AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Warren Smith’s Rock and Roll Ruby

…he knew, knew deep in his bones, knew on the face of it too that he could not keep her, keep her to himself, keep her settled down and so he accepted that she would blow away like the wind on him sometime and it was just a matter of how long he could keep her. It hadn’t started out that way, at least he did not see it like that at the beginning, see that she was a wayward wind, see that she had deeply imbibed the new wave coming across the continent. They had met conventionally enough senior year at old North Adamsville High, had responded to each other’s furtive glances in Miss Williams’ study hall, had danced around each other at Doc’s Drugstore where all the kids hung out after school to listen the latest music, their music juke box and had finally gone out on a double date (he without car at the time) at the local drive-in theater where she, sitting in the back seat with him, surprised him with her sexual advances. Stuff that he wasn’t all that familiar with but which he liked and which she knew that he liked. When he asked her about it later, not that night but a couple of weeks later, she just said girls knew stuff like that and she had learned it from her first boyfriend who was older. He let it pass. And so they were an “item” that last year of school.

Then the music at Doc’s jukebox changed, got more charged, frankly, got more sassy and sexual far different from their parents’ sappy sentimental stuff that didn’t get anybody’s heart rate up. And she changed, well maybe not so much changed as got caught up in the new dispensation, the new moves. When they went on dates it wasn’t to the movies or to some restaurant but to Smiley’s Bar& Grille on the outskirts of town where old Smiley had a hot new cover band, the Rocking Rockets, playing all the latest big beat stuff from guys like Warren Smith with his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby that she flipped out on. Not that she, like Warren said, would dance on the tables and stuff like that but that she would dance with lots of guys, would be flirty, tease flirty right before his eyes. When he questioned her on it she just said “don’t be a square, daddy” and refused to discuss it further. And some nights when he called her mother answered to say she was not home, had gone out with the girls, or something like that. Yeah, he knew deep in his bones …

********

…he had changed, changed too much for her tastes, changed into a “square” just like all the parents in town and all the kids who didn’t want to have fun and just be like them and so she knew, sooner or later she was not sure which, she would have to drop him, drop him for somebody who was fun. The problem was that in square old North Adamsville that someone who was fun had not passed her door, but she had hopes. In the meantime she thought she would stick with old gloomy Gus him as he fretted his life away when she started swaying when the juke-box played some hot, latest rock and roll tune or the cover band at Smiley’s started her dancing to the beat on something like Warren Smith’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby.

Funny, as she thought back to that time a little over a year before when they had eyed each other in Miss Williams’ study hall that she was then attracted to his easy manner, his sly boyish-ness which she thought she could talk him out of with a little coaxing(he had made her laugh when after they became an “item” he said that the eyeing had really been furtive glances-he said funny things like that then). They had not spoken a word until they had spent what seemed like a lifetime dancing around each other at Doc’s Drugstore where he put in endless nickels and dimes in the juke-box and then just sat there dreamy-eyed looking at her until she said enough and went over to him and stood right in front of him and dared him to ignore her with her look. He had surrendered easily enough and they became an “item” after a subsequent drive-in movie date where she had shown him a few things in the back seat of her friend Debbie’s boyfriend’s car. He liked her doing that stuff and she knew he liked her doing that stuff although he was a very shy boy for the first few times. So this was how they had spent their last year of school together in some kind of bliss.

Things changed though, changed when a new breeze came through the town, when Doc’s juke-box started to almost jump off the walls what with the latest rock tunes coming one right after another. But he did not catch on, wanted to stay mired in his parents’ music and so the frets began-his about marriage and settling down, hers about having fun rocking the night away. The worse times had been when they went to Smiley’s, the hot-spot bar on the outside of town and who had plenty of booze and bop and guys who eyed her, maybe not shy furtively like he had but eyed her like they wanted to have a good time, wanted to have fun rather mope around and be square. He would just sit there and be mopey while she danced with a few guys, a couple of whom she had given her telephone number to although they had not worked out. She got to telling her mother sometimes that when he called to tell him she was out and that she didn’t know when she would be back. Even when, like this night, she was just sitting up in her room waiting for a new guy who had danced her off her feet the night before was supposed to call and maybe, just maybe, want to have fun …

