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Next
DPP Membership Meeting
Monday,
September 14:
6:30-8:30pm,
Vietnamese-American Center, 42 Charles St. (Near Fields Corner T station,
Parking lot available at VACC). This meeting will focus on Summer Reports and
planning for Fall Projects, including the DPP Retreat. Here are some
highlights:
Local
Politics:
National Social
Issues:
International
Events:
DPP Organization /
Infrastructure:
Announcements
*
* * *
MANTRA
FOR 9/11: Fourteen Years Later
Fourteen
years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites,
the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions,
and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and
Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a
military-first foreign policy of repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen
years of a culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as
well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks. Fourteen years of the burial of
American democracy (or rather its recreation as a billionaire’s playground and a
source of spectacle and entertainment but not governance)… Fourteen years later,
don’t you find it improbable that Washington’s post-9/11 policies in the Middle
East helped lead to the establishment of the Islamic State’s
“caliphate” in parts of fractured Iraq and Syria and to a movement of almost
unparalleled extremism that has successfully “franchised” itself out from Libya to Nigeria to Afghanistan? If, on September 12, 2001, you had predicted such
a possibility, who wouldn’t have thought you mad? … Fourteen years later, isn’t it possible to think of 9/11 as
a mass grave into which significant aspects of American life as we knew it have
been shoveled? More
US
Gov’t Agents Involved In Almost Every Major Terror Plot Since
9/11
Since
9/11, agencies like the FBI have been tasked with preventing the next terrorist
attack. However, in their zeal to catch terrorists before they strike, they’ve
created more terrorist plots than any actual terror groups… The FBI is
responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than any other
organization. More than al-Qaida, more than al-Shabaab, more than the Islamic
State. According to Aaronson, “The FBI is much better at creating terrorists
than it is at catching terrorists.” In the 14 years since the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, Aaronson said there have only been about six actual domestic terrorist
incidents, including the Boston Marathon bombing and a handful of failed
incidents. By contrast, he said the FBI has arrested dozens for “material
support” of terrorism, usually impoverished or mentally ill Muslim-Americans who
were convinced to take part in terrorist plots by high-paid undercover
informants. More
*
* * *
Everyone
must know by now that the Iran Agreement is certain to go into effect, now that Senate Democrats have
(somewhat surprisingly!) held firm and denied the opponents of the deal to bring
a resolution of disapproval to the floor. Only four Democratic senators
(Schumer of NY, Menendez of NJ. Cardin of Maryland, and Manchin of W.VA.) stood
with the unanimous Republicans in opposing the agreement. In the House, Republican extremists are planning a more complicated
response, which will have no effect on the actual agreement. In our state, the
two senators voted with the rest of the Democrats against cloture;
Representatives Neal and Keating have now declared support, making our delegation
unanimously for the agreement (with Capuano technically only “leaning” but sure
to vote for the deal).
More
disturbing is the anti-Iranian (and pro-Israel) rhetoric universally expressed
by agreement supporters, which will limit the possibilities of real detent with
Iran and a lessening of tensions in the Middle East – while flooding the region
with ever more US armaments. Some Democrats may also be planning to support a
resolution to “strengthen” the agreement that will contain “poison pills” to possibly derail it.
