This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
50 Years Gone Jack Gone And What Might Have Been- The Lonesome Hobo-In Honor Of Ti Jean Kerouac’s “Lonesome Traveler”
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Million-word pre-word processor so golf score pencil and Woolworth’s 5&10 cent store notebook fitted for flannel shirt pockets Jack (nee Jeanbon, nee Ti Jean, nee everyman, every man, and every woman with the fire in the belly to write) bellowed out in the good earth night, bellowed out in the night from the womb, bellowed about loneness, loneness in crowds, and sign of the age loneness. Not loneliness, not on the surface, not with Acre kidding corner boys crowding around (mostly French-Canadian boys who set the tone of the town, adieu this and that, but some Irish and Greek boys too, especially mad monk poet Sammy, hanging around Leclerc’s Variety Store), Jack-crowding, small-breasted F-C loves (oohing ,aah-ing in the dark- haired angel man thought ) swaying to Benny on the be-bop 1930s night and tossing and turning over Ti Jean words and clowning arounds (and secret Irishtown girl love spoken of before and now done), Jack-crowding, Adonis full field, full football field heroics, crowds cheering against bread and roses fed arch –rivals, Jack-crowding, Village cafes, full, chock full of the hip, the want-to-be hip, the faux hip, waiting, waiting on some dark-haired golden boy to rescue them from the little box night, Jacking-crowding, ditto Frisco, ditto New Jack City redux, ditto Jack-crowding.
So not loneliness he but lonesome cosmic wanderer from youth as partner to the crowds, up in small, immensely small twelve- year old bedrooms playing full- fledged leagues of solo jack baseball, sitting solo in fugitive Lowell libraries reading up a storm from Plato to kinsman Voltaire (via Acadian Gaspe dreams), sitting solo in some sigma phi dorm room munching chocolate bars, vanilla puddings, great greasy sugared crullers after hearty beef meals, as companion pouring over tales of greek gods and Homer, sitting solo (hard to do, believe me ) astern ships on big wave oceans ready to devour man, beasts and ship whole, sitting solo in midnight slum New Haven rooms, small hot stove, coffee pot percolating, ditto later in Frisco town, ditto in big sur town, ditto in Tangiers town, ditto down in mere Florida town, ditto solo.
Ditto too solo adventures on west coast work ship piers, solo sweaty dusty south of the border Mexican nights adventures, solo brakeman of the world trackless night adventures, solo sea- sick sailor going to fugitive night adventures, solo weird New Jack City 1950s beat scene adventures, solo big rock candy mountain and the void adventures, solo stumble around Europe on a dollar a day adventures, and solo mad cap late night chronicler of the hobo jungle world vanishing adventures. And hence crowded solo lonesome karmic writings and big word blasts, and smiling, smiling, maybe Buddha-like, at the connected-ness of it, of the one-ness of it, of the god-like symmetry of it. And a Ti Jean kindred tip of the hat.
In the spring of 1959, New York City was rocked by a six-week hospital strike. Thousands of workers, who were mainly black, Puerto Rican and women, fought to win union recognition and an end to poverty wages and long hours. The labor movement rallied to their side, with craft unions at hospital building sites joining the pickets. This union solidarity was key to eventual victory.
The strike came out of an organizing campaign started in 1958 by Local 1199, then part of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It transformed that small union local of mainly Jewish pharmacists into the huge multiracial hospital union that 1199SEIU is today, with 450,000 members across five states and Washington, D.C. During the strike, Jewish pharmacists, black and Puerto Rican cleaners and white skilled trades workers were on the picket lines together, showing that class struggle can cut against the bosses’ attempts to pit workers of different races against one another and that the unions can fight in the interests of all the oppressed.
Nonetheless, the militancy of the strikers was constrained by the Local 1199 leadership under President Leon Davis, which sought to bind the aspirations of the workers to the “good graces” of Democratic Party politicians. This subordination of the union to so-called “friend of labor” Democrats (and even a few Republicans), who in fact are the bosses’ agents, has been the hallmark of the 1199 officialdom ever since. Today, these labor statesmen sometimes give a nod to the importance of the 1959 strike, but avoid class struggle like the plague.
The 1959 Strike
Today, as in the 1950s, the majority of hospitals in New York City are private “voluntary” hospitals, often misnamed “not for profits” or charities. Far from providing charity, they extract exorbitant fees from patients and their insurers, and those who can’t pay are dumped on the city hospitals. The voluntaries, which pay no taxes because they are said to offer a “community service,” can make huge profits. Their boards of trustees are packed with financiers, landlords and industrialists—members of the capitalist class that derives its profits from the exploitation of the workers.
