The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

Laura Perkins was talking to her daughter, Emily Andrews one afternoon in April when she went to visit her and the grandkids after returning from Florida where she had spent the winter. (Emily the first born girl from her first of three marriages who now had a couple of kids of her own although she has retained as is the “new style,” post-‘60s new style anyway, of women retaining their maiden name kept  Andrews in the bargain although Laura gave that name up minute one after the divorce which was messy and still a source of hatred when Emily’s father’s name is mentioned and thereafter kept her maiden name through the subsequent two marriages and divorces). During the conversation Laura commented to Emily having not seen her for a while on how long and straight she was keeping her hair these days which reminded her of the old days back in the romantic early 1960s when she used to hang around the Village in New York at the coffeehouses and folk clubs listening to lots of women folksingers like Carolyn Hester, Jean Redpath, Thelma Gordon, Joan Baez, Sissy Dubois and a bunch of others whose names she could just then not remember but whose hair was done in the same style including her own hair then.

Laura looked wistfully away just then touching her own now much shortened hair (and colored, how much and for how long only her hairdresser knew and she was sworn to a secret oath even the CIA and Mafia could admire in the interest of not giving  into age too much) while Emily explained how she came to let her hair grow longer and straighter (and her own efforts to keep it straighter) against all good reason what with two kids, a part-time accounting job and six thousand other young motherhood things demanded of her that would dictate that one needed a hair-do that one could just run a comb through.       

“Ma, you know how you are always talking about the old folk days, about the days in the Village and later in Harvard Square after you moved up here to go to graduate school at BU, minus Dad’s part which I know you don’t like to talk about for obvious reasons. You also know, and we damn made it plain enough although you two never took it seriously, back when we were kids all of us hated the very sound of folk music, stuff that sounded like something out of the Middle Ages [which actually some of it was, at least the rudiments] and would run to our rooms when you guys played the stuff in you constant nostalgia moments. Well one day I was in Whole Foods and I hear this song over their PA system or whatever they call it, you know those CDs they play to get you through the hard-ass shopping you need to do to keep the renegade kids from starvation’s door. The song seemed slightly familiar, folkie familiar, so I asked at the customer service desk who was singing the song and its name which I couldn’t quite remember. Of course the young clerk knew from nothing but a grey-haired guy, an old Cambridge radical type, a professor-type not that I think about probably teaching English Lit, a guy you see in droves when you are in Harvard Square these doddering along looking down at the ground like they have been doing for fifty years, standing in the same line said it was Judy Collins doing Both Sides Now.  

That information, and that tune stuck in my head, got me thinking about checking out the song on YouTube which I did after I got home, unpacked the groceries and unpacked the kids. The version I caught was one of her on a Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest series that was on television back then which I am sure you and Dad knew about and she had this great looking long straight hair. I was envious. Then I kind of got the bug, wanted to check out some other folkie women whose names I know by heart, thank you, and noticed that Joan Baez in one clip taken at the Newport Folk Festival along with Bob Dylan singing With God On Our Side, God-awful if you remember me saying that every time you put it on the record-player, had even longer and straighter hair than Judy Collins. There she was all young, beautiful and dark-skinned Spanish exotic, something out of a Cervantes dream with that great hair. So I let mine grow and unlike what I heard Joan Baez, and about six zillion other young women did, including I think you, to keep it straight using an iron I went to Delores over at Flip Cuts in the mall and she does this thing to it every couple of months. And no I don’t want you to give me your folk albums, please, to complete the picture because the stuff still sounds like it was from the Middle Ages.”        

