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)

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

******

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

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops,

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! -Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! No One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

 

Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

https://unacpeace.org.

 

Sam Eaton thought it was funny that every time that he and his old time comrade from the anti-war struggles here in America, Ralph Morris, seemed to run out of steam the government would, under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, force them to dust off the old “Stop The War” you fill in the blank which war banners, write up some new leaflet denouncing the latest government rationale for blowing people in other countries to smithereens or raise dough from their circle of ex-radical and left liberal friends guilty about having left the struggle to send people to D.C. or New York to once against voice their opposition. Sam had thought it funny just then as the President had just authorized another escalation (you fill in the President and the country) because the pair had been doing this kind of fairly lonesome work for a long time although they too had had some fairly long periods of inactivity for personal reasons like raising kids and the like.

They had thought, and had talked about the matter several times when they would get together for a few drinks when Ralph was in town and to talk about the old days, that they would be able to “retire” from the anti-war fights once they had reached occupation retirement age. But that was not to be, not the way they were built. See they had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when a lot of radicals, revolutionaries and just plain thoughtful liberals who were totally fed up with the seemingly never-ending Vietnam War (fed up about other issues too, but that was the burning one) and decided to take matters into their own hands by trying to shut down the government if the government did not shut down the war. Now the idea of civil disobedience has a long and proud history and if any situation required civil disobedience to try and stop the madness it was that damn war but the whole scheme was as Ralph called it at the time “utopian” since the anti-war forces were totally inadequate for the array of forces the government had sent out to stop them in their tracks that day. So for their efforts Sam, Ralph and many thousands of others wound up in the bastinado, would up in their case spending about four days in detention inside the Robert F. Kennedy football stadium that on autumn Sundays was the home field of the Washington Redskins before they just walked out of a side exit and nobody stopped them.

They had met in the stadium after Ralph had been picked off by the police around Massachusetts Avenue and Sam on his way up Pennsylvania Avenue headed to the White House. Ralph had noticed that Sam was wearing the button of a supporter of Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and had asked Sam if he was a veteran. Sam answered no but that a close friend had been killed there and that had triggered something inside him to oppose the war after he had been rather indifferent about it previously. He told Ralph he felt most comfortable with VVAWers once he told them his motivation for supporting their efforts and they had welcomed him. So one the things that drew them together was that they had similar motives for being in Washington at that time. Sam from Carver (the cranberry bog capital of the world) a working class town about thirty miles south of Boston and Ralph from General Electric-dominated working class Troy in upstate New York had had very personal reasons at the time. Sam like he had said had lost a close hang around guy from high school, Jeff Mullins, out in some jungle outpost in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Although he was exempted from the drat as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away from a heart attack in 1965 that lost affected him deeply, at the time more deeply than any intellectual argument anybody could have presented. Those arguments would come later. Ralph had served in Vietnam (1967-1969) and although he survived what he had seen there led him to total opposition to the war once he got back. So the unlikely pair struck up a friendship that has lasted ever since.

What both Ralph and Sam did not figure on was that they would still be at it with some breaks over forty years later. At a point sometime in the mid-1970s they both had figured out that the big wave of the 1960s had ebbed and so they slipped away from the movement, or at least their 24/7 devotion to it to go back to “normalcy,” Sam to restart his print shop that he had left behind after he got “religion” on the war question and raise a family and Ralph to take over his father’s electrical shop when he retires and raise a family. They would stay in contact, periodically as their kids got older would have shared vacations together in the Adirondacks and sniff around whatever struggles needed a little help like the opposition to the American government in Central America, the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the fast over first Iraq War in 1991. Nothing big but they had a profile.     

Then all hell broke loose after 9/11 when with the same kind of governmental hubris that Sam and Ralph were very familiar with from Vietnam War days began to rear its head in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly Iraq. In late 2002 when the drums of war were being beaten savagely by the Bush administration they met at Jack Higgin’s Grille in Boston, Sam’s in-town watering hole and vowed now that they again had some time that they would wage “peace” as Sam called it until the American troops left the Middle East. Knowing that such efforts requires some kind of organizational affiliation Ralph as a member and Sam as a supporter joined Veterans for Peace a group Sam had heard about in Boston at an anti-war march. And they have been involved as best they can ever since, although Ralph has had some medical issues of late.     