***********

"Rock And Roll Ruby"

Well I took my Ruby jukin'
On the out-skirts of town
She took her high heels off
And rolled her stockings down
She put a quarter in the jukebox
To get a little beat
Everybody started watchin'
All the rhythm in her feet

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

Now Ruby started rockin' 'bout one o'clock
And when she started rockin'
She just couldn't stop
She rocked on the tables
And rolled on the floor
And Everybody yelled: "Ruby rock some more!"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

It was 'round about four
I thought she would stop
She looked at me and then
She looked at the clock
She said: "Wait a minute Daddy
Now don't get sour
All I want to do
Is rock a little bit more"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

One night my Ruby left me all alone
I tried to contact her on the telephone
I finally found her about twelve o'clock
She said: "Leave me alone Daddy
'cause your Ruby wants to rock"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

********

Billie’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame-Bill Haley And The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock

I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing a commercially- produced classic rock series over the past few years. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.

And we, we small time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billie who I will talk about later, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.

Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Yeah right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.

In many ways 1956 was the key year, at least to my recollection. And here is why. Elvis may have been burning up the stages, making all the teenage girls down South sweat, making slightly older women sweat and throw undergarments too, and every guy over about eight years old start growing sideburns before then but that was the year that I actually saw him on television and started be-bopping off his records. Whoa. And the same with Bill Haley and the Comets, even though in the rock pantheon they were old, almost has-been guys, by then. And Chuck Berry. And for the purposes of this particular review, James Brown, ah, sweet, please, please, please James Brown (and the Flames, of course) with that different black, black as the night, beat that my mother (and others too) would not even let in the house, and maybe not even in our whole white working- class neighborhood. But remember that transistor radio and remember when rock rocked.

Of course all of this remembrance is just so much lead up to a Billie story. You know Billie, Billie from “the projects” hills. William James Bradley to be exact. I told you about him once when I was reviewing a 30th anniversary of rock film concert segment by Bo Diddley. I told the story of how he, and we, learned first-hand down at the base, the nasty face of white racism in this society. No even music, and maybe particularly not even music, was excepted then from that dead of night racial divide, North or South if you really want to know. Yes, that Billie, who also happened to be my best friend, or maybe almost best friend we never did get it straight, in elementary school. Billie was crazy for the music, crazy to impress the tender young girls that he was very aware of, much more aware of than I was and earlier, with his knowledge, his love, and his respect for the music (which is where the innocent Bo Diddley imitation thing just mentioned came from although that story was later than the story I want to tell you now).

But see we were “projects kids,” and that meant, and meant seriously, no dough kids. No dough to make one look, a little anyway, like one of the hot male teen rock stars such as Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. Now this “projects” idea started out okay, I guess, the idea being that returning veterans from World War II, at least some vets like my father, needed a leg up in order to provide for their families. And low- rent public housing was the answer. Even if that answer was four-family unit apartment buildings really fit for one family, one growing three boy family anyway, and no space, no space at all for private, quiet dreams. Of course by 1955, ‘56 during the “golden age” of working- class getting ahead (or at least to many it must seem so now) there was a certain separation between those who had moved on to the great suburban ranch house dream land and those who were seemingly fated to end up as “the projects” fixtures, and who developed along the way a very identifiable projects ethos, a dog-eat-dog ethos if you want to know the truth. It ain’t pretty down at the base, down at the place where the thugs, drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters feed off the rough-edged working poor.

That didn’t stop Billie, or me for that matter, from having our like everybody else dreams, quiet spaced or not. In fact, Billie had during his long time there probably developed the finest honed-edge of “projects” ethos of anyone I knew, but that came later. For now, for the rock minute I want to speak of, Billie was distractedly, no beyond distraction as you will see, trying to make his big break through as a rock performer. See Billie knew, probably knew in his soul, but anyway from some fan magazine that he was forever reading that old Elvis and Jerry Lee (and many of the rockers of the day, black and white alike) were dirt poor just like us. Rough dirt poor too. Farm land, country, rural, shack, white trash, dirt poor which we with our “high style” city ways could barely comprehend.

