*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"-Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album

Markin comment:

This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.

***********

Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album: Part 1
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music

In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:

""Goin to Chicago, sorry but I can't take you" is a classic blues line written and made famous by the late Jimmy Rushing, one of the country's best known blues shouters. It mirrored the truth for black women in the South; the man went north and the woman remained behind. The song was such a success that Rushing wrote another similar blues which could also have served for the title of this album, "Bye Bye Baby."

"Travel and trains have played an important role in the evolution of the blues song. Many songs begin with the sound of steel wheels grinding or the huffing and puffing of steam locomotives or use clanging train bells and whistles. It is easy to understand why the train figured so prominently: it meant escape, freedom, hope, excitement, and new worlds to conquer. The train also meant a way away from the Jim Crow atmosphere of water fountains with signs proclaiming "Whites Only" and all that implied: exploitation, disenfranchisement, physical danger.

""Goin to Chicago" meant going to the "promised land," especially in the 1920's when it was the railroad crossing and the hog-butcher of the world. It meant a chance at a job. The meat-packing industry hired blacks, though the jobs were the least skilled ones. Chicago was North and North meant Detroit too, where the automotive industry hired Negroes, as did Pennsylvania's steel industry...Factory jobs, no matter how menial, carried more dignity than did working in the fields or in lumber or pine camps or on the levees.

"Not that there wasn't also segregation in the North, but it was of a different variety. There was segregation on the way to the North too, for blacks couldn't board a train unless it carried a car for "coloreds."

"The history of all America, particularly black people after the Civil War, has been intertwined with the railroad. The romance and excitement of the train is extolled in books about the blues and jazz as a positive symbol of freedom. It was. But for men only--not for women. These books are written as though half the population didn't exist; nowhere is it mentioned how these forces affected black women..."

***
Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album: Part 2
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:


"To the women, the train was an unslayable monster, a demon who swallowed up their men, men who usually didn't come back and seldom sent for them. "Sorry but I can't take you." The magic that the sound and movement of the train held for men was a different one filled with terror and envy---for women.

"The factory jobs up North didn't exist for women; they were for men only. Jobs as domestics were not available either because Irish women had been filling them since their mass immigration in the nineteenth century because of the potato famine. A small number of black women worked as domestics but there were not enough jobs to pull them out of the South. There is an historic imperative to correct the belief that the response to the trian by black women in the South was the same as the one for men.

"The male blues songs of the period spell it out:

""I'm going up North, baby, I can't carry you.
""Ain't nothin in that cold country, a sweet gal can do."

These lines were written by Cow Cow Davenport in 1929, and "Jim Crow Blues," the tune they came from, was a big seller for Paramount, in part because of its driving boogie-woogie piano style, but also because of its sentiments..."

****

Rosetta Reitz 1980 Notes to Women's Railroad Blues Album: Conclusion
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:

"The train as a positive metaphor goes back as far as the earliest trains. It was a "natural"; that is why the symbolic history is so old. The Underground Railroad meant escape more than it meaant riding on a train. The railroad itself created jobs too and those jobs carried more respect and wages than did agricultural ones. But these jobs did not include women.

"In the vast blues literature, the sadness and sorrow of being abandoned, being left with the "Empty Bed Blues," is the result of the mobility of men in that culture. The freight train was everyman's escape, everyman's panacea. That is why there was always a shortage of men. He could hop a freight train and ride. She could not. This was a significant difference in their lives...

"...The women's lament became personified by Trixie Smith who recorded "Freight Train Blues" in May 1924 for the Paramount "race" label. It was a very big seller, both in black music stores and through mail order; nonetheless it has been virtually ignored in the blues histories...

"Trixie's 1924 version was such a big moneymaker for Paramount that other record companies hastened to cut it too. In September, Columbia had Clara Smith, a big star then, billed as the World's Champion Moaner, in the recording studio and Vocalion had Lena Henry cut it and Josie Miles acompanied by her Choo Choo Jazzers recorded it for Ajax...

"It is important to understand that the women singing these songs at this time were more important than their accompanists. The classic blues singers were looked upon by their public as heroes who made it; as high priestesses who were telling the truth which the listener could identify with in the here and now, not after death as in church songs. In the more than fifty years from the time these blues were originally recorded a historical distortion has taken place because most of the people involved in writing about, collecting, cataloguing and reissuing records have been men who have been more interested in the instrumentalists than in the female singers...


Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=7#ixzz0zMO9eVMA

*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"-From The Weavers at Carnegie Hall Liner Notes In 1950s

Markin comment:

This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.

************

From The Weavers at Carnegie Hall Liner Notes In 1950s--Part 1
Current mood: nostalgic
Category: Music

"Every once in a while a performer or group of performers comes along and revitalizes the popular music industry. Sometimes it's done by a unique personality, or by unusual repertory, or by creating a fresh style. When artists combine all of these, they may even have the rare privilege of changing the musical taste of a nation. The Weavers have that honor. Since that day in 1950 when "Good Night Irene"...hit the record racks...the music world has been a different kind of place to be, perhaps a more pleasant one.

"The Weavers set the tin-pans clanging in that alley with a reverberation which hasn't yet died down. They sent the songsmiths scurrying about in the folk music archives, doing a little research looking for "that hit." The second-hand music dealers, hung a sold-out sign on their dusty bins of folk songs and ballads. A lot of young people took up the guitar and banjo.

"Among the many knotty problems which The Weavers raised was that of classification. It is said that Billboard and Variety held a joint conference on the subject, where learned musicological dissertations were read bearing such titles as, "Are The Weavers Rhythm and Blues or Country and Western?..."

(from the liner notes of Vanguard's "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall" vinyl album of 1950s)


Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zMMHvL3x

From The Weavers at Carnegie Hall Liner Notes In 1950s--Part 2
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
"Talking about folk music is a large order. Woody Guthrie said it: "Folksongs and ballads are a big subject; just as old and just as young, just as big to talk about as the whole humanly race around our planet here." The Weavers came on the scene when, with few exceptions, folk music seemed to have become a specialized, even esoteric art, and some theorists were lamenting that it was "dying," that it was being driven into the ground by urban culture, that radio, television and manufactured popular songs were stifling its capacity for growth. The Weavers proved them wrong, and helped to replant folk music not merely in the countryside but in the urban centers as well.

"This could only have been done, of course, through a new approach. And the Weavers hit upon theirs in a way that could almost be called accidental; that is, working out what seemed to be "right" for themselves, rather than entertaining visions of starting a trend. Their unique style stems from a bold disregard of the "purist" approach. It may be described as a rejection of surface "authenticity" to arrive at a deeper authenticity. For the essential and living quality of folk music is that it is never "fixed" in a scholar's treatise or on a phonograph record; it is always growing and changing. It is at once the voice of the past and the vigorous voice of the present. It adapts itself to any voice or instrument. It can not only weather, but can profit from occasional changes of text, the addition of new verses, an inspired rhythmic alteration. And that is actually the way in which new folk songs have traditionally grown out of old ones. Always, to folk singers, a "new song" meant new words set to an old melody, and if in the process a new variant or curve of melody appeared, that seemed so natural a process that they hardly paid it any mind.."

From liner notes to Vanguard's "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall" vinyl album of the 1950s

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zMMN7ubK

Evicted-Poverty and Profit in the American City-A Book Review by Cliff Edwards and Simone Hayes

Workers Vanguard No. 1094	26 August 2016

Evicted-Poverty and Profit in the American City-A Book Review by Cliff Edwards and Simone Hayes

Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City examines the impact on the poor of rising housing costs and declining/stagnating incomes in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. Many tenants now pay more than 50 percent of their incomes in rent—over 70 percent with the soaring cost of utilities included—challenging their ability to survive on a daily basis. The result: a plague of evictions. Desmond’s book documents the lives of eight individuals and their families—both black and white—in the process of eviction from their homes. There are, as well, sketches of a landlord or two, seemingly included in the interest of “fairness” to those who find themselves compelled to throw their tenants out in order to turn a profit—and landlords are an integral component of Desmond’s purported solution to the housing crisis.

