*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind -Join The Resistance

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind -Join The Resistance         

          

      

By Bradley Fox

Back in 2014, the summer of 2014 to hone in on the time frame of the story to be told, Josh Breslin the then recently retired old-time alternative newspaper and small journal writer for publications like Arise Folk and Mountain Music Gazette who hailed from Olde Saco, Maine was sitting with his friend Sam Lowell from Carver down in cranberry bog country out in Concord in the field behind the Old Manse where the Greater Boston Folk Society was holding its annual tribute to folksinger Woody Guthrie he had thought about all the connections that he, they had to Woody Guthrie from back in the 1960s folk minute revival and before. He mentioned that orphan thought to Sam whom he queried on the subject, wanted to know his personal take on when he first heard Woody. And as well to Laura Perkins, Sam’s long-time companion who had been sitting between them and whom Josh had an on-going half flame going back who knows how far but who had made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue to Sam although she had thanked him for the attention compliment. Sam was aware of Josh’s interest but also of Laura’s position and so he and Josh got along, had in any case been back and forth with some many collective wives and girlfriends that attracted both of them since they had similar tastes going back to ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that they just took it in stride.  Here is what Sam had to say:   

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out to chapter and verse. Like those church hymns like Mary, Queen of the May, Oh, Jehovah On High, and Amazing Grace that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit first bought by poor but proud parents for first communion when that time came  complete with white matching tie on or if you were a girl your best frilly dress on, also so white and first communion bought, when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which had made the hymns make sense.

Like as well the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry, first name Chuck, black as night out of Saint Lou with a golden guitar in hand and some kind of backbeat that made you, two left feet you, want to get up and dance, told Mr. Beethoven, you know the classical music guy, and his ilk, Mozart, Brahms, Liszt, to move on over there was a new sheriff in town, was certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things.

One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind causing westward treks to do re mi California in search of the Promise Land). Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and where the song had gotten full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right some vagabond Sunday night and for a time on television, after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene which scared the wits of square Ike American that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment).

No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally as he lay wasting away from genetic diseases in Brooklyn Hospital, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest centered on making current event political protest songs from ban the bomb to killing the Mister James Crow South, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before that dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him.

He spoke in simple language and simpler melody of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels like dams and bridge spans of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Uncle Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley fought to the bitter end by heroic fellow American Abraham Lincoln Battalion International Brigaders in civil war Spain during the time when it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.     

The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).                 

It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.      

Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers, the forever night-takers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Scene Three: A First Misstep In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night, Early Spring 1969

Scene Three: A First Misstep In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night, Early Spring 1969


Let me tell this story, okay, this story about a couple of guys that I picked up hitch-hiking out on the 1960s highway. I’ll get to what highway it was later because it could have been any highway, any American or European, or maybe even African or Asian highway, if those locales had such highways, at least highways for cars back in those days. Anyway it’s their story, these two guys, really, and maybe around the edges my story, and if you are of a certain age, your story, just a little anyway.

Some of it though just doesn’t sound right now, or read right, at least the way they told it to me but we will let that pass because it has been a while and memories, mine in this case, sometimes seize up even among the best of us. Ya, but this part I do remember so let’s just subtitle this one a segment on that search for the blue-pink great American West night and that makes this thing a lot of people’s story. Let’s get to it right now by picking up where they and I intersect on the great American 1960s road:

Two young men were standing pretty close together, talking, up ahead at the side of a brisk, chilly, early spring morning 1969 road, a highway really, a white-lined, four-laned, high-speed highway if you want to know, thumbs out, as I came driving down the line alone in my Volkswagen Beetle (or bug, hey, that’s what they were called in those days, you still see some old restored or well-preserved ones around, especially out on the left coast, California), see them, and begin to slow down to pick them up. I would no more think not to pick them up than not to breathe. A few years earlier and I would have perhaps been afraid to pick up such an unlikely pair, a few years later and they would not have been on that road. But the thumbs out linked them, and not them alone on this day or in this time, with the old time hitchhike road, the vagabond road that your mother, if she was wise or nervous, told you never ever, ever to take (and it was always Ma who told you this, your father was either held in reserve for the big want-to-do battles, or else was bemused by sonny boy wanting to spread his wings, or better yet, was secretly passing along his own long ago laid aside blue-pink highway dreams).

This pair in any case, as you shall see, were clearly brothers, no, not brothers in the biological sense, although that sometimes was the case on the old hitchhike road, but brothers on that restless, tireless, endless, road. My hitchhike road yesterday, and maybe tomorrow, but today I have wheels and they don’t and that was that. No further explanation needed. I stopped. From the first close-up look at them these guys were young, although not too young, not high school or college young but more mid-twenties maybe graduate student young. I’ll describe in more detail how they looked in a minute but for those who desperately need to know where I picked them up, the exact locale that is, let me put your anxieties to rest and tell you that it was heading south on the Connecticut side of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border of U.S. Interstate 84 (near Union Ct. and Holland Ma.), one of the main roads to New York City from Boston. Are you happy now? Not as sexy as some of those old-time Kerouac-Cassady late 1940s “beat” roads, but I believe their ghosts were nevertheless hovering in the environs. Hell, now that I think about it, would it have mattered if I said it was Route 6, or Route 66, or Route 666 where I picked them up. I picked them up, that was the way it was done in those halcyon days, and that’s the facts, man, nothing but the facts.