Laura laughed a little at that as Emily went out the door to do some inevitable pressing shopping. After dutifully playing with Nick and Nana for a couple of hours while Emily went to get some chores done at the mall sans the kids who really are a drag on those kinds of tasks and after having stayed for supper when Sean got home from work she headed to her own home in Cambridge (a condo really shared with her partner, Sam Lowell, whom she knew in college, lost track of and then reunited with after three husbands at a class reunion). When she got home Sam, working on some paper of his, something about once again saving the world which was his holy mantra these days now that he was semi-retired from his law practice was waiting, waiting to hear the latest Nick and Nana stories instead she told him Emily’s story. Then they started talking about those old days in the 1960s when both she and he (he in Harvard Square having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston) imbibed in that now historic folk minute which promised, along with a few other things, to change the world a bit. Laura, as Sam was talking, walked to a closet and brought out a black and white photograph from some folk festival in 1967 which featured Joan Baez, her sister Mimi Farina, who had married Richard Farina, the folk-singer/song-writer and Judy Collins on stage at the same time. All three competing with each other for the long straight hair championship. Here’s part of what was said that night, here’s how Laura put it:    

“Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. Remember Sam how we all called folk the “new dispensation” for our generation which had begun back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, slightly before our times when we caught up with it in college in 1964. So maybe it started in reaction to the trend when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits. That funny Mad Men, retro-cool today look, which is okay if you pay attention to who was watching the show. In the days before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on that fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by not wearing a soft felt hat like Uncle Ike and the older guys.”

“Funny too it would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit or dress combination. Remember even earlier when the hula-hoop fad went crazy when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you. I know I did with Jasper James King who tried like hell to imitate Elvis and I just stepped on his toes all dance when he asked me to dance with him on It’s Alright, Mama.”  

“But maybe it was, and this is a truth which we can testify to when some girls, probably college girls like me, now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, or flippy like mine, whatever  don’t hold me to all the different hairstyles to long and straight strands. Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover, the folk scene was too young and small back in the early days to cause such a sea-change.”

 Sam piped up and after giving the photograph a closer look said, “Looking at that photograph you just pulled out of the closet now, culled I think from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High. But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy sexual desire thing about hopping in the hay, and that was that.”                   

“My old friend Bart Webber, a guy I met out in San Francisco  when I went out West with old Peter Markin in our hitchhike days with whom if you remember I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British invasion). He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when the place had their weekly folk night (before every night was folk night at the place when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together. That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Bart thought she looked fine. Bart, like myself, was not then hip to the long straight hair thing and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.”

“Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory straight hair although it was not much longer than when he first met her which he said frankly made her face even longer. When Bart asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.”

“Of course he compounded his troubles by making the serious mistake of asking if she had her hair done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go. So she joined the crowd, Sam got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl, and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched Catholic school shirt things she used to wear.”     

“By the way Laura let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Bart back in the early 1960s since his Emma goes crazy every time anybody, me, you, Bart, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan mentions any girl that Bart might have even looked at in those days. Yeah, even after almost forty years of marriage so keep this between us. She and Bart went “Dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. They were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Just friends despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Bart hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers. A few years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to me since I had gone with them with my date, Joyell Danforth, as we waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with us to see if I remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while I thought I remembered I was not sure.

I asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.”

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk times (think Birmingham Sunday). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo as proof.           

 

 

 

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth 

  

 

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

 

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

 

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (and will again this year on her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

****A Voice From The Left-The Latest From The Steve Lendman Blog

****A Voice From The Left-The Latest From The Steve Lendman Blog

 

 A link below to link to the Steve Lendman Blog

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/

 

Sam Lowell was feeling his years these days, not so much the physical aches and pains that seem to reside for months when in the days of his youth, the days when he would cavort around the country doing his best Jack Kerouac on the road imitation and later after Jake Jacobs was killed in some Vietnam outpost in the Central Highlands his best high hat radical fight against the American monster role, and think nothing of it but politically weary.  As he told his old time friend and comrade Ralph Morris over the cellphone one night when he was feeling down after a day of trying to get his Congressman, Danny Shea, to listen to him and the others in his delegation to vote against the war appropriations for the Middle East nightmare and for the umpteenth time was told that by Shea that he had to support  the supply of American “boots on the ground” no matter what,  he was weary unto death of such thankless delegations, small anti-war rallies where passers-by show utter indifference and of people refusing to talk any serious politics except the fruitless “horse race” stuff for President and the like. (That comrade expression by the way not signifying some allegiance to Moscow or Peking [sic] like it very well might have done in the old days but in the old fashion 19^th century way to connote a politically solid friendship for which either party would scale the barricades for, and gladly.