And there was Elvis, for one, up in big lights. With all the cars, and not junkie old fin-tailed Plymouths or chromed Fords but Cadillacs, and half the girls in the world, and all of them “hot” (although we did not use that word then), or so it seemed. Billie was hooked and hooked hard on that rock star performer fantasy. It consumed his young passions. And for what purpose? If you answered to impress the girls, “the projects” girls right in front of him, hey, now you are starting to get it. And this is what this little story is about.

This was late 1956, maybe early 1957, anyway it’s winter, a cold hard winter in the projects, meaning all extra dough was needed for heat, or some serious stuff like that. But see here old Billie and I (as his assistant, or manager, it was never clear which but I was to be riding his star, no question) had no time for cold, for snow or for the no dough to get those things because what was inflaming our minds was that a teen caravan was coming to town in a few weeks. No, not to the projects, Christ no, but downtown at the high school auditorium. And what this teen caravan thing was (even though we were not officially teens and would not be so for a while) was a talent show, a big time talent show, like a junior American Bandstand television show, looking for guys and girls who could be the next teen heartthrobs. There were a lot of them in those days, those kinds of backwater talent shows and maybe now too.

This news is where two Billie things came into play so you get an idea of the kind of guy he was back then. First, one night, one dark, snowy night Billie had the bright idea than he and I should go around town and take down all the teen caravan announcement advertisements from the telephone poles and other spots where they were posted. We did, and I need say no more on the matter. Oh, except that a couple of days later, and for a week or so after that, there was a big full-page ad in the local newspaper and ads on the local radio. That’s one Billie thing and the other, well, let me back up.

When Billie got wind of the contest he went into one of his rants, a don’t mess with Billie or his idea of the moment rant and usually it was better if you didn’t, and that rant was directed first to no one else but his mother. He needed dough to get an outfit worthy of a “prince of rock” so that he could stand out for the judges. Moreover the song he was going to do was Bill Haley and The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock. I will say he knew that song cold, and the way I could tell was that at school one day he sang it and the girls went crazy. And some of the guys too. Hell, girls started following old Billie around. He was in heaven (honest, I on the other hand, was indifferent to them, or their charms just then). So the thought that he might win the contest was driving him mad (that same energy would be used later with less purpose but that story is for another day)

Hell, denim jeans, sneakers, and some old hand-down ragamuffin shirt from an older brother ain’t going to get anyone noticed, except maybe to be laughed at. Now, like I said, we were no dough projects boys. And in 1956 that meant serious problems, serious problems even without a damn cold winter. See, like I said before the projects were for those who were on the down escalator in the golden age of post-World War II affluence. In short, as much as he begged, bothered and bewildered his mother there was no dough, no dough at all for the kind of sparkly suit (or at least jacket) that Billie was desperate for. Hell, he even badgered his dad, old Billie, Senior, and if you badgered old Billie then you had better be ready for some hard knocks and learn how to pick yourself up off the ground, sometimes more than once. Except this time, this time something hit Old Billie, something more than that bottle of booze or six, hard stinky-smelling booze, that he used to keep his courage and television-watching up. He told Mrs. Billie (real name, Iris) that he would spring for the cloth if she would make the suit. Whoopee! We are saved and even Billie, my Billie, had a kind word for his father on this one.

I won’t bore you with the details of Mrs. Billie’s (there you have me calling her that, I always called her Mrs. Bradley, or ma’am) efforts on behalf of Billie’s career. Of course the material for the suit came from the Bargain Center located downtown near the bus terminal. You don’t know the Bargain Center? Sure you do, except it had a different name where you lived maybe and it has names like Wal-Mart and K-Mart, etc. now. Haven’t you been paying attention? Where do you think the material came from? Brooks Brothers? Please. Now this Bargain Center was the early low- rent place where I, and about half the project kids got their first day of school and Easter outfits (the mandatory twice yearly periods for new outfits in those days). You know the white shirts with odd-colored pin-stripes, a size or two too large, the black chinos with cuffs, christ with cuffs like some hayseed, and other items that nobody wanted someplace else and got a second life at the “Bargie.” At least you didn’t have to worry about hand-me-downs because most of the time the stuff didn’t wear that long.