Hey, by the way, while we are talking about facts, just the hard-headed fact of this pair standing on the side of a highway road should have been enough to alert the reader that this is no current episode but rather a tale out of the mist of another American time. Who in their right mind today would be standing on such a road, thumb out, or not, expecting some faded Dennis Hopper-like flower child, or Ken Kesey-like Merry Prankster hold-out to stop. No this was the time of their time, the 1960s (or at the latest, the very latest, about 1973). You have all seen the bell-bottomed jeans, the fringed-deerskin jackets, the long hair and beards and all other manner of baubles in those exotic pre-digital photos so that one really need not bother to describe their appearances. But I will, if only to tempt the fates, or the imaginations of the young.

One, the slightly older one, wispy-bearded, like this was maybe his first attempt at growing the then< em>de rigueur</em> youth nation-demanded male beard to set one apart from the them (and from the eternal Gillette, Bic, Shick razor cuts, rubbing alcohol at the ready, splash of English Leather, spanking clean date night routine, ah, ah, farewell to all that). Attired: <em>Levi</em> blue-jean’d with flared-out bottoms, not exactly bell-bottoms but denims that not self-respecting cowboy, or cowboy wanna-be would, or could, wear out in the grey-black , star-studded great plains night; plaid flannel shirt that one would find out there in that bronco-busting night (or in backwoodsman-heavy Maine and Oregon in the time of the old Wobblies or Ken Kesey’s <em>Sometimes a Great Notion</em>); skimpily-sneakered, Chuck Taylor blacks, from the look of them, hardly the wear for tackling the great American foot-sore hitchhike road which makes me think that these are guys have started on something like their maiden voyage on that old road; and over one shoulder the ubiquitous string-tied bedroll that speaks already of ravine sleep, apartment floor pick your space sleep, and other such vagabond sleep certainly not of Holiday Inn or even flea-bag motel sleeps; and over the other shoulder the also ubiquitous life’s gatherings in a knapsack (socks, a few utensils, maybe underwear, and the again maybe not, change of shirt, a few toilet articles, not much more but more than the kings (and queens) of the roads, 1930s ancestor forbears carried, for sure , ask any old Wobblie, or bum-hobo-tramp hierarch- take your pick-who took that hard-scrabble, living out of your emptied pocket road).

And the other young man, a vision of heaven’s own high 1960s counter-cultural style: long-haired, not quite a pony tail if tied back and maybe not <em>Easy Rider</em> long but surely no advertisement for <em>Gentleman’s Quarterly</em> even in their earnest days of keeping up with the new tastes to corner the more couth segments of the hippie market; cowboy-hatted, no, not a Stetson, howdy, Tex, kind of thing but some Army-Navy store-bought broad brimmed, sun-bashing, working cowboy hat that spoke of hard-riding, branding, cattle night lowing, whiskey and women Saturday town bust-ups, just right for a soft-handed, soft-skinned city boy fearful of unlit places, or places that are not lit up like a Christmas tree; caped, long swirling cape, like someone’s idea of old-time film Zorro stepping out with the senoritas; guitar, an old Martin from the look of it, slung over one shoulder, not protective cased against the winds, rains, snows, or just the bang-ups of living, but protective in other ways when night falls and down in the hills and hollows, or maybe by a creek, heaven’s own strum comes forth. Woody Guthrie’s own child, or stepchild, or some damn relative. I swear.

Welcome brothers, as I open up the passenger side door. “Where are you guys heading?” This line is more meaningful than you might think for those who know, as I know, and as these lads will know, as well, if they spent any time on the hitchhike road. Sometimes it was better, even on a high-speed highway, to not take any old ride that came along if, say, some kind–hearted local spirit was only going a few miles, or the place where a driver would let you out on the highway was a tough stop. Not to worry though these guys, Jack and Mattie, were hitchhiking to California. California really, I swear, although they are stopping off at a crisscross of places on their way. A pretty familiar routine by then, playing hopscotch, thumbs out, across the continent.

These guys were, moreover, indeed brothers, because you see once we started comparing biographical notes, although they never put it that way, or really never could just because of the way they thought about things as I got to know them better on the ride, were out there searching, and searching hard, for my blue-pink night. Christ, there were heaven’s own blessed armies, brigades anyway, of us doing it, although like I said about Jack and Mattie most of the brothers and sisters did not get caught up in the colors of that night, like I did, and just “dug” the search. Jack and Mattie are in luck, in any case, because on this day I’m heading to Washington, D.C. and they have friends near there in Silver Springs, Maryland. The tides of the times are riding with us.

And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story or at least this part of it, am I heading to D.C.? Well, the cover story is to do some anti-war organizing but, for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a women who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here, although that theme might turn up again. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novels section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you will find here.

I’ve got a kind of weird story to tell you about why Jack and Mattie were on this desolate border stretch of the highway in a minute but let me tell a little about what they were trying to do out on that road, that west road. First, I was right, mostly, about their ages, but Jack and Mattie were no graduate students on a spring lark before grinding away at some master’s thesis on the meaning of meaning deconstuct’d (although this reference is really an anachronism since such literary theories were not then fashionably on display on the world’s campuses, but you get the drift) or some such worthy subject in desperate need of research in a time when this old world was falling apart and the bombs were (are) raining (literally) on many parts of the world.