Today, the hospital bosses grudgingly tolerate the union under its current misleadership as an adjunct to their lobbying for government funds. But in the 1950s, the bosses were dead set on keeping the workers in the basement kitchens, laundries and workshops voiceless and unorganized. Most of these workers were recent migrants from the South, Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean. In the hospitals, as in broader U.S. society, where black people are segregated at the bottom and oppressed as a race-color caste, the racial hierarchy was rigidly enforced. For example, black men were restricted to the least skilled positions, while eastern and southern European immigrants filled more skilled jobs. Wages and conditions were even worse than those in the underfunded city hospitals, which had mainly white workforces. Indeed, many voluntary hospital workers were welfare recipients.
In 1958, amid intensifying civil rights struggles against Jim Crow segregation in the South, Local 1199 launched a voluntary hospital organizing drive. At the time, the membership of Local 1199 was largely Jewish, not least due to anti-Jewish exclusion in the medical schools, which drew many, like Davis, to become pharmacists instead. Through a series of strikes against the drugstore chains in the city, Local 1199 had won a 40-hour workweek by 1953. Union members were determined to extend such conditions to the harshly exploited hospital workers. They voted to pay an extra dollar in monthly dues to fund the recruitment of black and Puerto Rican workers into the union. Many joined the “crack of dawn brigades” that went to hospitals with union cards and distributed bilingual leaflets in what was called la cruzada. The union soon collected cards from a majority of workers at several locations who embraced the union, including because of its record of fighting on behalf of black workers.
The first big breakthrough success was at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, where the board agreed to negotiate with Local 1199 in December 1958. But the boards of the other hospitals stiffened in their opposition to the union. In response, Davis sought to assure management that if it agreed to union recognition, Local 1199 would agree to a no-strike pledge and binding arbitration, which is nothing but a trap designed to give the bosses the upper hand in contract negotiations. This offer to give up the strike weapon curried favor with some Democrats like Eleanor Roosevelt, but it did nothing to break the resistance of the bosses. And why would it? The interests of workers and the bosses are entirely counterposed. The bosses exploit the labor of workers to make profits, and withdrawing that labor collectively is the only way to hit the bosses where it hurts.
The strike began at six hospitals on May 8, after the bosses’ Greater New York Hospital Association, a cabal of all 81 voluntaries, arrogantly declared it would never recognize Local 1199. The walkout was extended to a seventh hospital on June 5. The strikers fought back with great courage against the anti-union intransigence of the capitalists on the hospital boards. They defied injunctions, arrests and beatings, vilification by the bourgeois press and maneuvers by Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. to force them back to work empty-handed. This Democrat, who won office with the support of the labor officialdom, regularly unleashed his cops to attack the strikers.
The strike was very popular with the city’s working people and poor, who were all too familiar with the racist contempt of the capitalist rulers and their club-wielding NYPD thugs. Huge quantities of food and donations poured in for the strikers. Crucially, Teamsters and laundry workers refused to cross the Local 1199 picket lines, while other unions helped build the lines. As the Militant, the newspaper of the then-revolutionary Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, observed: “Union solidarity has gone beyond financial and moral support. Skilled construction workers who make as much money in one day as some hospital workers do in a week have walked off the job on new buildings going up at three of the struck hospitals. The Building Trades Council declared that construction will not be resumed until the hospital workers win recognition” (8 June 1959). These concrete acts of solidarity on the picket line brought black and white workers together to advance their common class interests.
The conservative head of the IBEW electricians Local 3 and the NYC Central Labor Council, Harry van Arsdale, provided money and other support for the 1199 strike, but also insisted on limiting the strike to a handful of the hospitals, which is exactly what the Local 1199 tops did. Workers at other hospitals voted to join the strike but were not called out. Criminally, Davis kept offering management a no-strike pledge in exchange for union recognition. After six weeks, the strikers had no better offer than a deal the mayor had proposed early in the strike and which the strikers had decisively rejected.
The settlement, which was basically the same raw deal, did not include union recognition but allowed workers to elect a representative for grievances. Working conditions in the hospitals were to be reviewed by a “Permanent Administrative Committee” with six bosses and six “neutral” appointees who were chosen by a New York State court. However, the courts are not “neutral” but a part of the repressive state apparatus that defends the profits and rule of the bosses. At the ratification meeting before the vote, Local 1199 president Davis proclaimed: “We won backdoor recognition. But we’ll be in the front door soon” (quoted in Moe Foner, Not for Bread Alone, 2002). This was, however, by no means assured.
Building the Union, Winning Recognition
Despite not winning union recognition, strikers went back to work with Local 1199 buttons on and their heads held high. Management, try as it might to hold back the tide, had a new reality to deal with: Workers had an organization and identified with their new union. Members held regular meetings and elected stewards, who collected dues in person and handled grievances with management.