House
GOP disapproves of Iran deal in symbolic vote
In
an anticlimactic end to the acrimonious debate in Congress over the Iran nuclear
deal, the House voted against the agreement Friday -- a largely symbolic move
that won’t prevent the pact from taking effect next week. The 162-269 vote
against the accord between Obama, Iran and five other nations will have little
practical effect beyond putting House lawmakers on the record, because a day
earlier Senate Democrats blocked an attempt to scuttle the pact… Before the
vote, House lawmakers passed two resolutions rebuking Obama on the deal. The
first accuses Obama of violating a congressional review law by failing to give
Congress access to documents from an independent nuclear watchdog agency and
Iran. Republicans have said they are unwilling to support the larger nuclear
deal without having access to information in those so-called "side-deals,” which
the administration says are unrelated to the nuclear deal. The second measure,
which
 was
passed mostly along party lines, would prevent Obama from lifting any sanctions
against Iran. Neither measure is likely to make it to Obama’s desk for a
signature. More
Pro-Israel
Group Suffers Stinging Political Defeat
The loss has raised
difficult questions about the future of Aipac, a group formed in 1951 just a few
years after the birth of Israel. Aipac has long drawn its political potency from
its reservoirs of loyalty among members of both parties, but that bipartisan
veneer all but vanished in recent weeks as the debate over the Iran deal became
increasingly bitter… Aipac now faces a debate within its ranks about how to
respond to the defeat, whether by exacting a political price from lawmakers —
all of them Democrats — who defied its wishes and supported the Iran deal, or
moving swiftly to mend fences with lawmakers and White House officials angered
by the group’s efforts to kill the deal… “That poses a real challenge to an
organization that absolutely requires bipartisanship to maintain its resilience
and strength.” More
The
Iran Deal and the End of the Israel Lobby
The
miscalculations by opponents of the Iran deal began with a poor grasp of public
opinion. They imagined they could foment a broad public backlash, and opponents
frequently, and triumphantly, cited opinion polls showing more respondents
disapproved than approved of the Iran deal. But the results of these polls
varied widely. Small changes in wording produced wildly varying results,
reflecting the fact that few people knew or cared much about the issue. Turning
a foreign-policy issue with no immediate salience to American security — even a
nuclear-armed Iran, a worst-case scenario, would not involve an attack on
Americans at home or abroad — into an issue Americans would actively care about
was never realistic… Over the last 15 years, the foreign-policy debate in Israel
has moved steadily rightward. (In the last election, left-of-center Israeli
parties relied on domestic issues, rather than appealing for territorial
compromise.) The Israeli right favors either permanent occupation of the West
Bank, or an occupation that lasts until such time as the Palestinians produce a
pro-Zionist government, which is functionally the same thing. That perspective
has become increasingly coterminous with the American “pro-Israel” view. At last
year’s AIPAC conference, some 65 percent of the attendees were Republican. That skewed
perspective has pushed the American Jewish establishment to the right of
American Jewry as a whole. More
Slaughtering the
Truth and the False Choice of War on Iran
Even outspoken
supporters of the nuclear
deal signed between Iran and the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, China,
Russia and Germany) rely on myriad entrenched
myths and falsehoods about Iran's nuclear program to make their case. For
instance, the constant claim that the agreement "prevents Iran from building a
nuclear weapon" is a facile talking point that assumes an Iranian drive for a
bomb that has never actually existed… In essence, even the deal's own
supporters buy into ahistorical, Netanyahu-inspired narratives of malevolent Iranian intent and prepare their appeals from there. Unfortunately, this is unsurprising and a direct
result of the consistent failure of both the media and policymakers to present
accurate information. More
Iran's 'Nuclear
Ambitions' Go Unquestioned in Coverage of Iran Deal Momentum
As Democratic
senators declared their support for the deal struck between Iran and six world
powers–an agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action–corporate
media coverage of this momentum is leaving out at least one crucial detail: the
lack of evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb… Reporters Carl
Hulse and David Herszenhorn could have pointed out, as James Risen and Mark
Mazzetti did on the Times‘ front page three years ago (2/24/12; FAIR.org, 2/9/15), that “American intelligence analysts continue to
believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear
bomb.” Or quoted, as Seymour Hersh did (New Yorker, 6/6/11), longtime IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei’s statement
that he had not seen “a shred of evidence” that Iran was trying to weaponize its
uranium. Or at least included, as basic balance, the fact that Iran had
consistently maintained that it has no intention of building a nuclear weapon
(FAIR.org, 9/30/13). More
 Netanyahu Makes Quick
Pivot From Loss on Iran Deal
In the week
since it became clear that Congress would not block the Iranian nuclear deal he loathes,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has largely toned down his rhetoric on the issue and
pivoted to others… David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel news
site, observed, “He is not particularly interested in playing up the fact
that a deal he bitterly opposed is going through.” Mr. Horovitz added, “Although
he’s not saying that the cause is lost, if he hammers away at the same level, he
reminds everybody that it’s been lost.” …The stinging loss on Iran may actually
remove a headache for Mr. Netanyahu, as many American leaders are wary of
seeming to pile on by pressuring him on Palestinian statehood. More
Israeli officials:
Netanyahu's fight against Iran deal not a failure
The senior
officials claimed that Netanyahu's campaign against the deal led many Americans
to understand the need for increased U.S. aid to Israel. "There is great
support for the Israeli position, both from American public opinion and from
Congress," officials said, adding that the American mindset believes that
Israeli is an ally and Iran is a terror-enabling state. "Even those Americans
backing the deal say that the U.S. should further strengthen its relationship
and alliance with Israel." More
Clinton
Wraps Last-Minute Endorsement of Iran Deal with Hawkish Threats of Military
Force
Though
she endorsed the deal, which seeks to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear
weapon by forcing controls onto the country's nuclear energy program, Clinton
vowed that she would do so with skepticism and—as many have pointed out—an eye
on a military alternative.