In one sense they were graduates though, graduates of the university of hard knocks, hard life, and hard war. They had just a few months before been discharged, a little early as the war, or the American ground troops part of it, was winding down, from the U.S. Army after a couple of tours of duty in ‘Nam (their usage, another of their privileged usages was “in-country”). I swear I didn’t believe them at first, no way, they looked like the poster boys for the San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967. Something, something big was going on here and my mind was trying to digest the sight of these two guys, “good, solid citizens” before the “man” turned them around in that overseas Vietnam quagmire who looked in attire, demeanor, and style just like the guy (me) who picked them up.

Ya, but that is only part of it and not even the most important part, really, because this California thing was also no lark. This is their break-out, bust-out moment and they are going for it. As we rode along that old super highway they related stories about how they came back from “in-county”, were going to settle down, maybe get married (or move in with a girlfriend or seven), and look forward to social security when that distant time came. But something snapped inside of them, and this is where every old Jack London hobo, every old Wobblie, every old bummer on the 1930s rail highway, hell even every old beat denizen of some Greenwich Village walk-up was a kindred spirit. Like I said, and I am sitting right in the car listening to them with a little smirk on my face, the boys are searching that same search that I am searching for and that probably old Walt Whitman really should take the blame for, okay. I’ll tell you more, or rather; I’ll let them tell you more some other time but let me finish up here with that weird little story about why they were at that god forsaken point on the highway.

Look, everybody knows, or should know, or at least knew back then that hitchhiking, especially hitchhiking on the big roads was illegal, and probably always was even when every tramp and tramp-ette in America had his or her thumb out in the 1930s. But usually the cops or upstanding citizenry either ignored it or, especially in small towns, got you on some vagrancy rap. Hey, if you had spent any time on the hitchhike road you had to have been stopped at least once if for no other reason than to harass you. Still some places were more notorious than others in hitchhike grapevine lore in those days, particularly noteworthy were Connecticut and Arizona (both places where I had more than my own fair share of “vagrancy” problems).

So I was not too far off when I figured out that Jack and Mattie were on their maiden voyage. Thumbs out and talking, the pair missed the then ever-present Connecticut state police cruiser coming from nowhere, or it seemed like nowhere, as it came to a stop sharply about five feet away from them. The pair gulped and prepared for the worst; being taken to some state police barracks and harassed and then let go at some backwater locale as the road lore had it. Or getting “vagged”. Or worst, a nice little nasty trick in those days, have “illegal” drugs conveniently, very conveniently, found on their person.

But get this, after a superficial search and the usual questions about destination, resources, and the law the pair instead were directed to walk the few hundred yards back across the border line to Massachusetts. Oh, I forgot this part; the state cop who stopped them was a Vietnam veteran himself. He had been an MP in ‘Nam. Go figure, right. So starts, the inauspicious start if you think about it, in one of the searches for the blue-pink great American West night. Nobody said it was going to be easy and, you know, they were right. Still every time I drive pass that spot (now close to an official Connecticut Welcomes You rest stop, whee!), especially on any moonless, starless, restless, hitchhiker-less road night I smile and give a little tip of the hat to those youthful, sanctified blue-pink dreams that almost got wrecked before they got started.

When The Blues Was Dues-With The Film “Cadillac Records” In Mind

When The Blues Was Dues-With The Film “Cadillac Records” In Mind

By Si Landon

[The film Cadillac Records chronicles the rise and fall of the blues label the Chicago-bound House of Chess, a guy from the villages in Poland, so a white guy, who nailed the whole trajectory of the switch from the old timey country blues sung in the acoustic “juke joints” that could be found out in the rural un-electrified South, the South of share-croppers, plantation workers just like in the ante bellum times, and the benighted land of one Mister James Crow to the electrified urban sounds of those who jumped bail on Mister and headed north up the Mississippi and faced some of the same stuff-segregation(with some stopping along the  This is the background about how a wise Polish boy, a Polish Jewish boy, who took a bunch of young black men, and later a black woman and created a sound that lasted-a sound that sounds good today just like when they sweated those blues in some Chicago tavern practically eating the microphone.(I am not kidding on that score. Check out Howlin’ Wolf playing the harmonica down at the Newport Folk Festival in the early sixties on YouTube if you need visual proof).

Sam Phillips down river in Memphis with his white-bread boys (who were very aware of black-etched rhythm and blues from gospel to the juke joints and the street corner singers) and Brother Chess with his stable of black and night blues men-and a woman pretty well wrap up in a bow the genesis of rock and roll. Rock and roll the music that shaped Jack Reardon and Bart Webber, working class guys who hailed from Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston and who lived and died for the music-and the girls that the music snagged. S.L.]             

****

“Wasn’t that a time,” Jack Reardon mentioned to Bart Webber his old high school friend who was a late-comer to the study of the roots of rock and roll or really the same thing-came to the blues late one night a few nights after he had seen the film Cadillac Blues on his television via the beauties of NetFlix (he had seen the film when it had first come out but was in what he would call a “when blues is dues.” Bart had not seen the film so he asked Jack to give him a short run-down on the film to see if Lana, his lovely wife of many years, mighty grab that selection from NetFlix and they would watch it as well. So as they settled into their chairs in the den of Bart’s house with a drink in hand Jack was happy to chat away about his growing up music-the music that he had “hipped” all his guys around the corner of Benny’s Drug Store over on Ripon Road in downtown Riverdale to before that genre caught on with rock and roll devotees.