Evicted has been greeted with one rave review after another from critics across the spectrum of bourgeois opinion, from the left-liberal Guardian to the plutocratic Wall Street Journal. In a review in the New York Times (22 February), Jennifer Senior described the book as “unignorable,” concluding that “it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing.” The fact that the poor, especially the black and Hispanic residents of America’s ghettos and barrios, live in dismal circumstances and are often thrown into the streets is hardly a revelation—except, evidently, to the excited reviewers. Nonetheless, when Desmond details the struggles of those who have only a few bucks left after their rent is paid, he is trenchant and compelling, perhaps informed by his parents’ eviction while he was in college.

An American City

Desmond conducted his research in Milwaukee, which he notes is “a fairly typical midsize metropolitan area,” much like Minneapolis, Baltimore, Cincinnati and many others. In Milwaukee, one in fourteen renters is evicted by court order each year. There are almost as many “informal” evictions—where your stuff is dragged out to the curb without legal authorization. One in five black female renters in Milwaukee reports being evicted as an adult, triple the rate for white women. Court records show that women living in black areas of Milwaukee are twice as likely to be evicted as their male neighbors. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” Desmond writes, concluding: “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

Milwaukee is one of many cities in racist America that are described as the country’s most segregated. During the civil rights era, hundreds of marches for integration were turned back by racist mobs and cop terror. An influx of immigration in the 1970s resulted in a segregated Latino enclave. To this day, “separate and unequal” prevails in the city. Racist discrimination, cop harassment, poverty and unemployment trap black tenants in the worst slums of Milwaukee’s North Side. Black tenants—and households with children—are most likely to have to endure broken windows and appliances; rats, roaches and bedbugs; lack of heat and failing plumbing. The slums also return high rates of profit for landlords—dilapidated property is cheap and chronically poor tenants have little choice but to accept crippling rent and horrific living conditions.

Desmond’s research includes a run-down white trailer park in Milwaukee’s far South Side. There he documented pervasive racial prejudice that obscured how much the white trailer park residents had in common with the black slum dwellers. Anti-black racism is a key ideological prop of American capitalism. Far from bestowing some form of privilege on white poor and working people, racism hampers social struggle and divides the working class, allowing the capitalist exploiters to drive down living conditions across the board.

The Making of a Crisis

With rents nationally projected to rise another 8 percent this year, the living conditions of the working poor and the unemployed are likely to shift from the excruciating to the unendurable. Democratic president Bill Clinton’s destruction of “welfare as we know it” in the 1990s means that today benefits barely cover rent for those who can even get welfare. The workfare program Clinton applied to the whole country was pioneered in Milwaukee, where it drove 22,000 desperate families off the welfare rolls. Since the 1980s, when many public housing projects began to be razed, such assistance for renters as was available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been in decline.

In 1992, HUD instituted a demolition program under the Orwellian acronym of HOPE VI that destroyed 270,000 units of public housing—a 19 percent decrease in public housing stock. At the same time, the federal government increased the use of housing vouchers. Vouchers—government payments to private landlords—became the largest housing subsidy program. Supposedly designed to cap the rent payments of qualifying recipients at 30 percent of their income, vouchers are available only for the poorest of the poor; the average income of voucher recipients is $12,000 to $14,000 a year. Only two million renters—a quarter of those supposedly eligible for such assistance—actually receive it. With no requirement for private landlords to accept housing vouchers, the program has reinforced residential segregation. The number of people receiving rent voucher assistance has frozen, while the number in need of assistance has gone up and up.

Desmond is well aware of this history. He characterizes the current state of affairs as “one of the worst affordable housing crises in generations.” Nevertheless, he projects the sunniest optimism regarding prospects for the future: “The good news is that much has already been accomplished. America has made impressive strides over the years when it comes to housing.” Well, not quite. In 1960, American renters paid on average 19 percent of their yearly income toward housing costs. Today that figure is 30 percent.

Liberal Delusions

Desmond believes there is a simple solution to the housing crisis under capitalism. He advocates that the government provide housing vouchers to all low-income families to prevent them from paying a dime more than 30 percent of their incomes for rent. Under his scheme, landlords would be enjoined from raising rents but be guaranteed a “modest” profit, adjusted, of course, for inflation. In exchange for mandatory participation in the program and a ban on discriminatory practices, landlords would be spared a too stringent enforcement of building codes.