"The
outcome of the deal in Congress is no longer in much doubt," she said, speaking
at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., "so we've got to start looking
ahead as to what's next: enforcing the deal, deter Iran and its proxies, and
strengthening our allies," which was largely in reference to neighboring Israel…
If elected, Clinton vowed to "deepen America's unshakeable commitment to
Israel's security" by "guaranteeing Israel's qualitative military edge" in the
Middle East. To do so, she said she would strengthen their missile defense
system, and increase military support and intelligence sharing.
More
Will
American Weapons Flood Middle East After Iran Deal?
The
region is about to enter a new arms race fueled by U.S. efforts to reassure
Israel and various Sunni countries that feel threatened by the Shi’ite Islamist
government in Tehran. Indeed, American defense companies are already signing
billion-dollar deals that will support this new push — a reality that Iranian
officials are beginning to understand. “This is one of the U.S. policies that we
think is wrong,” a senior Iranian official told reporters during a recent
briefing in New York. “If the United States wants tranquility to prevail… why is
it adding to the arsenal there?” …The Obama administration is already reaching
out to regional players to begin discussing post-deal security arrangements.
Israeli officials, still consumed in their fight against the deal in Congress,
have thus far refused to participate in post-deal security discussions with the
administration. But they are expected to do so once the agreement gets the
congressional green light… The Obama administration has already approved massive
arms sales programs to Saudi Arabia and other regional players. These include a
major contract for upgrading the Saudi navy, a massive $1 billion arms deal to
replenish Saudi munitions used up in its war against the Iranian-backed Houthi
rebels in Yemen, and sales of helicopters and radar systems.
More
Sending MOPs and
Bombers to Israel: Big Mistake
Over the past
week, the failure of the opponents of the Iran nuclear deal to kill it in
Congress has become a foregone conclusion. With that in mind, advocates of war
with Iran have adopted a new idea: giving Israel the means to attack Iran on its
own, without US assistance. The thinking goes that the Israelis, unhindered by
Obama’s fecklessness, will have the wherewithal to do what needs to be done…
Sending strategic bombers to Israel is a bad idea. It’s bad enough that the
Israelis probably won’t take them. But it could get even worse if they decided
to make a go of it… In recent days, the idea has
proliferated. A Washington Post op-ed by Dennis Ross and David Petraeus on
August 25 reiterated Deptula’s proposal. Walter Reich, former director of the US
Holocaust Museum, recommended that President Obama guarantee Israeli access to
Massive Ordnance Penetrators
| |||||||||||||||||
Friday, September 11, 2015
Present At The Creation-Chuck Berry’s Maybelline (1955)
Present At The Creation-Chuck Berry’s Maybelline (1955)
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Deep in the dark red scare Cold War
night, still brewing then even after Uncle Joe fell down in his Red Square
drunken stupor one night and never came back, so yeah still brewing after he
kissed off in his vast red earth, still brewing as a child remembered in dark
back of school dreams about Soviet nightmares under Uncle Joe wondering how the
kids got through it, and still brewing too when Miss Winot in her pristine
glory told each and every one of her fourth grade charges, us, that come that
Russkie madness, come the Apocalypse, come the big bad ass mega-bombs (of
course being pristine and proper she did not dig down to such terms as “big bad
ass” but let’s face it that is what she meant) that each and every one of her
charges shall come that thundering god-awful air raid siren call duck, quickly
and quietly, under his or her desk and then place his or his hands, also
quickly and quietly, one over the other on the top of his or her head, a small
breeze was coming to the land.