[Funny Jack had come to the blues quite by accident-the accident of modern technology-in this case the invention, the savior invention, as any generation of ‘68er, anybody who came of musical age in the 1950s, would be glad to tell you of the transistor radio which was basically a small portable radio run by batteries that you could put to your ear and listen to stations like WMEX where the latest rock songs were being played without having to be hassled by irate parents telling you that you were going to hell in a hand-basket and more importantly not to have to listen to their tinny music. One errant Sunday when the winds were up, say 1957, 58 he could not get the signal for the local rock station, WJDA, for Bill Mathers’ Rock Hour but instead picked up in the late night WABC out of Chicago where he heard this bad-ass beat that seemed kind of familiar, not a rock beat but kind of like it, a little more sweaty if he had been pressed to tell what his ear picked up on Little Milton’s Blues Blast. The song, Big Ike Turner’s Rocket 88. He was hooked.]                     

“It’s funny how some great movements in music history started out “from hunger.” That really is the start of Chess Records (the real name of the label-the Cadillac of the film is just an acknowledgement that one had arrived in the great golden age of the “boss” car of the 1950s.That was the pay-off for success for both Chess and the bluesmen). Chess was hustling a junkyard job but with a hunger to get out, to become an impresario. The first big star of his label Muddy Waters was down in some forlorn cotton field dreaming about heading north, north to the bright lights of the city, dreaming “from hunger” dreams too. That first combination that hit was when Muddy worked the streets and tossing that old acoustic guitar to the garbage can (not literally such instruments were life-blood remember-and remember too you might be back on cheap street soon and in need of that old thing for your new daily bread) and threw some electric cord and amped up. (Maxwell Street the most famous street for bluesmen to bring their acts along, maybe get noticed too, maybe nurse a few drinks to keep the devil away too.)

The movie threads it way up and down through Muddy always in the background, always the guy who made the whole thing work-until rock and roll swamped the canoe. Along the way they pick up the greatest harmonica player who ever played that key blues instruments, Little Walter.           

But all musics have their ups and downs and so the big moment falls back with the onslaught of rock and roll brought to the Chess label via Chuck Berry and his vaunted duck walk (to lose his fame and freedom  via some bullshit crackerjack stuff with Mister’s women). And they all ride on his back as they attempt to figure out how they are going to fit into the new wave. Then Etta James comes along and does a female version of the guys who brought the music north. Of course there are the romances (Muddy with his stable, Chess with Etta), the drugs (and alcohol, stuff that would help do Little Walter in), the tensions between the various blues persona-Muddy versus the Wolf. With that lead-in Bart knew that even if he was a late-comer to the blues he was going to see the movie come hell or high water-or Lana.        

A Story Goes With It-The 1947 Film Adaptation Of Earl Derr Bigger’s “Seven Keys To Baldpate”-A Film Review

A Story Goes With It-The 1947 Film Adaptation Of Earl Derr Bigger’s “Seven Keys To Baldpate”-A Film Review

DVD Review  

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Seven Keys To Baldpate, starring Phillip Terry Jacqueline White, adapted from Earl Derr Bigger’s crime novel of the same name, 1947 (there were earlier cinematic versions). 

You never know what guys will bet on, even guys who don’t look like they need dough, serious dough anyway. That is the “hook” behind this film adaptation of crime novelist Earl Derr Bigger’s Seven Keys To Baldpate (Bigger better known for his classic Charlie Chan series). The bet: that left to his own devices, left alone crime writer Kenneth McGee, played by Phillip Terry, can finish a crime novel in a short specific period of time-twenty-four hours. The prize: five thousand in cash (yeah I know nothing but walking around today as one of my fellow film critics mentioned when commenting on the money stolen in some 1950s bank robbery in another film he was reviewing). The chase is on.     

Part of the idea behind the bet was for McGee to head for the quiet of a shutdown for the season New England inn in order to pursue his work in peace. McGee is given the only key to the inn and heads up smacking his lips that this bet would be like money found on the ground. But as the title of film tips us to he is not the only one with a key to access that well-worn front door. The place turned into Grand Central Station as people with very mixed motives keep popping up in this isolated snow drifted place. Toward the end I thought maybe I had a key and got mad that I didn’t have one.

The cast of rogues who show up include, let’s count them, since we know McGee has one, an unexpected caretaker who greets him at the door, a hermit, a femme, a professor, a gunman, and the fetching secretary of the guy who McGee made the bet with, Mary played by Jacqueline White to add a little off-hand romance while McGee figures out the motives of his co-residents. That’s seven in my book.  Here’s where you have to look twice at some guys, some guys you bet with, since Mary’s motives are straight up. She had been sent by the guy McGee bet to make sure that he didn’t finish the novel on time. Not fair, not fair at all.      