Further, Desmond sees guaranteed housing as a panacea for all of America’s social ills. A home, in his mind, becomes almost a heaven on earth: “The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets...the wellspring of personhood.” One is almost embarrassed to remind Desmond that there are elderly people who dine on pet food and die of heatstroke in their own homes.

Irrespective of his layering of schmaltz, Desmond’s recommendations for reform border on the preposterous. The housing crisis is a product of a society organized on the basis of private profit, and of the ebbs and flows of employment and unemployment that are endemic to the capitalist system. Friedrich Engels vividly described that process in his 1872 pamphlet The Housing Question:

“In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of settling the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of settling it in such a way that the solution continually poses the question anew.... No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the most scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-glorification by the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but—they appear again at once somewhere else.... The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place produces them in the next place also.”

The reality is that the capitalist system cannot guarantee its wage slaves a decent living—much less those it has tossed on the scrap heap of permanent unemployment.

For decades, the capitalist order has aggressively pursued an all-sided assault on the living standards of working and poor people. In fact, the only significant reforms providing affordable housing for working people have been ceded by the capitalist rulers in response to the prospect of social upheaval. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the legions of the unemployed were often organized (usually by communists) into unemployed councils that fought on behalf of the destitute. With close ties to the working class and broad popular support, these councils were very successful in stopping evictions of the unemployed as well as in organizing rent strikes. During the Great Rent Strike of 1932 in New York, tenants in several buildings withheld their rent and demanded reductions in prices and a moratorium on evictions. Landlords fired back with massive evictions, but protesters stopped the evictions in hand-to-hand combat with police.

The 1937 Housing Act, which initiated the construction of public housing units throughout the country, was passed during the tumultuous wave of class struggle that established the CIO industrial unions. (The landlord associations at that time lobbied for a voucher system instead.) Similarly, it was the social upheavals of the civil rights movement that led to a series of Fair Housing Acts and a significant expansion of HUD’s voucher program.

Expropriate the Expropriators!

Today public housing has been eviscerated. The voucher system is stagnating and, in real terms, shrinking, notwithstanding the growing inability of masses of people to afford housing. The fight for quality housing—and for jobs—is no less necessary today than it was in the 1930s. But the fighting spirit of the labor movement has been sapped by a trade-union bureaucracy committed to maintaining the bosses’ profits in the face of this country’s social decay. As the depredations of capitalism impel the working class to struggle, a new, fighting leadership in the unions must be forged, committed to organizing the unorganized. Building such a leadership goes hand in hand with constructing a revolutionary workers party that will act as the tribune of the oppressed and will stop at nothing less than abolishing capitalism. Those who labor must rule!

Labor militancy can forestall and, to some extent, reverse the excesses of capitalist exploitation. But without the overthrow of bourgeois class rule, when the class battles subside, the inexorable drive to increase profits will reassert itself, producing growing misery for the working masses at one pole and, at the other, obscene wealth for the owners of the means of production. As Engels wrote, “The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself.”

Desmond’s book is representative of the same school of thought as Thomas Piketty’s much-ballyhooed Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). These friendly critics of capitalism try to convince those opposed to the profit system’s savageries that drastic measures (e.g., revolution) are unnecessary. Their method is to identify and analyze a glaring injustice and then put forward a solution that is purportedly so modest and reasonable that it will win over the powers that be. For Piketty, the problem is the gargantuan inequality of wealth between the rulers and the ruled, and his solution is a planet-wide tax on the wealthy (see “Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” WV Nos. 1053 and 1054, 3 and 17 October 2014). Desmond’s vouchers-for-all proposal is, perhaps, a shade less delusional than Piketty’s, but it is no more likely to be implemented by the rulers of the capitalist order.

No application of persuasion or pressure will suffice to eradicate the diseases caused by the profit system. As Engels put it, “The housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished...only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned.” A victorious working-class revolution would solve the housing crisis almost instantaneously by expropriating the property of the bourgeoisie, from the financiers and rentiers to the real estate barons. The vacant suites of all the mansions and luxury high-rise apartments as well as the almost 19 million homes in this country that sit vacant would be seized to provide housing for all who require it, including the inhabitants of the slums and the 3.5 million people who are now homeless.