Of course Ralph felt a little badly for Sam (although he knew better than to mention the fact to Sam for Sam was not the kind of guy who took feeling badly for, especially in politics, with good grace) since he had been instrumental in getting Sam back into the left-wing liberal political battles back in 2002 in the lead-up to the Bush junior Iraq War after years of badgering him about his withdrawal from active progressive politics when the great wave of the 1960s ebbed and it looked like an Ice Age had set in for the kind of world that they both were seeking in their callow youths. Ralph had stayed far more active in progressive circles over the years but even he had to admit that he had drifted far from the in-your-face street confrontations like the one down in Washington in 1971 where he and Sam had met in RFK Stadium after they had been arrested and placed there after an indiscriminate police round-up of anybody who even looked young and was not wearing a three-piece suit that day. He had spent his off-hours when not running his father’s electrical shop doing the exact same things that Sam had bitched to him about over the phone. With the advent of the Internet and the rise of social networking he had originally thought that the old idea of a world “tribal youth nation” had traction again. He had even gone full force when the rising star of Barack Obama seemed like it would push the rock up the hill. And although that particular star had turned into a cipher he was still fighting the good fight trying to make this foolish messy democratic system work since those old street confrontation days didn’t produce anything but forty plus years of cold cultural civils wars, and they were not on the winning side.



Ralph thought he would try to buck Sam up after that last call by referring him to some blogs that he “followed” (followed here meaning merely clinking onto the blogger’s homepage and nothing more sinister like some cultish madness that he had nearly got caught up in after the ‘60s wave turned tepid and he was looking for some “new age” personal solutions) to show he had kindred out there in the progressive political universe. Sam did pay attention to a couple, one in particular the Steve Lendman blog which gave good analyses but after a while he had this abiding feeling that he was again spinning his wheels in this progressive mish-mash. He decided to write something about his dilemma although he is not a writer but rather had just recently retired from the printing business which was taken over by his son. Here is what he had to say, and here is where the problem lies:    



Over the last couple of years that I have been presenting political material in this space I have had occasion to re-post items from some sites which I find interesting, interesting for a host of political reasons, although I am not necessarily in agreement with what has been published. Two such sites have stood out, The Rag Blog, which I like to re-post items from because it has articles by many of my fellow Generation of ’68 residual radicals and ex-radicals who still care to put pen to paper and the blog cited here, the Steve Lendman Blog.  The reason for re-postings from this latter site is slightly different since the site represents a modern day left- liberal political slant. That is the element, the pool if you will, that we radicals have to draw from, have to move left, if we are to grow. So it is important to have the pulse of what issues motivate that milieu and I believe that this blog is a lightning rod for those political tendencies. 



I would also add that the blog is a fountain of rational, reasonable and unrepentant anti-Zionism which became apparent once again in the summer of 2014 when defense of the Palestinian people in Gaza was the pressing political issue and we were being stonewalled and lied to by the bourgeois media in service of American and Israeli interests. This blog was like a breath of fresh air.



I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 



Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 



The left-liberal/radical arena in American politics has been on a steep decline since I was a whole-hearted denizen of that milieu in my youth somewhere slightly to the left of Robert Kennedy back in 1968 say but still immersed in trying put band-aids on the capitalist system. That is the place where Steve Lendman with his helpful well informed blog finds himself. As do my old anti-war comrade Ralph Morris and myself as well. It is not an enviable place to be for anyone to have a solid critique of bourgeois politics, hard American imperial politics in the 21st century and have no ready source in that milieu to take on the issues and make a difference (and as an important adjunct to that American critique a solid critique of the American government acting as front-man for every nefarious move the Israeli government makes toward increasing the oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank). 