As for the others, except the hermit who is just there for effect, they are in this Podunk out of the way place to divvy up the spoils from a big jewel heist. Among themselves they manage to shoot up the place as they double-cross each other leaving two dead in the end when the coppers come to put paid the whole enterprise. Just your average crime story. Hey a story McGee could write in a jiffy and still collect the dough. Except that fetching secretary with the long legs showing to good effect got him all brain-addled when she flopped herself on his lap and dared him to ignore her. McGee should have known the fix was in on that score too.          

Vietnam Veteran Fritz Taylor’s Rockport Fourth Of July-2017

Vietnam Veteran Fritz Taylor’s Rockport Fourth Of July-2017

By Associate Moderator Jonathan Prince

[Those who are familiar with this site and a number of on-line media platforms with which he is associated may have noted that Peter Paul Markin has been for the past decade or so the moderator of this site. Some may also know the background story about the original of his on-line moniker which honors his long lost friend of the same name, the real life Markin, who taught him many things before he fell down to his own hubris, maybe his whole genetic infrastructure, in Mexico in a hail of gunfire over a busted drug deal in the mid-1970s. As one can assume by the time frame of many of his stories of his youth (and of course of the real Markin as well) the moderator is getting up there in age and as with the case of film critic Sam Lowell is ready to give up the day to day chores associated with moderating this busy site. Jonathan Prince, the son of an old college friend Leonard, and a recent college graduate himself, has volunteered to help out with the moderator and reporting roles as things move into transition.  

This assignment, an assignment which is basically a job of reportage about Fritz Taylor’s take on the Fourth of July celebration in the old time fishing town and now something of a tourist Mecca Rockport out on ocean edge Cape Ann in Massachusetts , is his first attempt at getting his feet wet on the job. It is rather fitting that Jonathan has had Fritz Taylor’s current story as his first assignment since Fritz was the first subject of the real Peter Paul Markin’s series of articles in the early 1970s for the now long gone East Bay Other out in Oakland. That series detailed how a bunch of Vietnam veterans from all over and for all kinds of personal reasons who could not deal with coming back to the “real” world after Vietnam came together down in Southern California and formed what they would now call an alternate community among the arroyos, under the bridges and along the railroad tracks. Bruce Springsteen later titled one of his songs Brothers Under The Bridge about that same experience and that seems to fit as well as any other for what went on back then. Not a bad way to cut your reporting teeth. Peter Paul Markin]     

Fritz Taylor is a marching mad man. A marching mad man with a purpose. Funny it had not always been that way. He had not always been that way. Back home as a youth in Fulton County, Georgia he would moan and groan if had to walk the half mile to the nearest grocery store to get provisions for his large family’s meals. Later, when he came of age and could not justify staying around the house and enlisted in the Army just as the war in Vietnam was coming to a boiling point, he would gripe, piss and moan he called it, about having to walk all over half that benighted country for most of his tour of duty.      

That war, that Vietnam experience which would change him forever when he got back to the “real” world, also changed his attitude toward walking, walking “with the king” he calls it now since he has gotten on the right side of the angels about the issues of war and peace. Of course as with a lot of guys back then, guys who fought and suffered every kind of stress and disorder, that wisdom did not come easy, and it was a close thing that it came at all. The dope he craved to take the pain away, the pain of living, almost did him in a few times. Like a lot of guys too he gave up to dope and to whatever other stuff was ailing his mind his wife and kids, his good paying job as a trucker, and his cozy place just waiting for him in society as a veteran. He had been one of the first guys to head to Southern California to be what he now calls “a brother under the bridge” after he ran into a friend who had served with him in the Forth Infantry up in the Central Highlands. It was down in the camp along the railroad track outside Westminster where Peter Paul Markin [the real Markin] first ran into Fritz and he had agreed to be interviewed for a story to run in an alternative newspaper in Oakland [the East Bay Other] where Markin was working at the time.                 

That was the early 1970s and while he wished that getting to know Markin, a fellow veteran, through that interview Fritz fell down, his term, many times to the lure of various drugs, in the end cocaine, before he got clean. He confessed to me that before then he could have “given a fuck” about thinking about wars, or peace for that matter. Getting clean helped him to be able to see that whatever was bothering him about what he had done in Vietnam and later to his social circle was the root of what bothered him. (He got what he called great help from the VA, from a therapist they provided which helped him work out some of what had enraged him for so many years). From there he, slowly, came to believe that if he was to have peace within himself that he would need to “spread the word,” again his term. Then Fritz began in the early 1980s to look around for groups that were doing peace work.             

By this time he had settled in Baltimore, gone to community college and had become a computer technician (paid for by the GI Bill), met a nice woman with a couple of kids and they were living together. This woman, Heather, now Heather Taylor, knew a few Quakers from a literacy campaign she had worked on with them and she got Fritz in touch with them. That had not really worked out because Fritz did not feel himself to be a pacifist nor did he feel comfortable with the plainness of the sect and its ways of living in this wicked old world.    

In 1987, or 1988, Fritz was not sure which, while living in a town just outside of Boston where he and Heather relocated so he could get a better job in what he had heard was the booming Hi Tech industry he ran into a guy with a Veterans for Peace tee shirt on in Harvard Square. This guy, Lenny Block, was headed to a Central America solidarity rally on Cambridge Common and he invited Fritz along. As it turned out that was to be his first serious peace march where he “walked with the king” since after the rally the participants were heading to the State House in Boston several miles away to publicize the situation in Central America and the United States government’s nefarious involvement in that troubled area of the world.         