I will say that Mrs. B. did pretty good with what she had to work with and that when the coat was ready it looked good, even if it was done only an hour before the show. Christ, Billie almost flipped me out with his ranting that day. And I had seen some bad scenes before. In any case it was ready. Billie went to change clothes upstairs and when he came down everybody, even me, hell, even Old Billie was ooh-ing and ah-ing. Now Billie, to be truthful, didn’t look anything like Bill Haley. I think he actually looked more like Jerry Lee. Kind of thin and wiry, lanky maybe, with brown hair and blue eyes and a pretty good chin and face. I would say now a face that girls would go for; although I am not sure they would all swoon over him, except maybe the giggly ones.

So off we go on the never on time bus, a bus worthy of its own stories, to downtown and the auditorium, even my mother and father who thought Billie was the cat’s meow when I brought him around. Billie’s father, Old Billie of the small dreams, took a pass on going. He had a Friday night boxing match that he couldn’t miss and the couch beckoned (an argument could be made that Old Billie was a man before his time in the couch potato department). However all is forgiven him this night for his big idea, and his savior dough. We got to the school auditorium okay and Billie left us for stardom as we got in our rooting section seats. A few minutes later Billie ran up to us to tell us that he was fifth on the list so don’t go anywhere, like out for a cigarette or something.

We sat through the first four acts, a couple of guys doing Elvis stuff (so-so) and a couple of girls (or rather trios of girls) who did some serious be-bop stuff and had great harmonies. Billie, I sensed, was going to have his work cut out for him this night. Finally Billie came out, prompted the four-piece backup band to his song, and he started for the mike. He started out pretty good, in good voice and a couple of nice juke moves, but then about half way through; as he was wiggling and swiggling through his Rock Around The Clock all of a sudden one of the arms of his jacket fell off and landed in the front row. Billie didn’t miss a beat. This guy was a showman. Then the other jacket arm fell off and also went into the first row. Except this time a couple of swoony girls, girls from our school were tussling, seriously tussling, each other for it. See, they thought it was part of Billie’s act. And what they didn’t know as Billie finished up was that Mrs. Billie (I will be kind to her and not call her what Billie called her) in her rush to finish up didn’t sew the arms onto the body of the jacket securely so they were just held together by some temporary stitches.

Well, needless to say Billie didn’t win (one of those girl trios did, and rightly so, although I didn’t tell Billie that). But next day, and many next days after that, Billie had more girls hanging off his arms than he could shake a stick at. And you know maybe Billie was on to something after all because I started to notice those used-to-been scrawny, spindly-legged, pigeon-toed giggling girls, their new found bumps and curves, and their previously unremarkable winsome girlish charms, especially when Billie would give me his “castoffs.” So maybe his losing was for the best. My “for the best.”

********

Rock Around The Clock

One, Two, Three O'clock, Four O'clock rock,
Five, Six, Seven O'clock, Eight O'clock rock.
Nine, Ten, Eleven O'clock, Twelve O'clock rock,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight.

Put your glad rags on and join me hon',
We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one.

CHORUS:
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'till broad daylight,
We're gonna rock, we're gonna rock around the clock tonight.

When the clock strikes two, three and four,
If the band slows down we'll yell for more.

CHORUS

When the chimes
ring five, six, and seven,
We'll be right in seventh heaven.

CHORUS

When it's eight, nine, ten, eleven too,

I'll be going strong and so will you.

CHORUS

When the clock strikes twelve we'll cool off then,
Start rockin' 'round the clock again.