Maybe nobody saw it coming although the
more I think about the matter somebody, some bodies knew something, not those supposedly
in the know about such times, those who are supposed to catch the breezes
before they move beyond their power to curtain them. Take guys like my older brother
Franklin and his friends, Benny and Jimmy, who were playing some be-bop stuff up in his room (Ma refused to let him
play his songs on the family record player down center stage in the living room
or flip the dial on the kitchen radio away from her tunes of the roaring 1940s,
her and my father’s coming of age time, so up his room like some mad monk doing
who knows what because I was busy worrying about riding bicycles or something).Here’s
the real tip-off though he and his boys would go out Friday nights to Jack
Slack’s bowling alleys not to bowl, although that was the cover story to
questioning mother, but to hang around Freddie O’Toole’s car complete with
turned on amped up radio (station unknown then but later WMEX) and dance, dance
with girls, get it, to stuff like Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 (a great song tribute to a great automobile which nobody
in our neighborhood could come close to affording so reduced to cheapjack Fords
and Plymouths), and guys who even today I don’t know the names of even with YouTube
giving everybody with every kind of musical inclination a blast to the pass
ticket. Or, how about the times we, the family would go up to Boston for some
Catholic thing in the South End at Holy Cross Cathedral and smack across from
the church was the later famous Red Hat Club where guys were blasting away at pianos,
on guitars and on big ass sexy saxes and it was not the big band sound my folks
listened to or cool, cool be-bop jazz either but music from jump street, etched
in the back of my brain because remember I’m still fussing over bikes and stuff
like that. Or how about every time we went down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston
as the sun went down, the “Negro” part before Huntington Avenue (an area that
Malcolm X knew well a decade before) and we stopped at the ten billion lights
and all you would hear is this bouncing beat coming from taverns, from the old
time townhouse apartments and black guys dressed “to the nines,” all flash
dancing on the streets with dressed “to the nines” good-looking black girls.
Memory bank.
So some guys knew, gals too don’t
forget after all they had to dig the beat, that beat out of some Africa breeze
mixed with sweated Southern lusts if the thing was going to work out. Maybe though
the guys in the White House were too busy worrying about what Uncle Joe’s
progeny were doing out in the missile silos of Minsk, maybe the professional
television talkers on Meet The Press
wanted to discuss the latest turn in national and international politics for a
candid world to hear and missed what was happening out in the cookie-cutter
neighborhoods, and maybe the academic sociologists and professional
criminologists were too wrapped up in figuring out why Marlon Brando was
sulking in his corner boy kingdom (and wreaking havoc on a fearful small town
world when he and the boys broke out), why
Johnny Spain had that “shiv” ready to do murder and mayhem to the next
midnight passer-by, and why well-groomed and fed James Dean was brooding in the
“golden age” land of plenty but the breeze was coming.
(And you could add in the same brother
Franklin who as I was worrying about bikes, the two pedal two kind getting “from
hunger” to get a Brando bike, a varoom bike, so this girl, Wendy, from school, would
take his bait, a girl that my mother fretted was from the wrong side of town,
her way of saying a tramp but she was smart as hell once I found out about her
a few years later after she, they had left town on some big ass Norton but that
is after the creation so I will let it go for now.)
And then it came, came to us in our
turn, came like some Kansas whirlwind, came like the ocean churning up the big
waves crashing to a defenseless shoreline, came if the truth be known like the
“second coming” long predicted and the brethren, us, were waiting, waiting like we had been waiting
all our short spell lives. Came in a funny form, or rather ironically funny
forms, as it turned out.
Came one time, came big as 1954 turned
to 1955 and a guy, get this, dressed not in sackcloth or hair-shirt but in a
sport’s jacket, a Robert Hall sport’s jacket from the off the rack look of it
when he and the boys were “from hunger,” playing for coffee and crullers before
on the low life circuit, a little on the heavy side with a little boy’s regular
curl in his hair and blasted the whole blessed world to smithereens. Blasted
every living breathing teenager, boy or girl, out of his or her lethargy, got
the blood flowing. The guy Bill Haley, goddam an old lounge lizard band guy who
decided to move the beat forward from cool ass be-bop jazz and sweet romance
popular music and make everybody, every kid jump, yeah Big Bill Haley and his
Comets, the song Rock Around The Clock.
Came a little more hep cat too, came
all duck walk and sex moves, feet moving faster than Bill could ever do, came out
of Saint Loo, came out with a crazy beat. Came out in suit and tie all swagger.
Came out with a big baby girl guitar that twisted up the chords something fierce
and declared to the candid world, us, that Maybelline was his woman. But get
this, because what did we know of “color” back then when we lived in an all-white
Irish Catholic neighborhoods and since we heard what we heard of rock and rock
mostly on the radio we were shocked when we found out the first time that he
was a “Negro” to use the parlance of the times, a black man making us go to “jump
street.” And we bought into it, bought into the beat, and joined him in saying
Mister Beethoven you and your brethren best move over.