And that, fast forward, had been how almost twenty years and plenty of worn shoe leather later one Fritz Taylor was spending the ebbing Fourth of July day in Rockport, Massachusetts as part of a combined VFP and affiliated peace group contingent in the annual town parade. This had not been Fritz’s first Rockport march, he reckoned it was his fourth or fifth so he knew what to expect (not Heather’s either who while not very “political” stood on the right side of the angels on the peace issue and marched with him in this parade). The crowds as usual were both respectful of the veterans as veterans and generally receptive to the peace message they were bringing to the fore with their array of dove-centered white flags flapping in the ocean breeze creating quite a stirring sight.        

That former part of the sentence about the crowd response is what bothered Fritz, had for a while in many locations, the part about respecting veterans as veterans. That respect was in Rockport that day, in the past and in other locations, signified most graphically by one expression-“Thank for your service.” While on march it was hardly appropriate to single out those who expressed themselves that way and ask what they meant. So Fritz suffered in silence about what the crowds were really responding to, a patriotic or peace strain. Fritz had been through a lot in Vietnam and what it had done to his psyche, been down in the ditch in Southern California with other lost souls from that war, had gone to the depths in drug addiction before being washed clean so he was more than usually bothered by the thought that those who used the thank you expression were honoring his tour of duty in Vietnam.     

This year Fritz decided that he would ask a few of the spectators once the parade was over what they meant since he would still get through the VFP tee shirt he was wearing those thanks. He stopped one older person and asked frankly what she meant by her compliment. She said for his service to his country and the peace aspect was just so much frosting. Another spectator agreed. A few others thought it “cool” that veterans were marching for peace. A mixed bag. The final response from a person he asked gave an unequivocal response that he believed for service to the country and not anything to do with peace. This gave Fritz an idea, an idea he tested out that very nice. Anytime somebody threw the expression of thanks for his service at him he would reply-“Yes, for my service now.” Fritz chuckled as he thought about how many more marches this new-found expression would get him through. A lot he hoped.        

Vietnam Veteran Fritz Taylor’s Rockport Fourth Of July-2017

Vietnam Veteran Fritz Taylor’s Rockport Fourth Of July-2017

By Associate Moderator Jonathan Prince

[Those who are familiar with this site and a number of on-line media platforms with which he is associated may have noted that Peter Paul Markin has been for the past decade or so the moderator of this site. Some may also know the background story about the original of his on-line moniker which honors his long lost friend of the same name, the real life Markin, who taught him many things before he fell down to his own hubris, maybe his whole genetic infrastructure, in Mexico in a hail of gunfire over a busted drug deal in the mid-1970s. As one can assume by the time frame of many of his stories of his youth (and of course of the real Markin as well) the moderator is getting up there in age and as with the case of film critic Sam Lowell is ready to give up the day to day chores associated with moderating this busy site. Jonathan Prince, the son of an old college friend Leonard, and a recent college graduate himself, has volunteered to help out with the moderator and reporting roles as things move into transition.  

This assignment, an assignment which is basically a job of reportage about Fritz Taylor’s take on the Fourth of July celebration in the old time fishing town and now something of a tourist Mecca Rockport out on ocean edge Cape Ann in Massachusetts , is his first attempt at getting his feet wet on the job. It is rather fitting that Jonathan has had Fritz Taylor’s current story as his first assignment since Fritz was the first subject of the real Peter Paul Markin’s series of articles in the early 1970s for the now long gone East Bay Other out in Oakland. That series detailed how a bunch of Vietnam veterans from all over and for all kinds of personal reasons who could not deal with coming back to the “real” world after Vietnam came together down in Southern California and formed what they would now call an alternate community among the arroyos, under the bridges and along the railroad tracks. Bruce Springsteen later titled one of his songs Brothers Under The Bridge about that same experience and that seems to fit as well as any other for what went on back then. Not a bad way to cut your reporting teeth. Peter Paul Markin]     

Fritz Taylor is a marching mad man. A marching mad man with a purpose. Funny it had not always been that way. He had not always been that way. Back home as a youth in Fulton County, Georgia he would moan and groan if had to walk the half mile to the nearest grocery store to get provisions for his large family’s meals. Later, when he came of age and could not justify staying around the house and enlisted in the Army just as the war in Vietnam was coming to a boiling point, he would gripe, piss and moan he called it, about having to walk all over half that benighted country for most of his tour of duty.      

That war, that Vietnam experience which would change him forever when he got back to the “real” world, also changed his attitude toward walking, walking “with the king” he calls it now since he has gotten on the right side of the angels about the issues of war and peace. Of course as with a lot of guys back then, guys who fought and suffered every kind of stress and disorder, that wisdom did not come easy, and it was a close thing that it came at all. The dope he craved to take the pain away, the pain of living, almost did him in a few times. Like a lot of guys too he gave up to dope and to whatever other stuff was ailing his mind his wife and kids, his good paying job as a trucker, and his cozy place just waiting for him in society as a veteran. He had been one of the first guys to head to Southern California to be what he now calls “a brother under the bridge” after he ran into a friend who had served with him in the Forth Infantry up in the Central Highlands. It was down in the camp along the railroad track outside Westminster where Peter Paul Markin [the real Markin] first ran into Fritz and he had agreed to be interviewed for a story to run in an alternative newspaper in Oakland [the East Bay Other] where Markin was working at the time.                 

