own hands and mobilized his forces. The NAACP recruited volunteers to dress as sharecroppers and sent them out to gather information. These brave individuals knew full well what lay in store for them should they be detected. Civil rights lawyer Conrad Lynn worked on the case and identified others involved in the killing, but they were never prosecuted. Dr. T. R. M. Howard, leader of the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, helped organize and contributed to pay the costs of the investigation and relocation of the witnesses. He also was eventually forced to flee North. He made speaking tours of the country to expose the reign of terror in Mississippi. For the smallest shred of hope that justice might be served, these people put their lives on the line.

But that smallest shred was really no shred at all in the mid '50s in the Mississippi Delta. The ensuing murder trial of Bryant and Milam was exactly what one would expect. All five lawyers in the county joined the defense team so that none could be appointed special prosecutor in the case. Neither of the defendants denied kidnapping Emmett. The jury came back with a verdict of not guilty in just over an hour. It took them "that long" because they stopped to get a soda, hoping to stretch the time for appearance's sake. The jury came up with the lie that the bloated, rotting body that was dragged out of the Tallahatchie River might not be Emmett at all, but a body planted by his mother and the NAACP. Emmett was supposedly alive and well in Detroit, according to the Southern racists. A grand jury would not even indict them on kidnapping charges. Then, just months after the acquittal, Look magazine published a confession by Bryant and Milam boasting of their lynching of Till.

A campaign orchestrated by plantation owner, arch-segregationist Mississippi Senator, James O. Eastland, tried to smear Emmett Till and his dead father Louis as rapists. The U.S. army had executed Louis Till in 1945. While serving in Italy, he was charged with raping two white women and killing another, charges that many who served with him stated were lies. The same man, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as a general signed the execution order of the elder Till, sat as U.S. president and refused to investigate the lynching of the son. When Eastland managed to secure the army death records of Louis Till—the same records that Mamie Till-Mobley had been denied—and leaked them to the press, the

NAACP took a step back from the case, concerned to maintain their image of "respectability."
Louis Till was not the only man to be executed or "disappear" under such dubious circumstances during World War II. In her autobiography, Mamie Till-Mobley spoke to the chilling stories she heard from other black soldiers and friends of Louis Till of the "problem that followed them overseas from the United States." She described 3 a.m. line-ups of black soldiers by racist white officers and Military Police. A woman would be brought in to identify one of the soldiers and the "black soldiers who got pointed out at three in the morning were always taken away. They were not brought back." As Mamie Till-Mobley astutely pointed out,

"It seemed that the army really didn't need much more proof than a late-night identification to take black soldiers out. But based on what Louis's friends told me, it seemed the real offense wasn't always against white women. Often, it was really against white men. A number of women in those late-night lineups, it seems, were only identifying the men who slept with them, not men they were accusing of rape.... But for many of the white officers and soldiers from the South, there also was a custom about that sort of thing.... Louis died before he could see what would happen to his son. Bo [Emmett's nickname] died before he could learn about what had happened to his father. Yet they were connected in ways that ran as deep as their heritage, as long as their bloodline.... Maybe Emmett did wind up like his father, an echo of what had happened ten years earlier. Maybe they were both lynched."

Lynching—"As American as Baseball and Church Suppers"
In 1924, a young Communist from Indochina named Nguyen Ai Quoc—later known as Ho Chi Minh—wrote:

"It is well known that the Black race is the most oppressed and the most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery, which was for centuries a scourge of the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching."

The story of Emmett Till lays bare the harsh reality of black life in a country built on human bondage. The fight for genuine black equality remains an unfinished task of the American Civil War. The 200,000 ex-slaves and Northern blacks who fought in that war helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Union Army, but the victorious Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of equality. Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic period in U.S. history. But the Northern capitalists looked at the devastated South and saw opportunity—not for building radical democracy, but for profitably exploiting Southern resources and the freedmen. With the "Compromise of 1877," the last of the Northern troops were pulled from the South and Reconstruction came to an end. Freed blacks were disenfranchised, politically expropriated and kept segregated at the bottom of society. The institution of Jim Crow segregation began to take shape, marked by strict racial codes, returning the black population to a position of complete subservience, enforced by violence. How or when to address whites, where to live, eat, sit, shop, wash your hands, or take a drink of water were all strictly regulated and backed up through a system of race terror—the omnipresent threat of the lynch rope.

In the period following Reconstruction, in the late 19th century, lynching reached its height. Lynching is rightfully equated with the summary torture and execution of black people. But this was not always the case. The term "lynch law" is believed to have come from Judge Charles Lynch, a patriot in the American Revolutionary War. Upon discovery of a Tory conspiracy in 1780, Lynch was said to have presided over an extralegal court that meted out summary punishment to the pro-British Loyalists. Such methods were given free rein in a burgeoning young country with a vast frontier and a roughly established legal system. The evolution of lynching into an act of race terror is organically linked to the history of black chattel slavery. Lynching became a form of sadistic black subjugation in reaction to the rise of the anti-slavery abolition movement, developing into a widespread social phenomenon in the wake of the defeat of Reconstruction. By the end of the 19th century, "lynch law" had a specific meaning. At its height in the 1880s and 1890s, as many as two to three black people were lynched per week. Sociologist John Dollard wrote in 1937: "Every Negro in the South knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death; he does not know when his turn will come, it may never come, but it may also be any time."