Along the way, especially after the furor over the Iraq War faded once that war actually started (that faded something both men could not understand having witnessed the rise of the opposition to the Vietnam War go in the other direction as that war escalated and dragged on), the would run into and join the dwindling other groups and individuals who wanted to oppose the permanent war policies of the American government. Around 2010 or so in the “dog days” of the anti-war opposition when Barack Obama was riding high they would attend meetings of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) which was trying to unite all the various, mostly small, groupings under one umbrella. Sam, a little better at writing stuff than Ralph, after their most recent discussion about how long they had been at the struggle against war, wrote something to try to make sense of what they were doing. Here is what he had to say and see if that helps at all:      

“A while back, maybe last year [Fall, 2014] as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.

Over the summer there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels now expanded to Syria. Although not nearly enough. As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors, even his liberal backers, to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. And his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he feels needs the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”

The UNAC for a while now, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior.

So as the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria,  sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like my friend Ralph Morris who has kept the faith, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops.

 Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- Hands Off Syria! 

Here is something to think about:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden. 

 [Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right] ”




Here’s a plug for UNAC
Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com

You Got A Lot Of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend-With Positively Fourth Street In Mind.

You Got A Lot Of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend-With Positively Fourth Street In Mind.

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

The weekly magazine racket has always been a tough nut to crack, what with frequent deadlines, although not the absolute horror of the daily newspaper grind which chewed up more by-line reporters and scratching on the walls newshounds who went to ground in an alcoholic stupor than you could shake a stick at, and last minute stuff that snatched even the best editor, the best pressman, the best distributor. If you don’t believe me just look frenzy that the late Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo of blessed memory put the late night deadline editors at Rolling Stone through when that magazine was in its non-glossy format in its better days as describe in The Great Shark Hunt and other razor-edged pieces. While you had to take a lot of what a stone-cold drug crazy gun nut fast motorcycle over the edge guy like Thompson wrote for a candid world with a suspicious mind the deadline battles had the ring of ink-stained truth. So you can imagine what the guys who were just trying to hold on to their little space as police beat reporters went through to keep from going under. Every reporter, every would be-reporter from that high school rag to Vogue should have stock, and lots of it, in Johnny Walker Red because that is the only thing that will see you through in your old age. 

 

That is what drove the famous feature writer Benny Bancroft from the field of honor (his term) who started out with big dream boat dreams at the East Bay Other (that bay being Frisco Bay of course) before he went over the edge into big time syndication at Wright’s Guardian after his expose of Willie Stark that time down in Fresno. Brought him down from the big dream boast dream of bringing unsullied objective news and candid fierce opinion to the common clay. (Nobody ever knew, except me and I was Benny’s friend so I would take the secret to the grave if I had to, that his expose of Stark was bogus, had been paid for by Willie himself in cold hard cash, and lots of it, as a dodge to win a tough election where he could use the main stream media coverage as a foil to show he was working for the little guy against the snarling press and Benny with his reputation for hard-hitting honesty was the perfect foil, as long the cash envelope showed up every Friday afternoon). Those were the good old days, good old days in the news business being about two years and maybe less. The good old days before that alcoholic stupor he found himself fighting off daily didn’t help either.

But the latest tidbit in the weird life of Benjamin Bancroft hit everybody in the business by surprise when they heard the news that he was leaving publisher Jeb Wright’s Wright’s Guardian.  Knew as well that leaving that rag under the circumstances in which he left while in stable condition, meaning still standing, was part of the price to be paid for a free and democratic press and other blah, blah trite expressions when they rang up a toast to Benny at the old hang-out, Jake’s Lounge on West Seventh Street, New York City to say good-bye in his absence. (And in the next breathe half of the them, the newsies, not the opinion page writers, sports nuts, police beat bums or society page belles, were scampering for the telephones to see if news editor Irving Goldman needed an experienced by-line writer, on easy terms since times were tough just then and Jake was getting antsy about running up the tab so high.)  