Of course I had the luxury, if one could call it that, which a look at Mr. Lendman's bio information indicates that he did not have, was the pivotal experience in the late 1960s of being inducted, kicking and screaming but inducted, into the American army in its losing fight against the heroic Vietnamese resistance. That signal event disabused me, although it took a while to get "religion," on the question of the idea of depending on bourgeois society to reform itself. On specific issues like the fight against the death penalty, the fight for the $15 minimum wage, immigration reform and the like I have worked with that left-liberal/ radical milieu, and gladly, but as for continuing to believe against all evidence that the damn thing can be reformed that is where we part company. Still Brother Lendman keep up the good work and I hope you find a political home worthy of your important work. Hell, I hope I can find such a home too because this endless beseeching of bourgeois politicians to do the right thing is getting threadbare and getting me old time street action crazy.                 

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

Bruce Springsteen - Brothers Under The Bridge (Live 1996-10-26)

A View From The Left-Trans-Pacific-Partnership-Down Wiht U.S.Imperialism's Anti-China Trade Pact!

Workers Vanguard No. 1078	13 November 2015
Trans

 

-Pacific Partnership-Down With U.S. Imperialism’s Anti-China Trade Pact!

 

No to Protectionism! Workers of the World Unite!

On October 5, representatives of 12 countries from across Asia and the Americas signed on to U.S. imperialism’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). If it is ratified, the TPP will be the largest trade agreement in history, encompassing at least 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and one-third of all global trade. Japan and the more minor imperialist countries Canada and Australia have been cut in on the deal—and competing European powers cut out—but it is the U.S. rulers who hold the whip hand. Under the banner of “free trade,” the TPP aims to drive up the exploitation of labor across the board while increasing imperialist domination of dependent countries. Above all, this agreement targets China, escalating the U.S. bourgeoisie’s drive to promote capitalist counterrevolution there through economic pressure and military encirclement.

The TPP has been described as “NAFTA on steroids,” after the 1994 agreement that opened the door for the wholesale economic rape of Mexico by America’s capitalist rulers and their Canadian junior partners. The TPP agreement would batter down measures protecting industry and agriculture in underdeveloped countries, eliminating 18,000 taxes and other controls on U.S. companies’ goods and services. Secret tribunals, empowered to overturn the decisions of national courts, would be established to allow investors to sue any signatory country they claim undermines their “expected profits.” The bloodsuckers of America’s Big Pharma drug monopolies would have their patent rights extended, ripping generic drugs out of the hands of millions of impoverished people whose lives depend on them, including for the treatment of HIV and tuberculosis.

The bourgeois rulers of Brunei, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru and other backward countries, lackeys of U.S. imperialism, signed the TPP in a bid to get their own shares of the wealth wrung from greater misery. The ruling Communist Party bureaucracy in the Vietnamese deformed workers state also agreed to the TPP’s extortionate terms, acting as labor brokers in exchange for foreign investment. At the same time, the provisions of the TPP that directly target state-owned enterprises are centrally aimed at Vietnam.

The collectivized property forms central to Vietnam’s economy are a gain of the social revolution that overturned capitalism, when Communist-led guerrilla forces defeated first the French and then the U.S. imperialists and their Vietnamese puppet forces. By demanding “fair competition” for capitalist investment, the TPP aims to undermine the workers state’s control of the economy.

China in the Crosshairs

The largest remaining country where capitalism has been overthrown, the Chinese deformed workers state is a strategic target of the imperialists. Washington pointedly excluded China from the agreement in an attempt to form an economic bloc against that country and undercut its growing economic reach. The TPP is the economic analog to the U.S.’s increasingly flagrant military provocations against China. Last spring, U.S. defense secretary Ashton Carter declared: “Passing TPP is as important to me as another aircraft carrier.”

In the first week of November, a U.S. aircraft carrier conducted operations near Chinese land reclamation and construction projects in the South China Sea’s Spratly (Nansha) Islands. These islands are of strategic importance to China’s military defense and its ability to protect critical shipping lanes. Threatening China’s sovereignty, Carter announced that the U.S. would make regular patrols of the area. Behind such gunboat diplomacy lies the threat of embargo and war.