That was the early 1970s and while he wished that getting to know Markin, a fellow veteran, through that interview Fritz fell down, his term, many times to the lure of various drugs, in the end cocaine, before he got clean. He confessed to me that before then he could have “given a fuck” about thinking about wars, or peace for that matter. Getting clean helped him to be able to see that whatever was bothering him about what he had done in Vietnam and later to his social circle was the root of what bothered him. (He got what he called great help from the VA, from a therapist they provided which helped him work out some of what had enraged him for so many years). From there he, slowly, came to believe that if he was to have peace within himself that he would need to “spread the word,” again his term. Then Fritz began in the early 1980s to look around for groups that were doing peace work.             

By this time he had settled in Baltimore, gone to community college and had become a computer technician (paid for by the GI Bill), met a nice woman with a couple of kids and they were living together. This woman, Heather, now Heather Taylor, knew a few Quakers from a literacy campaign she had worked on with them and she got Fritz in touch with them. That had not really worked out because Fritz did not feel himself to be a pacifist nor did he feel comfortable with the plainness of the sect and its ways of living in this wicked old world.    

In 1987, or 1988, Fritz was not sure which, while living in a town just outside of Boston where he and Heather relocated so he could get a better job in what he had heard was the booming Hi Tech industry he ran into a guy with a Veterans for Peace tee shirt on in Harvard Square. This guy, Lenny Block, was headed to a Central America solidarity rally on Cambridge Common and he invited Fritz along. As it turned out that was to be his first serious peace march where he “walked with the king” since after the rally the participants were heading to the State House in Boston several miles away to publicize the situation in Central America and the United States government’s nefarious involvement in that troubled area of the world.         

And that, fast forward, had been how almost twenty years and plenty of worn shoe leather later one Fritz Taylor was spending the ebbing Fourth of July day in Rockport, Massachusetts as part of a combined VFP and affiliated peace group contingent in the annual town parade. This had not been Fritz’s first Rockport march, he reckoned it was his fourth or fifth so he knew what to expect (not Heather’s either who while not very “political” stood on the right side of the angels on the peace issue and marched with him in this parade). The crowds as usual were both respectful of the veterans as veterans and generally receptive to the peace message they were bringing to the fore with their array of dove-centered white flags flapping in the ocean breeze creating quite a stirring sight.        

That former part of the sentence about the crowd response is what bothered Fritz, had for a while in many locations, the part about respecting veterans as veterans. That respect was in Rockport that day, in the past and in other locations, signified most graphically by one expression-“Thank for your service.” While on march it was hardly appropriate to single out those who expressed themselves that way and ask what they meant. So Fritz suffered in silence about what the crowds were really responding to, a patriotic or peace strain. Fritz had been through a lot in Vietnam and what it had done to his psyche, been down in the ditch in Southern California with other lost souls from that war, had gone to the depths in drug addiction before being washed clean so he was more than usually bothered by the thought that those who used the thank you expression were honoring his tour of duty in Vietnam.     

This year Fritz decided that he would ask a few of the spectators once the parade was over what they meant since he would still get through the VFP tee shirt he was wearing those thanks. He stopped one older person and asked frankly what she meant by her compliment. She said for his service to his country and the peace aspect was just so much frosting. Another spectator agreed. A few others thought it “cool” that veterans were marching for peace. A mixed bag. The final response from a person he asked gave an unequivocal response that he believed for service to the country and not anything to do with peace. This gave Fritz an idea, an idea he tested out that very nice. Anytime somebody threw the expression of thanks for his service at him he would reply-“Yes, for my service now.” Fritz chuckled as he thought about how many more marches this new-found expression would get him through. A lot he hoped.        

NEW “STAND WITH REALITY” AWARENESS CAMPAIGN TO FUND LEGAL DEFENSE FOR ALLEGED ELECTION INTERFERENCE WHISTLEBLOWER REALITY WINNER

NEW “STAND WITH REALITY” AWARENESS CAMPAIGN TO FUND LEGAL DEFENSE FOR ALLEGED ELECTION INTERFERENCE WHISTLEBLOWER REALITY WINNER

 

July 10, 2017

 

Stand With Reality (https://standwithreality.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of concerned individuals, is launching a campaign today to defend N.S.A. contractor Ms. Reality Leigh Winner against an overzealous prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice.

 

Winner has been charged under the Espionage Act, a 100-year-old statute originally designed for spies and saboteurs, for allegedly giving a document vital to the public’s understanding of potential Russian interference in U.S. election systems to a news organization.

 

Stand With Reality believes the charge against Winner is grossly disproportionate to her alleged offense, and is designed to create a chilling effect on investigative journalism by dissuading sources from sharing information that is critical to the public interest. The group is dedicated to raising public awareness of Winner’s case, as well as the U.S. government’s persistent abuse of the Espionage Act to silence its critics and stifle journalism.