That was the public story anyway, that bit about the alcohol getting the best of him, distorting his objective judgement and candid thoughts, creating too many missed deadlines, which nobody saw or heard about until the end when Jeb through Irving pulled the hammer down because Benny’s “assistant” Penny Patterson worked her ass off to feed the presses whatever she thought Benny would have thought about whatever issue she wrote about if he himself had thought about the damn thing. [Whee!] And yes that “assistant” thing needs all the quotation marks around it to support the word since not only had she been a budding just graduated student of the Columbia School of Journalism (Class of 1964) when she first came to the Guardian but through their daily working together had become Benny’s paramour even though she was twenty years younger than him and worse that he had been married when they started “shacking up together” (her term), and wayward ways with the truth on the decreasing number of articles that he actually put pen to paper on.

The way sneak journalist (his actual title since that was the way he operated, the way every “sneak” had to operate in the cutthroat world of weekly scoops even at the expense, or maybe particularly at the expense of fellow writers) Roy Kline pieced it together for the highest bidder (also standard in the business where they were like gypsies here today, gone tomorrow to the next high bidder), These Modern Times was in the best tradition of his part of the racket. Nobody around town knew him, knew much about Roy Kline except that he was a free-lancer out of work who hung out like every other free press personage in some gin mill when not working. In his case, his lucky case the Starlight Lounge down the street from Jake’s on West Seventh where the “executives” of the publishing world, the working executives anyway if not the paycheck writers anyway, you know the various editors, ad sellers, photo layout people, graphic design people, all those who depend on the by-line writers and scratching newshounds for the daily bread, including Irving Goldman who would stop in the joint for his lunch (three whiskies, straight up, left empty when he left and an egg salad sandwich usually left half-eaten).           

One day Roy was sitting at the bar talking to Red Darling the bartender when Irving came in with another guy and sat a couple of stools away from him, a guy in a suit and tie so an executive of some sort, ordered his three whiskies and sandwich (although Red knew the routine five days a week so really did not need to be told what Irving was going to order and thought Irving was just trying to “cut” him, and maybe he was). After his first quick shot Irving started grousing about one of his reporters, about a guy who worked for him, who used to write good stuff that needed little editing that would make him jealous that he could write so well without a coach, him, Irving, to help him along, who was hitting the sauce too much and his work suffered. He wanted to get rid of him but didn’t know how, didn’t want to except he didn’t want booze hounds working for him (and deadline problem children although he was agnostic about that paramour Penny business since he had had a few midnight flings himself  including a run at Penny before she settled in on Benny).

Problem was that the two of them had started out in the business together working as copyboys for the Cleveland Free Press and kind of rode to the top of the New York mag pyramid together. Roy would not know until later that Benny, award-winning Benny dragged Irving in his wake, made it a condition of coming to the Guardian that Irving do his editing and in the course of things Irving had found his métier as editor-in-chief as opposed to third-rate hack writer. All this talk was grist for Roy’s mill. He had a big idea, a moneymaker idea.

A couple of days later, a Friday, Irving came in and did his usual ordering at the bar from Red. Then Roy coming across from a table on the side went to Irving and started to chat him up. Said he had heard that Irving was an editor of a big time magazine and did he need a stringer, a guy to pick up the pieces on a story. Irving nixed that idea, which was just an idea to him and not a good one either, since he had more stringers than he knew what to do with. So no. Roy presented his “credentials,” showed Irving a few of the exposes that he had uncovered about guys in business, guys who had something to hide, guys too in the publishing industry. Irving was still non-committal. Then Roy laid out what he had heard at the bar when Irving had been in a couple of days earlier. Irving perked up a little, the bait was set.    

Irving, once he agreed to Roy’s plan, once they decided on a price (and an introduction to Toddy Marlowe the publisher of Rock Today in Chicago to see what he needed done by a sneak journalist since Toddy’s whole operation depended on digging up scandal on stars, wannabe stars, hell even their dogs), did not want to know anything, anything at all about the means just get rid of Benny anyway he could without letting out the gaff. Here’s some irony-immediately after that lunch meeting with Roy Irving went back up West Seventh to his office and on the way ran into Benny and they talked for a good five minutes about the days back in Cleveland when they were young and hungry and look at them now. Jesus.   