American historian Leon F. Litwack has found that of the thousands of recorded lynchings, about 640 involved "accusations of a sexual nature"—the most notorious and hysteria-inducing accusation. The targets of the race terrorists were often those who owned competitive businesses and farms, the man who managed to acquire some property and was deemed by the racists to not have enough humility, the man who challenged the system, the man who was educated and/or prosperous. W. E. B. Dubois put it this way: "There was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency" (Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow [1998]).

In many cases, lynchings were not spontaneous mob violence but planned and advertised events bringing trainloads of spectators from near and far. These were ordinary, "church-going, upstanding" citizens, drawn together in a grotesque racist ritual. The "pillars of the community" were often directly involved or had prior knowledge, and they always approved afterward. "Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children along to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic" (Philip Dray, At The Hands of Persons Unknown [2002]). Celebratory postcards of mutilated and charred bodies were sent through the U.S. mail to friends and relatives. James Baldwin noted on seeing the red clay hills of Georgia for the first time, "I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees."

The Civil Rights Movement
As Mamie Till-Mobley remarked in a TV documentary, "When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement." Ten thousand people rallied in Harlem the Sunday following the acquittal. Thousands packed meeting halls and overflowed into the streets to hear Mamie speak around the country. Labor rallies and demonstrations were held to protest the lynching of Emmett Till and race-terror in Mississippi. The CIO Steelworkers Union to which Fill's grandfather belonged wired the Mississippi governor demanding justice.

In the convulsive years that followed, social protest exploded into the civil rights movement. Eventually, Jim Crow, the poll taxes and sham rules that prevented black people from voting were abolished, and segregated schools and other public facilities were formally opened up. However, the civil rights movement was stopped cold when it came North and confronted the hardened economic foundations of black oppression, rooted in American capitalism. The heroic struggles of many thousands of black and white activists were betrayed by the liberal perspective of the leadership of the civil rights movement. Much as the organizers of the demonstrations against Till's murder appealed to Eisenhower, the strategy of the liberal-led civil rights movement was based on appeals to a section of the American bourgeoisie to right the historic wrongs done against black people, as though black freedom could be attained under the capitalist system.

There were important exceptions to this, exemplified by militant black leaders such as Robert F. Williams, the head of the NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina, which heavily recruited from the black working class of the area. Williams, who was denounced by liberal civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, put forward a program of armed self-defense to fight race-terror as opposed to reliance on the capitalist state and its politicians. This earned him the enmity of the liberal NAACP, which disowned him, as the FBI hounded him out of the country. Williams found refuge in Cuba in 1961 and then China, before returning to the U.S. in 1969. In 1965, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice organized patrols to protect blacks and civil rights workers. At about the same time, in Gulfport, Mississippi, the black longshoremen's union threatened to close the port down if civil rights activists were injured or arrested.

But despite determined struggle to fulfill the unfinished promise of the Civil War—the promise of black freedom— the civil rights movement could only go so far. The Democratic Party co-opted many of the black leaders into their ranks. They and their political heirs today sit on Capitol Hill, in the statehouses and city halls, administering this system which is based on racial injustice and class oppression, while posing as defenders of black and working people.
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The lynching of Emmett Till was not an aberration. Such inhuman acts of violence were part of the fabric of the American Jim Crow South—a system that could only be enforced through violence. Nor did the smashing of Jim Crow mark the end of racial oppression in the U.S., in the North or the South. The laws enforcing segregation may be abolished, but segregation and inequality remain as facts. The death penalty represents the lynch rope as the ultimate form of institutionalized state terror, backed in the streets by racist cops who carry out their own summary executions. The continued oppression of black people some 40 years after the inauguration of formal, legal equality demonstrates that black oppression is an intrinsic component of the capitalist order in the U.S.

The capitalist rulers promote the poison of racism to keep the working class divided—to pit white workers against black workers—in order to more easily maintain their rule. But black people are not simply victims. Black workers represent a large component of the organized labor movement. The way forward lies in multiracial class struggle. A key obstacle to this perspective is the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which ties the working class to its exploiters, particularly by promoting illusions in the Democratic Party as a "friend" of labor and blacks.

The road to black freedom lies in the struggle to shatter this racist capitalist system through proletarian socialist revolution, and the power to do that lies with the working class. But this power cannot and will not be realized unless a class-struggle labor movement actively champions the cause of black liberation. The key to unlocking the chains that shackle labor to its exploiters is the political struggle to build a revolutionary internationalist leadership of the working class.

At the time of the Civil War, Karl Marx, the founder of modern communism, captured a fundamental truth of American society in his statement that "labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The Spartacist League fights to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will wrest the tremendous productive resources of this country out of the hands of the capitalist owners and put these resources into the hands of the working class, those who produce the wealth of this society. Only then will racial oppression be a thing of the past. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!