At the same time, the proletarian regime would undertake an enormous program to construct integrated residential communities designed to facilitate free and equal social relationships. Quality education and access to culture, entertainment and athletics will allow the fullest development of all, while facilities and social services will be vastly expanded to free women from the drudgery of housework and the burdens of child-rearing. Initial steps toward building such communities were taken in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The early Soviet regime, insofar as it was able to amid poverty, backwardness and the massive destruction caused by the Civil War, established communal institutions, such as kitchens and laundries, specifically aimed at liberating women from the stultifying slavery of housework. The Bolshevik vision was that the international proletarian revolution would lay the basis for ending the domination of man by man and open the way for the full flowering of the human species. In comparison, the elaborate schemes of the would-be reformers of the imperialist order promise little and obtain nothing that can endure the brutalities of the decaying capitalist system.

*****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 soul-mate, 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 or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible. That later summer  heat escape valve is a result of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time 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 robber-baron days etched Crane Castle to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, 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 Sam and Laura 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, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont while listening to some CD 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 had brought them together early on several years back 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. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge 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 some 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 according a report he had heard on NPR. 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 imitating Woody's style something  fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan 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.

Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “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 about the desperate search for roots 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. For 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 you had 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 mine, 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 as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. 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 who ran for cover to “protect” their 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 1980s 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 very 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 Sam 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 [Von Ronk's] 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 footnotes. 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 Laura laugh settled Sam continued “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. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. 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 end day time.”

They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that they 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.                      

On Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- Summer Of 1942 (1971)-A Film Review

On Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- Summer Of 1942 (1971)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Summer of 1942, Jennifer O’Neil, Gary Grimes, 1971

 

I suppose each generation goes through its coming of age period somewhat differently, coming of age meaning in beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and commotions once you pass puberty somewhat differently. Take the one I know about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old values, to turn the world upside down, from our parents’ generation. Take too the one before mine, the one represented in this film under review Summer of 1942 about the coming of age in our parents’ generation. The generation that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging World War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll. Here is the funny thing at least on the basis of a viewing of this film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents who, at least in my case and the case of my growing up friends, went through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding.               

Here’s how it played out in this film which was originally released in 1971 although the at least the two generations after mine might also recognize some of the danger signs, pitfalls and funny stuff that went on in this film around sexually coming of age in this wicked old world. The story line is based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island Nantucket Island in the book but filmed off desolate Mendocino in California in the film). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.      

That chase was on at two levels. The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for “meaningful” love in the person of an older woman, Dorothy, played by Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her husband headed off to war. The own age part, funny in parts, driven mostly by pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he finally got his wish with on night at the secluded end of the beach with his most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was. The “older woman” (in our circles a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was spaying on her and her husband so he was “saving” himself for her. And after a series innocent (and some goofy) encounters with Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.              

Those are the main lines that get played out but what makes this one more than of ordinary interest to me was the whole lead-up, the whole “foreplay” if you will to be doing something about getting out of that dreaded virgin status (and avoid the designation “homo,” among heterosexual youth the bane of every corner boy guy coming up in that and the next generation). There was the very familiar inevitable (and frustrating)“feeling up” of the girl scene at the movies of which neighborhood legends are made (although Hermie missed the mark, literally, on that one), the awkward scene where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and he got sexually excited by her off-hand helping hand touch, the scene where the three friends “discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of Benji’s mother’s medical books (unlike most of the rest of us learned what we learned about sex in the streets, and not always correct information either), and of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his first sexual experience. The best scene of all though and it really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Yeah, watch this one and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling around coming to terms with sex.     

A View From The International Left-Germany’s “War on Terror” Threatens Immigrants, Leftists, Workers

Workers Vanguard No. 1094	26 August 2016

Germany’s “War on Terror” Threatens Immigrants, Leftists, Workers

We print below a translation of an August 19 leaflet issued by the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, German section of the International Communist League.