To the ire of the U.S., there has been a stampede of countries, including European imperialist powers, to get in on the ground floor of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) that China initiated last October. Although it has yet to begin operations, the AIIB will challenge the loan sharks who run imperialist-dominated lending institutions. While outfits like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank dictate how countries they invest in should be governed and starve out those who don’t obey, the AIIB will reportedly offer loans for much-needed infrastructure development at below-market interest rates with no strings attached. While the ruling Chinese bureaucracy is not motivated by international solidarity, neither are its international investments driven by the relentless pursuit of profit that motivates the imperialist plunder of less-developed countries.

To counter U.S. imperialism’s efforts at containment, China is also developing a “new Silk Road.” Including multiple trading networks linking Asia and Western Europe, new Silk Road development includes pipelines, rail, air and sea routes as well as high-tech communications systems. These developments loomed large in the Obama administration’s decision to fast-track TPP negotiations. Focusing on Asia in this year’s State of the Union address, Obama argued: “As we speak, China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest growing region.... We should write those rules.”

The president’s push for fast-track authority suffered a brief setback in June when Democratic Party members of Congress voted it down, looking to boost their electoral fortunes with the trade-union bureaucracy. There was much rejoicing at AFL-CIO headquarters. The federation’s president Richard Trumka crowed that the vote “was a marvelous contrast to the corporate money and disillusionment that normally mark American politics today.” But this elation went up in smoke a few weeks later when the fast-track was voted up.

There is a burning need for internationalist proletarian opposition to the TPP, uniting the working masses around the globe in common class struggle. If the U.S. rulers succeed in the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Chinese workers state, it would mean opening China for untrammeled economic exploitation. This would be a disaster for the working class internationally, emboldening the imperialists to launch new attacks and drive down wages and working conditions not only in China, but around the world.

Raising a chauvinist hue and cry that the TPP will cost “American” jobs, the AFL-CIO bureaucrats oppose the pact because it doesn’t go far enough in creating a “strategic advantage over China” for U.S. capitalists. Against the China-bashing protectionism of the labor misleaders, which pits U.S. workers against their class brothers and sisters internationally, our opposition to the TPP is based on opposition to our “own” imperialist rulers and our unconditional defense of the Chinese deformed workers state.

U.S. Imperialism’s Loyal Labor Lieutenants

The AFL-CIO’s treatise, “The U.S.-China Economic Relationship: The TPP is Not the Answer,” blames China for “undercutting U.S. manufacturers and displacing millions of U.S. jobs” (aflcio.org, undated). In reality, the decline in U.S. manufacturing and the massacre of jobs, wages and social benefits are in the purest sense “made in the U.S.A.” By tying the interests of workers to the profitability of their exploiters, the capitalist class’s labor lieutenants in the trade-union bureaucracy paved the way for these defeats. Rather than mobilizing labor’s power in a fight against the decades-long onslaught against the unions, the labor misleaders argue that the workers must “sacrifice” in order to increase the competitive edge of U.S. capitalism against its rivals. One need look no further than the ravaged remains of the United Auto Workers (UAW), once the symbol of union power in this country, for the results of the bureaucrats’ class collaboration.

Following World War II, the U.S. emerged as the dominant imperialist power in the world, its boasts of technological and productive superiority epitomized by the auto industry. By the 1960s, however, U.S. dominance was increasingly challenged by the rising economic might of West Germany and Japan. The industrial base in those countries, which had been destroyed in World War II, was replaced by new plants that were far more advanced. Faced with growing competition, the U.S. auto bosses responded with a concerted campaign to intensify the exploitation of labor through massive layoffs and giveback contracts. Beginning in the 1980s, production was increasingly moved from the unionized North and Midwest to the open shop South, as well as to Latin America and East Asia.