Here is the funny thing, funny since we
were present at the creation, present in spite of every command uttered by Miss
Winot against it, declaring the music worse than that Russkie threat if you
believed her (a few kids, girls mainly, did whether to suck up to her since she
would take their entreaties although boys were strictly “no go” and I know
having spent many a missed sunny afternoon doing some silly “punishment” for
her). We were just too young to deeply imbibe the full measure of what we were
hearing. See this music, music we started calling rock and roll once somebody
gave it a name (super DJ impresario Alan Freed as we found out later after we
had already become “children of rock and roll”) was meant, was blessedly meant
to be danced to which meant in that boy-girl age we who didn’t even like the
opposite sex as things stood then were just hanging by our thumbs.
Yeah, was meant to be danced to at
“petting parties” in dank family room basements by barely teenage boys and
girls. Was meant to be danced to at teenage dance clubs where everybody was
getting caught up on learning the newest dance moves and the latest “cool”
outfits to go along with that new freedom. Was meant to serve as a backdrop at
Doc’s Drugstore’s soda fountain where Doc had installed a jukebox complete with
all the latest tunes as boys and girls shared a Coke sipping slowly with two
straws hanging out in one frosted glass. Was meant to be listened to by corner
boys at Jack Slack’s bowling alley where Jack eventually had set up a small
dance floor so kids could dance while waiting for lanes to open (otherwise everybody
would be still dancing out in front of O’Toole’s “boss” car complete with amped-up
radio not to Jack’s profit). Was meant to be listened to as the sun went down
in the west at the local drive-in while the hamburgers and fries were cooking
and everybody was waiting for darkness to fall so the real night could begin,
the night of dancing in dark corner and exploring the mysteries of the
universe, or at least of Miss Sarah Brown. Was even meant to be listened to on fugitive
transistor radios in the that secluded off-limits to adults and little kids
(us) where teens, boys and girls, mixed and matched in the drive-in movie night
(and would stutter some nonsense to questioning parents who wanted to know the
plot of the movies, what movies, Ma).
Yeah, we were just a little too young
even if we can legitimately claim to have been present at the creation. But we
will catch up, catch up with a vengeance.
In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Song-Catcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style
In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Song-Catcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style
From The Pen Of Josh Breslin
Listen above to a YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist looking for roots in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads in the 1850s, Charles Seeger (and maybe his son Peter too in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Lomaxes, father and son, in the 1930s and 1940s)"discovered" the song in 1916 in the deep back hills and hollows of rural Kentucky. (I refuse to buy into that “hollas” business that folk-singers back in the early 1960s, guys and gals some of who went to Harvard and other elite schools and who would be hard-pressed to pin-point say legendary Harlan County or story and song insisted on pronouncing and writing hollows to show their one-ness with the roots, the root music of the desperately poor and uneducated. So hollows.)
Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, certainly with not the wistful or sorrowful end of the love spectrum about false true lovers although even then I had been through that experience, more than once I am sorry to say, implied in the lyrics. Or so I though at the time. I had heard the song the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening on my transistor radio up in my room in Carver where I grew up to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston that I could pick up at that hour hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene). That night I heard the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk singing his version of the old song like some latter-day Jehovah or Old Testament prophet something that I have mentioned elsewhere he probably secretly would have been proud to acknowledge. (Secretly since then he was some kind of high octane Marxist/Trotskyist/Socialist firebrand in his off-stage hours and hence a practicing atheist.) His version of the song quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.
All this as prelude to a question that had haunted me for a long time, the question of why I, a child of rock and roll, you know Bill Haley, La Verne Baker, Wanda Jackson, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like had been drawn to, and am still drawn to the music of the mountains, the music of the hills and hollows, mostly, of Appalachia. You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago.
The Carter Family hard out of Clinch Mountain down in Virginia someplace famously arrived via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when fledgling radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music to fill the air and their catalogs. Fill in what amounted to niche music since the radio’s range back then was mostly local and if you wanted to sell soap, perfume, laundry detergent, coffee, flour on the air then you had to play what the audience would listen to and buy the advertiser’s products once they were filled into how wonderful they smelled, tasted, or felt. The Seegers and Lomaxes and a host of others, mainly agents of the record companies looking to bring in new talent, went out into the sweated dusty fields sweaty handkerchiefs in hand to talk to some guy who they had heard played the Saturday night juke joints, out to the Saturday night red barn dance with that lonesome fiddle player bringing on the mist before dawn sweeping down from the hills, out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren to seek out that brother who jammed so well at that juke joint or red barn dance, out to the juke joint themselves if they could stand Willie Jack’s freshly brewed liquor, un-bonded of course since about 1789, down to the mountain general store to check with Mister Miller and grab whatever, or whoever was available maybe sitting right there in front of the store. Some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.