The fatal shooting of nine immigrants in Munich on July 22 was an abhorrent racist crime. The man who did it was a fascist student, who chose to carry out his attack on the fifth anniversary of the mass murder in Norway of social-democratic youth by the fascist Anders Breivik. In the same week, there were two terrible terrorist attacks near Würzburg (July 18) and in Ansbach (July 24), both supposedly carried out by ISIS sympathizers. In Ansbach, 12 people were injured by the bomb with which a Syrian refugee blew himself up. Near Würzburg, a 17-year-old, probably of Afghan origin, attacked tourists from Hong Kong on a train with an ax and knife, seriously injuring five people.

The bourgeois state had evidently been waiting for an opportunity to set in motion its machinery of repression. On the Friday evening after the attack in Munich, the whole city was paralyzed under the flimsy explanation that the cops were looking for several attackers with rifles. They cordoned off the Stachus [central square], shut down the entire public transport system until Saturday morning and ordered the whole population of the third-largest city in Germany to stay at home. There was talk of a state of emergency, and 2,300 police and security forces were deployed, including the GSG 9 (special unit of the federal police). Forty-four men from the Austrian anti-terror unit Cobra were flown in by helicopter. To put some impetus behind her demand to make it easier to deploy the Bundeswehr [German army] domestically, Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen put 100 soldiers of a military police regiment on alert.

The whole thing was a well-prepared civil war maneuver, basically aimed at practicing ways of suppressing the working population when they again move against the capitalist system. The capitalists know that their system arouses the opposition of the exploited. In France, the Socialist Party-led government used the ongoing state of emergency, supposedly imposed against Islamic terrorists, against the mass mobilizations of workers seeking to stop the new anti-union law. For the last 15 years, the German government has also been using the “war against terror” as a pretext for the militaristic mobilization of the state; this has been directed above all against Muslims but ultimately has the workers movement as a whole in its sights.

A special forces commando shot dead the perpetrator of the train attack near Würzburg as he was fleeing. When Renate Künast (Green Party member of parliament) rightly questioned this targeted killing, the head of the German cop association started a vicious online campaign against her—which some Green politicians joined—to nip in the bud any and all criticism of the role of the police. Bavarian minister of the interior Joachim Herrmann (CSU) [Christian Social Union, Bavarian affiliate of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU)] likewise immediately justified the final deadly shot.

Four days after the attack in Ansbach, Chancellor Merkel announced a nine-point plan “against terror,” which is intended to further tighten the national security laws in force since 2001. The most ominous aspect is that the Bundeswehr and police can now carry out joint exercises for “major terrorist situations.” This June, the CDU/CSU-SPD [Social Democratic Party] government implemented a new package of anti-terror laws. Further, it is setting up a new office to assist the secret service and the Federal Criminal Police to decrypt internet communications—one more attack on everyone’s privacy. Down with the “war against terror”! Down with all the national security laws!

The government is seeking to make it easier to deport people more quickly, now even to war zones like Syria. The federal minister of the interior, Thomas de Maizière, is planning to restrict medical confidentiality, which is especially intended to intimidate those doctors who courageously campaign against the deportation of refugees. CSU and CDU ministers are agitating to abolish dual citizenship, which the SPD leadership has so far rejected. It is in the most basic interests of the working class not to be divided along ethnic lines, but to forge unity of all workers regardless of background. The unions must work for the integration of refugees into the working class, with equal pay for equal work. This will also enormously improve the chances of fighting against the capitalists and their government. Hands off dual citizenship! Full citizenship rights for all who live here! For union action to stop deportations!

The intensified state terror at home goes hand in hand with German imperialism’s increased interventions abroad. The Bundeswehr is now deployed in Africa, the Near East, the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Afghanistan. We demand in every case: Bundeswehr out! German imperialism has an extremely bloody history; in its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union (1941-45), over 27 million Soviet citizens were killed. The Hitler regime shored up the German bourgeoisie’s rule and destroyed the independent organizations of the working class. The bourgeoisie is responsible for the Holocaust—the industrial murder of millions of Jews, Roma and Sinti [Gypsies]—and the persecution and murder of communists and countless others. The Wehrmacht occupied the Balkans and subjugated the peoples living there. Today, German imperialism still sees the Balkans and East Europe as its backyard and defends its rapacious interests there against the other imperialists. Through the EU, it subjugates the other peoples of Europe, raking in massive profits with the aid of the euro. Down with the EU and German imperialism!