CHORUS

Songwriters
MYERS, JAMES / FREEDMAN, MAX

Published by
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier (see review in April 2006 archives). I made some special points here last year about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in January 2006 archives). This year it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these effort centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism. That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

Pete Seeger, Champion of Folk Music and Social Change, Dies at 94

Markin Comment

There were more profound influences on my music appreciation development than Pete Seeger like the early Bob Dylan. There were more memorable songs than Pete’s that I heard when I first came to folk music after listening to Dave Von Ronk’s Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. But the transmission belt for all of that tradition, all of that after Woody Guthrie’s health failed him, was one Pete Seeger. That is a worthy epitaph for a man who gave the genre his all. RIP-Pete

By JON PARELESJAN. 28, 2014

Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 94.

His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was confirmed by his grandson Kitama Cahill Jackson.

Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10, from college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.

For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.

In his hearty tenor, Mr. Seeger, a beanpole of a man who most often played 12-string guitar or five-string banjo, sang topical songs and children’s songs, humorous tunes and earnest anthems, always encouraging listeners to join in. His agenda paralleled the concerns of the American left: He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond. “We Shall Overcome,” which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals, became a civil rights anthem.

Mr. Seeger was a prime mover in the folk revival that transformed popular music in the 1950s. As a member of the Weavers, he sang hits including Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” — which reached No. 1 — and “If I Had a Hammer,” which he wrote with the group’s Lee Hays. Another of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” became an antiwar standard. And in 1965, the Byrds had a No. 1 hit with a folk-rock version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Mr. Seeger’s setting of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

A Generation’s Mentor

Mr. Seeger was a mentor to younger folk and topical singers in the ’50s and ’60s, among them Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who founded Sweet Honey in the Rock. Decades later, Bruce Springsteen drew from Mr. Seeger’s repertory of traditional music about a turbulent America in recording his 2006 album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” and in 2009 he performed Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with Mr. Seeger at the Obama inaugural. At a Madison Square Garden concert celebrating Mr. Seeger’s 90th birthday, Mr. Springsteen introduced him as “a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along.”

Although he recorded dozens of albums, Mr. Seeger distrusted commercialism and was never comfortable with the idea of stardom. He invariably tried to use his celebrity to bring attention and contributions to the causes that moved him, or to the traditional songs he wanted to preserve.

Mr. Seeger saw himself as part of a continuing folk tradition, constantly recycling and revising music that had been honed by time.

During the McCarthy era Mr. Seeger’s political affiliations, including membership in the Communist Party in the 1940s, led to his being blacklisted and later indicted for contempt of Congress. The pressure broke up the Weavers, and Mr. Seeger disappeared from commercial television until the late 1960s. But he never stopped recording, performing and listening to songs from ordinary people. Through the decades, his songs have become part of America’s folklore.

“My job,” he said in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.”

Peter Seeger was born in Manhattan on May 3, 1919, to Charles Seeger, a musicologist, and Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger, a concert violinist. His parents later divorced.

He began playing the ukulele while attending Avon Old Farms, a private boarding school in Connecticut. His father and his stepmother, the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, collected and transcribed rural American folk music, as did folklorists like John and Alan Lomax. He heard the five-string banjo, which would become his main instrument, when his father took him to a square-dance festival in North Carolina.

Young Pete became enthralled by rural traditions. “I liked the strident vocal tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing,” he is quoted as saying in “How Can I Keep From Singing,” a biography by David Dunaway. “The words of the songs had all the meat of life in them. Their humor had a bite, it was not trivial. Their tragedy was real, not sentimental.”

Planning to be a journalist, Mr. Seeger attended Harvard, where he founded a radical newspaper and joined the Young Communist League. After two years he dropped out and went to New York City, where Alan Lomax introduced him to the blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly. Lomax also helped Mr. Seeger find a job cataloging and transcribing music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

Mr. Seeger met Guthrie, a songwriter who shared his love of vernacular music and agitprop ambitions, in 1940, when they performed at a benefit concert for migrant California workers. Traveling across the United States with Guthrie, Mr. Seeger picked up some of his style and repertory. He also hitchhiked and hopped freight trains by himself, learning and trading songs.