The unwinding of Benny Goldman was simplicity itself once Roy got himself insinuated with the crowd at Jake’s, got to know the players. The ploy was obvious, Benny and his honey Penny once he found out that while Benny was not living with his wife (his second wife as it turned out) he was still married to her and so Benny was ready bait for some adultery plan in the staid New York divorce courts of the 1960s). The squeeze was on since as part of professional sneaking around he found out the old Jeb Wright would tolerate lots of stuff, lots of bad behavior but he considered his magazine a family one and so no hanky-panky that he knew of would be tolerated. And so one fine day in the mail, as you already might suspect, old Jeb got a fistful of lurid dated and time-stamped photographs of Benny and Penny going into and coming out of the Hotel Troubadour on West Ninth.

But Roy’s plans were almost foiled because the old man realizing that Benny’s by-line is what sold copy, what sold advertisers on expensive advertising campaigns too, fired Betty out of hand (that’s Penny, okay but Roy had called her Penny to the old man and it had stuck). Irving was a little frantic when Jeb called him in to break the news and have him do the actual deed. That’s where the worry was for not, that’s where Benny’s alcoholic stupor came into play. He would miss the deadlines first, then with one exception an article about some scumbag drug-dealers using nine and ten year old kids, girls too, to “mule” their drugs for them from Mexico, his writing vanished, fell off the charts until Irving showed the old man that the decline of the magazine’s revenues could be directly traced to the decline of one Benny Goldman the gig was up. (Even Penny’s saving his worthless ass by doing the damn by-line was not up to his level and the readers, and hence the advertisers, knew something had happened, another guy had fallen off the edge of the world.

Even then Irving played the simpleton saying he didn’t know how the whole thing had come to pass but the old man had sent the word down, and that was the law, Benny you understand don’t you. Get this-maybe the magazine could use Benny as a stringer. Roy laughed all the way to Chicago when he heard that one after he too had toasted Benny at Jake’s that fatal last night in town. Laughed loudest when he looked again at Irving’s gold-plated introduction to Toddy Marlowe.        

When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soulmate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described in parenthesis, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat. July when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes not being a period to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes the only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby Crane Castle to get away from the buggers as the well-to-do have been doing since there were well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including the various incantations of the mansion. 

Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge they had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth.  One of the things that brought them together early on was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply and which Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten second-hand through records and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.     

One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late. Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs in his style something  fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over when he moved on but who has actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age.”

He continued when Laura said she was not sure about the connection, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the “new wave” post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”  

Laura said she knew all of that although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers who she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. Us, but also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could put up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hand over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mind, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”

“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who we have heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”    

 

“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers wo ran for cover to “protect” there precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-ip market.  Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and conmen who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”     

“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1970s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll, On The Road which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge. Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that same club then played for the “basket.” You know the “passed hat” which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the “Dutch treat” thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.  And so the roots of New York City folk according to the “father.”

Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And asked about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story. He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the “skinny.” Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnote. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”

Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.       

“As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that  Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”

Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that day.”

They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.  Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-“when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.

As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.                      

From The Going To The Jungle Series-For Juana Wherever She Is

From The Going To The Jungle Series-For Juana Wherever She Is

“United States," answered Fritz Taylor to the burly “la migra” U.S. border guard who was whip-lashing the question of nationality a mile a minute at the steady stream of border-entering people, and giving a cursory nod to all but the very most suspect looking characters, the most illegal Mexican- looking if you want to know. Yes, American, Fritz thought, Fritz John Taylor if they looked at his passport, his real passport, although he had other identification with names like John Fitzgerald, Taylor Fitzgerald, and John Tyler on them, as he passed the huge "la migra” U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at El Paso on the American side across from old-time Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. Juarez, a city in passing that March, 1972 day that looked very much like something out of Orson Welles’ 1950s Touch of Evil, except the automobiles were smaller and less flashy and the graft now more expensive, and no longer guaranteed to grease the rails, the illegal rails; drugs, women, illegals, gambling, fenced goods, you name it. But just then he didn’t want to think about greasing any rails, or anything else illegal for that matter.