 

“The document Winner is alleged to have given The Intercept is vital for understanding how U.S. election systems are seriously vulnerable to hacking. It is absurd that the government is charging her under the draconian Espionage Act rather than helping states fix our country’s election security,” said Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist project director and co-founder of Stand With Reality.

 

The organization aims to fully fund Winner’s legal defense team headed by attorney Titus Nichols, of the Augusta, Georgia law firm of Bell & Brigham. Stand with Reality launched a crowdfunding campaign today to cover both legal fees and public awareness efforts. "It is refreshing to know that so many people that Ms. Winner has never known have come together to offer their support and prayers for her,” notes Nichols. “Your pledge of additional support, for fees related to her case, is commendable,” he adds.

 

“The new Stand with Reality group means the world to me. Not only are they going to be raising money for my daughter’s legal defense, they'll also be raising awareness. Reality won't be forgotten, and she'll have a whole organization behind her,” said Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, of Kingsville, Texas. The Winner Family will be closing their GoFundMe effort and directing supporters to the new Reality Winner Defense Fund hosted by Courage to Resist in collaboration with Stand with Reality. Meanwhile, the UK-based Courage Foundation is undertaking fundraising and support efforts on behalf of Winner throughout Europe.

 

First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund provided a grant of $50,000 which will act as a matching fund for the first $50,000 raised for this campaign between now and August 30th. First Look is the publisher of The Intercept, which published its story based on a document allegedly provided by Winner after receiving it anonymously. The Fund is committed to supporting legal fights where key principles of press freedom are at stake, including the defense of journalistic sources like Winner facing this Espionage Act charge.

 

Winner, 25, is an Air Force veteran and recipient of the Air Force Commendation Medal for those who have "distinguished themselves by meritorious achievement and service." She is universally described by friends and family as a “patriot”.

 

She is currently being denied bail on the basis that she is a flight risk, despite assurances from her family, and their offer of their 20-acre Southern Texas ranch as collateral.

 

“We believe the prosecution is trying to demoralize Reality and her family by denying her bail,” said Rainey Reitman, open Internet advocate and co-founder of Stand with Reality. “They’re punishing her with months in jail, and denying her the opportunity to fully participate in her defense preparations, all before a jury hears the merits of the government’s case.”

 

Stand with Reality was founded by three individuals dedicated to open government, free expression, civil liberties, and the rule of law:

• Jeff Paterson, a Marine veteran and web developer, has spent the last 11 years as the project director of Courage to Resist, which provides legal and advocacy assistance to military war resisters.
• Trevor Timm, a lawyer and free speech advocate, is the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which helps defend the rights of journalists and whistleblowers worldwide.
• Rainey Reitman, a writer and privacy advocate, leads the advocacy team for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, and works as a nonprofit consultant.

For complete campaign information:

https://StandWithReality.org

 

Press contact:

Matt Burton

(415) 335-6054

matt@standwithreality.org

 

# # #

 

 

 

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind         

          

      

By Bradley Fox

Back in 2014, the summer of 2014 to hone in on the time frame of the story to be told, Josh Breslin the then recently retired old-time alternative newspaper and small journal writer for publications like Arise Folk and Mountain Music Gazette who hailed from Olde Saco, Maine was sitting with his friend Sam Lowell from Carver down in cranberry bog country out in Concord in the field behind the Old Manse where the Greater Boston Folk Society was holding its annual tribute to folksinger Woody Guthrie he had thought about all the connections that he, they had to Woody Guthrie from back in the 1960s folk minute revival and before. He mentioned that orphan thought to Sam whom he queried on the subject, wanted to know his personal take on when he first heard Woody. And as well to Laura Perkins, Sam’s long-time companion who had been sitting between them and whom Josh had an on-going half flame going back who knows how far but who had made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue to Sam although she had thanked him for the attention compliment. Sam was aware of Josh’s interest but also of Laura’s position and so he and Josh got along, had in any case been back and forth with some many collective wives and girlfriends that attracted both of them since they had similar tastes going back to ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that they just took it in stride.  Here is what Sam had to say:   

 

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out to chapter and verse. Like those church hymns like Mary, Queen of the May, Oh, Jehovah On High, and Amazing Grace that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit first bought by poor but proud parents for first communion when that time came  complete with white matching tie on or if you were a girl your best frilly dress on, also so white and first communion bought, when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which had made the hymns make sense.

 

Like as well the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry, first name Chuck, black as night out of Saint Lou with a golden guitar in hand and some kind of backbeat that made you, two left feet you, want to get up and dance, told Mr. Beethoven, you know the classical music guy, and his ilk, Mozart, Brahms, Liszt, to move on over there was a new sheriff in town, was certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things.

 

One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind causing westward treks to do re mi California in search of the Promise Land). Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and where the song had gotten full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right some vagabond Sunday night and for a time on television, after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene which scared the wits of square Ike American that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment).

 

No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

 

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally as he lay wasting away from genetic diseases in Brooklyn Hospital, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest centered on making current event political protest songs from ban the bomb to killing the Mister James Crow South, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before that dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him.

He spoke in simple language and simpler melody of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels like dams and bridge spans of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Uncle Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley fought to the bitter end by heroic fellow American Abraham Lincoln Battalion International Brigaders in civil war Spain during the time when it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.     

 

The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).                 

 

It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.      

 

 

 

Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers, the forever night-takers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.