When he returned to New York later in 1940, Mr. Seeger made his first albums. He, Millard Lampell and Hays founded the Almanac Singers, who performed union songs and, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, antiwar songs, following the Communist Party line. Guthrie soon joined the group.

During World War II the Almanac Singers’ repertory turned to patriotic, anti-fascist songs, bringing them a broad audience, including a prime-time national radio spot. But the singers’ earlier antiwar songs, the target of an F.B.I. investigation, came to light, and the group’s career plummeted.

Before the group completely dissolved, however, Mr. Seeger was drafted in 1942 and assigned to a unit of performers. He married Toshi-Aline Ohta while on furlough in 1943. She would become essential to his work: he called her “the brains of the family.”

When he returned from the war he founded People’s Songs Inc., which published political songs and presented concerts for several years before going bankrupt. He also started his nightclub career, performing at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Mr. Seeger and Paul Robeson toured with the campaign of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, in 1948.

Forming the Weavers

Mr. Seeger invested $1,700 in 17 acres of land overlooking the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y., and began building a log cabin there in the late 1940s. (He lived in Beacon for the rest of his life.) In 1949, Mr. Seeger, Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman started working together as the Weavers. They were signed to Decca Records by Gordon Jenkins, who was the company’s music director and an arranger for Frank Sinatra. With Jenkins’s elaborate orchestral arrangements, the group recorded a repertoire that stretched from “If I Had a Hammer” and a South African song, “Wimoweh” (the title was Mr. Seeger’s mishearing of “Mbube,” the name of a South African hit by Solomon Linda), to an Israeli soldiers’ song, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” and a cleaned-up version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene.” Onstage, they also sang more pointed topical songs.

In 1950 and 1951 the Weavers were national stars, with hit singles and engagements at major nightclubs. Their hits included “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” and Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” and they sold an estimated four million singles and albums.

Their commercial success was dampened, however, when “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet that named performers with suspected Communist ties, appeared in June 1950 and listed Mr. Seeger, although by then he had quit the Communist Party. He later criticized himself for not having left the party sooner, though he continued to describe himself as a “communist with a small ‘c.’ ”

By the summer of 1951, the “Red Channels” citation and leaks from F.B.I. files had led to the cancellation of television appearances. In 1951, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigated the Weavers for sedition. And in February 1952, a former member of People’s Songs testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that three of the four Weavers were members of the Communist Party.

As engagements dried up, the Weavers disbanded, though they reunited occasionally in the mid-1950s. After the group recorded an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, Mr. Seeger left, citing his objection to promoting tobacco use.

Shut out of national exposure, Mr. Seeger returned primarily to solo concerts, touring college coffeehouses, churches, schools and summer camps, building an audience for folk music among young people. He started to write a long-running column for the folk-song magazine Sing Out! And he recorded prolifically for the independent Folkways label, singing everything from children’s songs to Spanish Civil War anthems.

In 1955 he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In his testimony he said, “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature.” He also stated: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

Mr. Seeger offered to sing the songs mentioned by the congressmen who questioned him. The committee declined.

Mr. Seeger was indicted in 1957 on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. He was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison, but the next year an appeals court dismissed the indictment as faulty. After the indictment, Mr. Seeger’s concerts were often picketed by the John Birch Society and other rightist groups. “All those protests did was sell tickets and get me free publicity,” he later said. “The more they protested, the bigger the audiences became.”

The Folk Revival Years

By then the folk revival was prospering. In 1959, Mr. Seeger was among the founders of the Newport Folk Festival. The Kingston Trio’s version of Mr. Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” reached the Top 40 in 1962, soon followed by Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a Hammer,” which rose to the Top 10.

***Pete Seeger Passes at 94-Yes, Where Have All The Flowers Gone ....

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator –The Scorched World

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.