The imperialists are the biggest terrorists in the world, and their destruction of the Near East, which is escalating day by day, is responsible for people being driven to flee, some of them into the arms of Islamists. The development of ISIS is the direct result of the policies of the U.S. and other imperialists, who destroyed countries like Libya, Iraq and Syria. We welcome every setback for the imperialists and therefore take a military side with the Islamic State when it fights against the imperialists and their ground troops, which are the mainly Kurdish SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) and the pesh merga. The only solution for the oppressed masses is a series of workers revolutions with the perspective of a socialist federation of the Near East. Imperialists out of the Near East!

Deploying the Bundeswehr at home is nothing new, but in contrast to France or the U.S. [e.g., the National Guard], for instance, it is not seen as normal. After Germany’s defeat in World War II and the end of the fascist regime, police and military functions were initially strictly separated. However, when the Bundeswehr was reorganized, reserve units were set up for “homeland protection.” Since 2013, 2,700 soldiers have been on standby in the 16 federal states to assist the police when the situation requires. An article in taz newspaper, “Soldiers for the Rebellious People” (10 August 2012), explains what kind of situations are meant:

“According to a general clause of the European Union, they could be deployed to assist in the case of a political general strike against supply facilities, violent mass protests, social disturbances or civil disobedience actions such as strikes and/or street barricades affecting transport and energy or the health care system.”

In 2008, the Bundeswehr was deployed against leftist demonstrators at the G8 summit in Rostock. Fighter jets flew low over the heads of the leftists, who were simply protesting the gathering of imperialist heads of state. Next year, the imperialist G20 plans to meet in central Hamburg. The intimidation against possible protests started early with a brutal cop raid in July on two leftist housing projects in the Hafenstrasse. Two hundred fifty cops, some armed with automatic weapons, forced their way into the houses; the residents, refugee solidarity activists, were threatened at gunpoint and 30 people were detained. The workers movement has an interest in defending leftists against all state terror because these are the same cops whose job is to protect the capitalists’ private property and who act as scabherders during strikes. We say: Cops out of the DGB union federation!

The reformist left, with the leadership of the Left Party in the front line, see things quite differently. Sahra Wagenknecht welcomed the cop action in Munich, and she calls on the state to carry out such actions more often. In a press statement of July 25 she explained: “Mrs. Merkel and the government now have a special responsibility to win people’s confidence in the continued ability of the state and its security forces to act.” Wagenknecht wants to strengthen this bourgeois state which, as Marx and Engels explained, is nothing other than the instrument of oppression by the ruling capitalist class.

This is the same state whose security service bolsters Nazi organizations and is deeply implicated in the series of murders of immigrants by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2000 and 2006. The state safeguards and exonerates the Nazis and racists who carry out near-daily attacks on refugees and deadly arson attacks on refugee hostels. While the state protects the Nazis, keeping them in reserve as shock troops against the working class, the fascist attack in Munich was used as a pretext for enhancing the state’s forces. And the bourgeois media are going to a lot of trouble to play down the fact that it wasn’t an Islamic terrorist, but a fascist.

When there was a fascist attack at Oktoberfest in 1980, with 13 deaths and 211 injuries, the state presented it as the act of an “individual madman” and dismissed the connections to the Nazi “Hoffmann gun sport group.” As we wrote in Spartakist No. 33, November 1980: “The main priority was to keep proceeding with the normal agenda for the election campaign: the German fascist past has been ‘dealt with,’ the ‘real’ terror comes from the left—against the state.”

It is urgently necessary to get rid of the deadly illusions in the neutrality of the state; such illusions only serve to maintain the barbaric imperialist system. What we need is to establish a multiethnic revolutionary workers party that has the program to overthrow this system, in contrast to the pro-capitalist program of the Left Party and the SPD. Such a revolutionary party will imbue workers and the oppressed with the lessons of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which explain why socialist revolution is necessary in order to end all the evils of this society.