Obliging the bosses’ demands for concessions in the name of “saving jobs,” the UAW bureaucrats launched a chauvinist crusade to defend the Big Three against competing manufacturers. The racism at the heart of the UAW’s “buy American” protectionism was demonstrated in the murder of a young Chinese American, Vincent Chin, who was bludgeoned to death in 1982 by a Chrysler foreman who thought he was Japanese and blamed him for “stealing American jobs.” Meanwhile, non-union auto plants expanded as Japanese, German and South Korean manufacturers set up shop in the low-wage, open shop U.S. South in order to get around protectionist import restrictions.

In response, the UAW leadership has agreed to more and more concessions. While decrying “cheap labor” abroad, they helped create a pool of cheap labor in the union itself with the introduction of two-tier wages. Today, the UAW tops propose to fight the domestic “outsourcing” of union jobs to non-union auto supply plants with a program of “insourcing.” To entice auto parts suppliers in the U.S. back under the Big Three umbrella, the bureaucrats are offering third-tier wages! Thus in the name of “defending union jobs” in the U.S., the trade-union misleaders operate as cutthroat labor contractors for the bosses.

This long string of betrayals is hardly peculiar to the UAW. The same processes have reduced the industrial unions in this country to a shadow of their former selves. The pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy looks for friends in the camp of the capitalist class enemy and sees enemies and competitors in the growing ranks of the proletariat in Latin America and Asia. In fact, workers in other countries are crucial allies in the fight against capitalist exploitation. If the unions are to be effective instruments of struggle against the bosses, they must break the chains forged by the labor traitors that have shackled the workers to their exploiters. That means ousting the red-white-and-blue bureaucrats and replacing them with a class-struggle leadership whose banner will be the red flag of proletarian internationalism. The struggle for such a leadership must be tied to forging the multiracial revolutionary workers party that can lead the proletariat to victory in the “final conflict” to end the predatory rule of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad.

Defend the Gains of the Chinese Revolution!

The anti-Communist AFL-CIO misleaders have a long track record of dirty work on behalf of the U.S. rulers. At the outset of the Cold War, the predecessors of today’s labor sellouts purged the militants who led the CIO organizing battles. The AFL-CIO tops lent their services to the destruction of militant unions in Europe and Latin America, where they became known as the “AFL-CIA.” In the 1980s, the union bureaucracy channeled millions of CIA dollars to Polish Solidarność, a reactionary movement masquerading as a trade union that spearheaded the drive for capitalist restoration in East Europe. Cut of the same cloth is the AFL-CIO’s call for “free trade unions” in Vietnam, which, not surprisingly, is incorporated into the TPP.

Similarly, the labor misleaders echo their imperialist masters’ complaints that the Chinese government subsidizes state-owned industries, controls its currency, limits competition from foreign imports and offers other countries beneficial trade and investment. Yet the things they decry as “unfair” reflect gains for the working class that were won through the 1949 Chinese Revolution which drove out the imperialists and overthrew capitalism.

The core of the Chinese economy is collectivized, not privately owned by individual capitalist exploiters. State-owned enterprises dominate strategic industrial sectors, with much of the surplus they create channeled into the banks and treasury of the workers state. State control over China’s currency, the yuan, has insulated the country from the volatile movements of money capital that have wreaked havoc around the world.

Testifying to the superiority of a collectivized economy over production for profit, China’s economy continued to grow while the capitalist world was plunged into economic meltdown following the 2007‑08 collapse of Wall Street’s financial speculation. In the U.S., nine million jobs were destroyed, four million houses foreclosed on and pension funds were looted. Trillions of dollars went to bail out the banks, insurance companies and auto bosses. In contrast, China channeled massive investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity.

The Chinese Revolution was a tremendous victory for the workers of the world. However, the workers state was deformed from birth by the rule of a nationalist bureaucracy modeled on the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. Like their Kremlin counterparts before them, the rulers in Beijing oppose the perspective of international proletarian revolution. Thus they promoted the pipe dream of building “socialism in one country” and the equally delusional notion of “peaceful co-existence” with the imperialist powers. Although the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy’s rule depends on the existence of the workers state it seeks to prosper and maintain its status through an accommodation to the imperialist order, much like the AFL-CIO bureaucracy in this country.