*******

Oh sure I have a million stories to tell about my experiences now that I have retired after forty years working as an operative (peeper, shamus, gumshoe, private dick or whatever your dig at name for us, hah, hah now although in the old days I would get very hot under the collar if anybody called me anything except operative) with the International Operations Organization. Stories about murder and mayhem, deceit and deviousness, strange mental states and cold-bloodedness. Ordinary stories too about three-day lost husbands, bums for the most part, that the searching wives would best get rid of but you know love-at least three-day search love, hanky-panky among the upper-crust ending in huge settlements and nice payouts to the organization, and ho-hum dead-beat repo cases. A few cases too, not many especially not in the hard-pressed 1930s, we didn’t take, mainly because there was crass and gross illegality involved or somebody wanted us to look the other way when we should not have looked the other way.

Yes I have seen it all the worst side of mankind (male and female okay, and sometimes the women were the worst capable of things no guy would even think of doing no matter how much he hated whoever he hated), the backbiting, the scratching eyes out to beat someone out of something, the heat of passion, and not in the bedroom where it belongs, turning to dust. Not a pretty sight and not for the faint-hearted which is why I lasted for forty years, forty years of slugging it out to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world, and some days just for the pay. A lot of days for the pay when I was younger, was married, shortly married, and had a couple of kids underfoot although this business like the public coopers is note for family men. Right now my mind in on one of the last cases, the Bradford case, not because it was the worst, far from it, probably the Giles case with murder, mayhem, sexual perversion of the worst kind, and some depravity fit that bill, but because it didn’t make sense, didn’t make sense that a couple of well-off young women with plenty of prospects, plenty of guys ready to tie into the Bradford fortune, would go over the deep end for no real reason, just for kicks, kicks that we had to move might and main to cover up. Let me tell you about it.

It all started when John Bradford, the biggest banker in San Francisco, whose family had started the business after the gold rush charging big interest for mining equipment and eats to half-illiterate prospectors, came to the agency looking for help when his two daughters, Anne and Prudence, went missing after not checking in for about a week. (Yes Mr. Bradford was some distant descendant of somebody on the Mayflower crew although that doesn’t, I don’t think, explain what happened, the problems of in-breeding among the rich and getting kinky results over the generations, not by any reasonable accounting) We had done a previous case with Mr. Bradford over an employee embezzlement scheme and so he came back to us on that recommendation, although we never apprehended the scoffer and last I heard still hadn’t although somebody told me once that had a lead on him in Tahiti.

You might well ask why if Mr. Bradford was worried about his missing daughters, maybe having been kidnapped or worse, he didn’t go to the police, the FBI or something like your average guy would do. That is where the rich, and in his case the very rich, are different. They are worried about image, maybe about what would that Mayflower forbear think, or the country club set they belong with old hags ready to spread any juicy gossip at the drop of a hat, they want things, including messy things and maybe especially messy things hushed up. They can also afford to pay for extra service, extra service that hard-pressed police forces could not or would not provide. Bradford did not want the case ending up after three days in the cold files. Besides in this case the two young women had something of a history of walking on the wild side and so hushing it up was just in case they were involved in some freefall caper. And so it landed on the agency’s lap and the boss assigned me to the case since he believed from what Bradford told him (not all of which he told me since Bradford worked, as he had on the previous embezzlement case which hinder our operation, on a need-to-know basis) that it would involve no heavy lifting, meaning no shooting or fists, not many anyway, something easy as I eased into retirement.

Here is the way it went down, I started with the servants at the Bradford estate to see if they knew anything. Usually when the principals, the guys paying, are clueless the help knows every juicy detail and can be coaxed into departing with that precious information for a few bucks. Nothing doing this time, except some information about the pair having packed several suitcase before they left. None of servants saw that as unusual since the girls had taken an entourage’s worth of baggage before even on short trips. Then I went the rounds of friends, relatives, and acquaintances but no dice, no dice mainly because these sources were apparently working under some national security directive about giving information to a cop, public or private. Once would think, although one would be wrong, to expect friends to let their concern for the whereabouts of kindred perhaps head down in some deep ravine to trump their blind loyalty.