Fritz thought again, this time with breathing easier, whether "la migra” had looked at his passport or not, he was glad, glad as hell, to be saying his nationality, his American, gringo, Estados Unidos, call it what you will citizenship, something he never thought possible, not after Vietnam, not after all the shooting and killing of his thirteen month tour of hell, one month R&R included, a month in Hawaii where he thought he must have set the world record for boozing, mostly scotch, low-shelf scotch to make his dough last, dope-sniffing from opium to cocaine to brother and sister, reefer was the least of it, whoring, some paid, some free what did it matter when a man had  his wanting habits on, whoring running through the Kama Sutra and a couple of other tricks not listed in that volume that one of the girls, a white girl too from respectable parents back on the mainland who was looking for kicks, odd-ball kicks and found a partner, for a while, willing to indulge her, Angelina her name, ask her how she got that tattoo on her upper inner thigh and why, if you ever run across her in Lima, Ohio. Except these last three weeks down south of the border had been almost as bad as ‘Nam, and no more profitable, Fritz profitable. Now that he breathed gringo air, American air he could tell his story, or tell parts of it because he was not quite sure that parts might not still be inside the statute of limitations, for him or his former confederates. So some stuff was better left unsaid.

Yah, it started in ‘Nam really, Fritz thought, as he traced his life-sized movements back in time while he started for a bus, a gringo bright yellow and green El Paso Transit bus that would take him to a downtown hotel where he could wash the dust of Mexico, wash that clotting dust of the twenty hour bus ride from Cuernavaca off his body, if not his soul. Hell, he confessed to himself, a thing he would be very reluctant to mention to others, others impressed by his publicly impervious persona, if it hadn’t been 'Nam, it could have been any one of a thousand places, or hundred situation a few years back, back when he first caught the mary jane, ganga, herb, weed, call your name joy stick, delight habit, tea was his favorite term of rite though. And then he graduated to girl, cousin cocaine when that became the drug of choice and then mainly cheaper that high-grade reefer.

Or, maybe, it really started in dead-end Clintondale when he graduated from high school and with nothing particular to do, allowed himself, chuckling a little to hear him call it that way now, allowed himself to be drafted when his number came up. And drafted, 1960s drafted, meant nothing but 'Nam, nothing but 'Nam and grunt-hood, and that thirteen months of hell, minus one, the boozing, doping, whoring one. Or just maybe reaching down deep it was the hard fact that he grew up, grew up desperately poor, in the Clintondale back alley projects and so had spent those precious few years of his life hungry, hungry for something, something easy, something sweet, and something to take the pain away.

But mainly he was looking for something easy. And that something easy pushed him, pushed him like the hard fates of growing up poor, down Mexico way, down Sonora way, mostly, as his liked to hum from a vaguely remembered song, some old time cowboy song, on any one of his twenty or so trips down sur. Until, that is, this last Cuernavaca madness, this time there was no humming, no sing-song Mexican brass band marching humming. But stop right there, Fritz said to himself, if he was ever going to figure what went wrong, desperately wrong on this last, ill-fated trip, he had to come clean and coming clean meant, you know, not only was it about easy street, not only was it to get some dope to chase the soul pain away, but it was about a woman, and as every guy, every woman-loving guy, every honest woman-loving guy, will tell you, in the end it is always about a woman.

Not always about a woman named Juana though, his sweet Juana. Although, maybe the way she left him hanging by his thumbs in Mexico City when she disappeared before the fall, not knowing, or maybe caring, of his danger, he should have been a little less forgiving. Yah, that’s easy to say, easy off the hellish now tongue, but this was Juana not just some hop-head floozy out for kicks.

Jesus, he could still smell that sweetness, that exotic Spanish sweetness, that rose something fragrance Juana always wore which drove him crazy as a loon, that smell of her freshly-washed black hair which got all wavy, naturally wavy, and big so that she looked like some old-time Goya senorita, all severe front but smoldering underneath. And those big laughing eyes, yah, black eyes you won’t forget, or want to. Yes, his thoughts drifted back to Juana, treacherously warm-blooded Juana. And it seems almost sacrilegious thinking of her, sitting on this stinking, hit every bump, crowded, air-fouling bus filled with “wetbacks,” sorry, braceros, okay, going to work, or wherever they go when they are not on these stinking buses.