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 [this night was several years before the recent 2015 announcement that that central spot for the blues tradition and up and coming newer musical genre was closing after a forty year run], 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 and picked up by Ralph along the way when drinking his life-time scotch whiskey became verboten after a bad medical check-up about ten years before Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired kind of naturally. A lot of their conversations of late, the last few years as they slid into retirement Ralph giving the day to day operations of his specialty electrical shop over to his youngest son and Sam giving the day to day management of his high volume printing business to his longtime employee, Jimmy Jones, who held the place together at the beginning while Sam headed West with a gang of other Carver corner boys in search of the great blue-pink American West night that animated much of the late 1960s had centered on their lifetime of common musical interests (except folk music which Sam came of age with, caught the drift as it came through Harvard Square where he would hang out to get out of the house when tensions boiled  o to some extent but which mostly even with Bob Dylan anti-war protest songs made him grind his teeth.

By naturally Ralph meant, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. Songs like The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid like Ralph born and raised in Troy, New York a strictly working class town then, and now,  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 all the animals of the farm kingdom and their distinctive noises that still rattled Ralph’s head on hard drinking night if he got melancholy for his tortured childhood; Humpty Dumpty, a silly grossly overweight holy goof of the rankest order, an egghead to boot and that didn’t mean intellectual, far from it, who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression, that hell or high water expression, or used it in the high Roman Catholic Saturday-go-to-confession-to confess those damns, hells, and fucks that had entered you vocabulary through osmosis and Sunday-go-to-communion-to-absolve-all-sins Morris household out in Troy where Ralph still lives; and,  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 but thinking about it later what were they really doing up there. All this total recall, or mostly total recall showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. you have embraced that music as a child 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 sketch is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Sam nodded his head in agreement then chimed in with his opinion the music of junior high school as he thought, looking behind the bartender’s head to the selection of hard liquors displayed with the twinkle of an eye, about switching over to a high-shelf scotch whiskey, Haig &Haig, 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. (Sam unlike Ralph suffering no medical warning about the dire consequences to his system about throwing down a few shots since his health was in better shape than Ralph, Ralph having taken a beating in that department with whatever hellious chemical his government, or rather the American government for which he refused to take any credit or blame, was throwing on the ground of Vietnam from the nightmare skies during that long, bloody lost war).

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, getting back to junior high, Sam thinking about 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 had gotten him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on the poor, benighted man 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 said amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult in any era, 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 on the side in those days, not unlike these days, when teachers couldn’t live on their teaching incomes led an old-time, old time to Sam and his classmates Benny Goodman-style swing and sway big band at special occasions and as a regular at the Surf Ballroom over in Plymouth on Friday nights), who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks. Thus  you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance, God Bless America, 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 the Dasher 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. And they were not putting their three selections for a quarter to hear hokey Home on the Range.   

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 as he chuckled to himself and turned a little confession red although he not been into that stifling confession box on his gamy knees in many years, and it would not be nice either). Ralph 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 against the Nips (his father’s term for the dirty bastard Japanese) 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, guys like 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 or could hardly wait to hear when the jukebox guy came into Doc’s to put the latest selections in (and to have his hand greased by Doc for “allowing” those desperately desired songs onto his jukebox to fill his pockets with many quarters, see he was “connected” and so along with the jukebox hand over fist money-maker cam the hand).

That mention of transistor radios got Ralph and Sam 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 since they had moved from the bar to a table near the stage to get a better view of the band if they were to make it through both sets that night (and Ralph thinking, just this once, just for this bluesy night he would “cheat” a little on that scotch whiskey ban). This transistor thing by the way for the young who might wonder what these old geezers were talking about since it was clearly not iPods 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, her word whether she knew the exact meaning or not, meaning all hot and bothered, 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 Berry telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, all had to move over because there was a new sheriff in town.  Bo Diddley asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate. Buddy Holly 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, WBZ and later WCAS. 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 Sam although he would shutter his ears if Sam played some folk stuff).

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 (and plenty taken away when the soldiers and sailors, white soldiers and sailors came home on the overcrowded troop transports looking to start life over again and raise those families they dreamed about in the muds of Europe and the salty brine of the atoll Pacific). 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, think about Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, 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 down in Newport when everybody who was anybody that high school and college kids wanted to hear in that folk minute showed up there.  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 while American rockers were basically clueless until the Brits told them about their own roots music) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band. 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. And he and his band did just that. Yes, that blues calling from somewhere deep in the muds is an acquired taste and a lasting one.