A breakthrough did come when I went to the Knick-Knack Club, a place, a watering hole for the young, rich, and infamous where the young women hung out, a place they had been seen to frequent several times before their disappearances. That tipster, who shall remain anonymous just in case the forces of evil that were unleashed when we broke the case decide to do something further about it, told me that I should check with a guy named Johnny Firestone because Anne and Prudence had often been seen in his company. At first that name did not ring a bell but checking back with our agency files I found out that the name should have been ringing many bells. Johnny, or rather his father and then him when the father retired (retired to the bottom of San Francisco Bay whether by accident or foul deed was never ascertained but you figure out the percentages), was knee-deep in the drug trafficking business in the Bay Area which meant some big-time operations, many connections, many serious connections with the Asian sources and thus connected big time on the West Coast. It also seemed that Sonny Boy had taken up a new hobby, a new stream of revenue, branched out into high-end pornography. High-end meaning that the models were rich, wicked, perverted or whatever else made them get their kicks. Had been working out of some abandoned warehouse over in the East Bay, although the whereabouts took a little snooping, mainly tailing Johnny on his rounds.

So I followed that trail over to a converted warehouse in Haywood where Sonny Boy did his shoots. What would happen there, and what did happen with Anne and Prudence, was that Johnny would get them high, high as kites, for a while and then suggest that modelling scam. Maybe some smoke, maybe cocaine, maybe something spicier but get them indebted high then he would start to proposition them about becoming models, exclusive models who might make it onto a fashion magazine cover. If that lure was not enough the he would play to their wild sides. Get them all good and aroused to do something out of the ordinary, something new, something kinky. It came out later that he had that talent with women, at least rich young women. Then he could go either way-make money selling the photos to rich old perverts who got their kicks from seeing their own in a debased condition or, and here is where the real profit center was, blackmail guys like Bradford, bleed them forever. Nice work, Sonny Boy.

In this case both young women were eager to get their kicks that way. According to a girlfriend who went with them on one of the shoots they started taking their clothes off without prompting (and without a drug inducement). One afternoon, after trailing Johnny, and having another operative trail the girls from a sleazy walk-up over in East Oakland where the girls were hiding out and which I had discovered by following them one time rather than Johnny we closed down the operation. Before it was all over though some shots were fired, some fists flew, including mine on a so-called easy case, Johnny fell down wounded, and a very large sum of Bradford money changed hands in order to get all the negatives and all the prints bought and burned. Johnny is still operating his drug operations since no way on this good, green earth was scion Bradford pressing charges. Yeah, the rich. Last I heard the girls were married to some stockbrokers who are clueless about what their brides are capable of. Or maybe that is exactly why they grabbed the pair. Either way, good luck, good luck gentlemen reigning that pair in.

Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars

Learn what our government is doing in our name!

We will have a discussion after the movie.

Thursday, January 30 at 7:00 at the Robbins Library, in the Community Room
700 Massachusetts Avenue, Arlington (on the 77 and 79 bus lines)

In Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars, director Robert Greenwald investigates the impact of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere.The film highlights the stories of 16 year old Tariq Aziz, killed by a drone in 2011; and school teacher, Rafiq ur Rehamn, whose mother was killed and children hospitalized due to a drone strike in 2012. Unmanned includes more than seventy interviews. Prominent among these are a former American drone operator; Pakistani families of drone victims who are seeking legal redress; high ranking politicians and some of the military’s top brass, warning against blowback from the loss of innocent life.

For information about drones, see the website: nodronesnetwork.blogspot.com

Sponsored by Eastern Massachusetts Anti-Drones Network, justicewithpeace.org, (617) 776-6524.

Co-sponsored by Arlington United for Justice with Peace, WILPF Boston and Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade.

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AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Pete Seeger, Champion of Folk Music and Social Change, Dies at 94

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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Pete Seeger, Champion of Folk Music and Social Change, Dies at 94

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Pete Seeger: A Life Lived in the Power of Song

Pete Seeger: A Life Lived in the Power of Song

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Pete Seeger on Climate Change in 2007