Yah, Juana, Juana whom he met in Harvard Square when he first got back to the “world” and was looking to deep-six the memories of that 'Nam thing, deep-six it with dope, mope, cope, and some woman to chase his blues away. And there she was sitting on a bench in Cambridge Common wearing some wild seventy-two colored ankle-length dress that had him mesmerized, that and that rose something fragrance. But that day, that spring 1970 day, what Juana-bonded him was the dope she was selling, selling right there in the open like it was some fresh produce (and it was). Cops no too far off but not bothering anyone except the raggedy drunks, or some kid who took too much acid and they needed to practically scrape him off the Civil War monument that centered the park and get him some medical attention, quick.

See Juana, daughter of fairly well-to-do Mexican “somebodies,” needed dough to keep her in style. He never did get the whole story straight but what was down in Sonora well-to-do was nada in the states. She needed dough, okay, just like any gringa dame. And all of that was just fine by him but Juana was also “connected,” connected through some cousin, to the good dope, the Acapulco Gold and Panama Red that was primo stuff. Not the oregano-laced stuff that was making the rounds of the Eastern cities and was strictly for the touristas, for the week-end warrior hippies who flooded Harvard Square come Saturday night.

Fitz thought back, as that rickety old bus moved along heading, twenty-seven-stop heading, downtown trying to be honest, honest through that dope-haze rose smell, that black hair and those laughing eyes (and that hard-loving midnight sex they both craved when they were high as kites) about whether it was all that or just the dope in the beginning. Yah, it was the Panama Red at first. He was just too shattered, 'Nam and Clintondale shattered, to know when he had a woman for the ages in his grasp. But he got “religion” fast. Like every religion though, godly or womanly, there is a price to pay, paid willingly or not, and that price was to become Juana’s “mule” on the Mexico drug runs.

To keep the good dope in stock you had to be willing to make some runs down south of the border. If not, by the time it got to say some New York City middle man, it had been cut so much you might as well have been smoking tree leaves. He could hear himself laugh when she first said that tree leave thing in her efforts to enlist him. But by then he had religion, Juana religion, and he went off on that first trip eyes wide open. And that was probably the problem because it went off without a hitch. Hell, he brought a kilogram over the border in his little green knapsack acting just like any other tourist buying a cheap serape or something.

And like a lot of things done over and over again the trips turned into a routine, a routine though that did not take into consideration some of the greater not-knowing, maybe not knowable things, although he now had his suspicions, things going on, like the big bad ass guys of the international drug trade, like the squeeze out of the small unaffiliated tea ladies, like Juana, and placing them as mere employees like some regular corporate structure bad trip. But the biggest thing was Juana, Juana wanted more and more dough, and that meant bigger shipments, which meant more Fritz risk. And on this last trip it mean no more friendly Sonora lazy, hazy, getting high off some free AAA perfecto weed after the deal was made and then leisurely taking a plane (a plane for chrissakes) from some Mexican city to Los Angeles, or Dallas, depending on the connections. And then home.

This time, this time the deal was going down in Cuernavaca, in a church, or rather in some side room of a church, Santa Maria’s Chapel, in downtown Cuernavaca, maybe you know it if you have been there it's kind of famous. He didn’t like the switch, but only because it was out of the routine, a habit he learned in ‘Nam and that saved him more than once. What he didn’t know, and what his connections on the other side should have known (and maybe did, but he was not thinking about that part right that minute) was that the Federales, instead of chasing Pancho Villa’s ghost like they should have been doing, were driving hard (prompted by the gringo DEA) to close down Cuernavaca, just then starting to become the axis of the cartels further south.

And what he also didn’t know, until too late, was that Juana, getting some kind of information from some well-connected source in the states, had fled to Mexico, first Mexico City where he had met her to make connections further south, and then back to her hometown of Sonora he heard later. So when the deal in Cuernavaca went sour, after he learned at the almost the last minute that the deal was “fixed,” he headed Norte on the first bus, first to Mexico City and then to El Paso. And there he was, now alighting from that yellow green bus, ready to walk into that fresh hotel soap. As Fritz got off though he staggered for a minute when his feet hit the ground, staggered in some kind of fog, as he “smelled,” smelled, that rose fragrance something in the air. He said to himself, yah, I guess it's still like that with Juana. If you read this and are down Sonora way and see her tell her Fritz said “hello.”