In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), his analysis of the degeneration of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky observed of the bureaucracy in Soviet Russia:

“To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration.”

Since the 1949 Revolution, China has gone from being a backward peasant country to a mostly urban one, lifting some 600 million people out of poverty and creating a powerful industrial proletariat. Nonetheless, China remains a country of extreme contradictions, with great backwardness and poverty, particularly in the countryside. In mainland China today, there is a nascent capitalist class which, along with the corruption that permeates the Communist Party regime, poses a threat of internal capitalist counterrevolution. On the other side, hundreds of millions of workers as well as poor peasants wage countless strikes, protests and riots, estimated at 500 every day, against the consequences of bureaucratic misrule.

This ferment points to the potential for a proletarian political revolution that will sweep away the Stalinist regime and replace it with the rule of workers and peasants councils (soviets). Such a government would put an end to bureaucratic corruption and arbitrariness, creating a centrally planned and managed economy under conditions of workers democracy. It would expropriate the new class of domestic capitalists and seek to renegotiate the terms of foreign investment in the interests of the working people. The elementary Marxist understanding is that the key prerequisite for a socialist society is the elimination of scarcity, requiring the development and expansion of industrial production and technology worldwide. Thus, a genuine communist leadership in China would fight to advance the cause of workers revolution internationally, particularly in advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. and Japan.

Workers of the World Unite!

Since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the U.S. imperialists have been riding high in the saddle as the “world’s only superpower.” Promoting the TPP, Defense Secretary Carter boasted: “I never forget that our military strength ultimately rests on the foundation of a vibrant, unmatched and growing economy.” But there’s the rub. The unrivaled military might of U.S. imperialism rests on a corroding manufacturing and industrial base. Instead of investing in expanding and modernizing industry or repairing the country’s crumbling infrastructure, in recent decades the ruling class has enriched itself through a succession of speculative investment binges.

In the early 2000s, to send a message to the world that America remained the top dog of the planet militarily, the U.S. imperialists toppled governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, creating a seething caldron of unrest in the region. In 2010, Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s secretary of state, announced a “pivot to Asia,” which would redirect U.S. forces from the Near East and Afghanistan toward the more strategic aim of destroying the Chinese deformed workers state.

Although the U.S. remains bogged down in a quagmire of its own creation in the Near East, the Obama administration has made a full-court press to get the TPP signed, sealed and delivered. Just as the workers must defend their unions against the bosses despite the bureaucratic traitors that have so undermined them, so too must they fight for the defense of the Chinese deformed workers state despite the treachery of its Stalinist rulers who likewise accommodate the imperialists.

The decades-long war against labor, the shredding of the social “safety net” for the poor and the aged, the increased immiseration of the black population—these are the domestic products of the drive by America’s rulers to reverse their declining economic weight in the world. By fighting for their own interests against the U.S. imperialist predators, workers in the U.S. also strike a blow for the liberation of the oppressed around the planet. The purpose of the International Communist League is to reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution, that will bring to the fore the principle of international working-class unity in the struggle for a socialist world. As the ICL’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” explains:

“The victory of the proletariat on a world scale would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes and the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity. For the first time mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential, and a monumental forward surge of civilization.”

—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 54, Spring 1998

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

 

 

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in Johnny D’s over in Somerville, over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. (The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery, Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus the animals of the farm kingdom, Humpty Dumpty, a silly overweight goof who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression or used it in the high Roman Catholic Morris household out in Troy, New York where Ralph grew up and still lives, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. in case you have forgotten.) Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Or as in the case of music in junior high school as Sam chimed in with his opinion as he thought about switching over to a high-shelf whiskey, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. That “second coming” referring to guys, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta south of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  

Yeah, that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third  bottle of beer sipping getting him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on him that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids say amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks so you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that he was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)  

Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had and it would not be nice either). He added that some of the remembered music  reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam’s and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters  and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms.

That mention of transistor radios got them yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again if they were to make it through both sets that night. This transistor thing by the way for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).

Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to move over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential  from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit).

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.

What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform. Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.