But back to the answer to my haunting question. The thing was simplicity itself. See my father, Prescott, hailed (nice word, right) from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky, tucked down in the mountains near the Ohio, long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there, get out of a short, nasty, brutish life as a coalminer, already having worked the coal as had a few of his older brothers and his father and grandfather. During his tour of duty after having fought and bled a little in his share of the Pacific War against the Japanese before he was demobilized he had been stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base. During that stay he attended like a lot of lonely soldiers, sailors and Marines who had been overseas a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor in the late 1950s and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. (Ironically those moves south for cheaper labor were not that far from his growing up home although when asked by the bosses if wanted move down there he gave them an emphatic “no.”)
All during my childhood though along with that popular music, you know the big band sounds and the romantic and forlorn ballads that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player and the mother’s helper kitchen radio.
But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott, Junior was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain music and those sainted hills and hollows were in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
[Sometimes life floors you though, comes at you not straight like the book, the good book everybody keeps touting and fairness dictates but through a third party, through some messenger for good or ill, and you might not even be aware of how you got that sings-song in your head. Aware of where you are, how you got that sings-song in your head and why a certain song or set of songs “speaks” to you despite every fiber of your being clamoring for you to go the other way. Some things, some cloud puff things maybe going back to before you think you could remember like your awestruck father in way over his head with three small close together boys, no serious job prospects, little education, maybe, maybe not getting some advantage from the G.I. Bill that was supposed lift all veteran boats, all veterans of the bloody atolls and islands, hell, one time savagely fighting over a coral reef against the Japanese occupiers if you can believe that, who dutifully and honorably served the flag singing some misbegotten melody. A melody learned in his childhood down among the hills and hollows, down where the threads of the old country, old country being British Isles and places like that. The stuff collected in Child ballads back then in the 1850s that got bastardized by ten thousand no longer used for its original purpose red barn dance singers when guys like Buell or Hobart added their take on what they thought the words meant and passed that on to kindred and the gens. The norm of the oral tradition of the folk so don’t get nervous unless there had been some infringement of the copyright laws, not likely.
Passed on too that sorrowful sense of life of people who stayed sedentary too long, too long on Clinch Mountain or Black Mountain or Missionary Mountain long after the land ran out and he, that benighted father of us all, in his turn sang it as a lullaby to his boys. And the boys’ ears perked up to that song, that song of mountain sadness about lost blue-eyed boys, about forsaken loves when the next best thing came along, about spurned brides resting fretfully under the great oak, about love that had no place to go because the parties were too proud to step back for a moment, about the hills of home, lost innocence, you name it, and although he/they could not name it that sadness stuck.
Stuck there not to bear fruit for decades and then one night somebody told one of the boys a story, told it true as far as he knew about that father’s song, about how his father had worked the Ohio River singing and cavorting with the women, how he bore the title of “the Sheik” in remembrance of those black locks and those fierce charcoal black eyes that pierced a woman’s heart. So, yes, Buell and Hobart, and the great god Jehovah come Sunday morning preaching time did their work, did it just fine and the sons finally knew that that long ago song had a deeper meaning than they could ever have imagined.]
COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
(A.P. Carter)
(A.P. Carter)
The Carter Family - 1932
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning
They will first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
To make you think that they love you true
Straightway they'll go and court some other
Oh that's the love that they have for you
Do you remember our days of courting
When your head lay upon my breast
You could make me believe with the falling of your arm
That the sun rose in the West
I wish I were some little sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I would fly away to my false true lover
And while he'll talk I would sit and cry
But I am not some little sparrow
I have no wings nor can I fly
So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow
And try to pass my troubles by
I wish I had known before I courted
That love had been so hard to gain
I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden
And fastened it down with a silver chain
Young men never cast your eye on beauty
For beauty is a thing that will decay
For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden
How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away
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ALTERNATE VERSION:
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a star on summer morning
They first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
And make you think they love you so well
Then away they'll go and court some other
And leave you there in grief to dwell
I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks are black as ink
I'd write a letter to my lost true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink
For love is handsome, love is charming
And love is pretty while it's new
But love grows cold as love grows old
And fades away like the mornin' dew
And fades away like the mornin' dew
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