At the time, hospital workers were excluded from laws codifying collective bargaining rights. The Local 1199 bureaucrats peddled the lie that winning this right was a matter not of waging class struggle but of putting pressure on capitalist politicians to change the laws to favor the workers. In 1962, this dead-end strategy was behind the sellout of a strike for union recognition at Beth El Hospital (now Brookdale) in Brooklyn and Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. When this strike reached a stalemate, Leon Davis welcomed the intervention of Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller and pushed a rotten settlement on the strikers that included a promised collective bargaining law. The Militant (30 July 1962) warned:
“One political implication of the settlement is that in order for Rockefeller, a Republican, to live up to his promise, he will have to be re-elected this November. The labor leaders who made the deal with him previously supported Democratic candidates.
“Except for the retroactive pay, the strikers have won only promises from capitalist politicians. Similar broken promises forced them to strike in the first place. Even if the law is passed, it will not give the workers a union contract—not to mention good wages. It will only mean the hospitals are obliged to negotiate. But the proposed law bars strikes and experience has taught that these hospital managements grant nothing unless forced to.”
Sure enough, the Local 1199 tops called for a vote to Rockefeller. After his election, in 1963, state law was changed to grant collective bargaining to hospital workers only in the five boroughs, while compelling Local 1199 to accept binding arbitration of disputes; strikes were prohibited during the life of a contract. By preaching faith in capitalist politicians, the union misleaders betrayed the interests of the workers who had been militantly fighting for union recognition.
Despite this class collaboration of the Local 1199 bureaucracy, the strength of the union continued to grow, as workers eagerly fought to get better pay and work conditions. By 1963, the union had won a contract at 23 hospitals. Whereas in 1959 wages had been as low as $32 per week ($280 today), by 1968, when several managements formed the “League of Voluntary Hospitals” to negotiate a contract with 1199, the union secured a guaranteed minimum weekly wage of $100 with a pension. Local 1199’s organizing drive also awakened the desire for union representation among city hospital workers, who got a union contract under AFSCME District Council 37 in 1966. This growth of union power was due to the collective organization that came out of the militant strike of 1959.
The Early Years of the Integrated CIO Industrial Unions
The men who led the Local 1199 hospital organizing campaign in the 1950s had been supporters of the Communist Party (CP) during the tumultuous class battles for integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. These unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) represented all the workers in a particular industry, regardless of their race, ethnicity or craft—a significant advance over the AFL unions, which were steeped in race and craft prejudice. The CP provided a significant component of the CIO leadership at the time.
Fleeing Jim Crow terror and relentless poverty in the South, thousands of black workers were brought into huge industrial plants in the North, where they were segregated into the most menial and dangerous jobs. In the struggle to organize these plants, as well as various industries in the South, the unions had to take head-on the bosses’ divide-and-rule tactics meant to prevent the unity of black and white workers. As a result, the growth of the industrial unions was the greatest advancement for black rights since the Civil War and Reconstruction, and was a tremendous advance for white workers, too.
Leon Davis was active with the CP, which aimed to organize all workers in the pharmaceutical industry among many others, when in 1932 he helped found the Pharmacists Union of Greater New York (PUGNY), the precursor of Local 1199. The union went up against desperate conditions in Depression-era Harlem. In 1936, only seven black pharmacists were employed there. That year, PUGNY initiated a successful campaign in Harlem not just to secure jobs for black pharmacists in drugstores, but also to promote black workers from backroom porters to soda men, who dealt with the public.
PUGNY fought against racist exclusion by establishing the closed shop in the industry. When a store boss needed a worker, the union would send the first on the list. If the shop owner objected to hiring a black man or tried to hire a non-union worker, the union would close the store by picketing until the owner agreed to hire the union member dispatched for the job. Union recognition meant employers had to hire whoever the union sent, regardless of their race. In this way, the union showed how the struggles for labor rights and for black rights go forward together.
The labor upsurge that resulted in the organization of the CIO unions had begun to radicalize workers, with a layer open to the building of a workers party independent of and in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans. But the Stalinists of the CP and other CIO leaders diverted this incipient radicalism into support for the “progressive” Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which was designed to restore the profitability of American capitalism and prepare the country for interimperialist World War II. The unions’ support of the Democratic Party has handcuffed them ever since.
The CP’s futile reformist strategy of pressuring a supposedly progressive wing of the capitalist rulers underscored that it had long since abandoned the revolutionary internationalist program that animated the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It was left to the Trotskyists to uphold that banner for the abolition of wage slavery and fight for the complete independence of the working class from the bosses and their political representatives. The Roosevelt administration was backed by not only Northern industrialists but also the Southern Dixiecrats, who administered the system of rigid Jim Crow segregation.
The CP got no thanks for its class betrayal from the capitalist rulers, who launched a ferocious anti-Communist witchhunt that entered every facet of life in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Democratic president Harry Truman enforced the strikebreaking 1947 Taft-Hartley law that outlawed such labor weapons as secondary strikes and barred Communists from union office. Thousands of union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases resulting in the destruction of whole unions.
Local 1199 had to defend itself against government harassment and raiding attempts by both AFL and CIO unions. In the late 1950s, black and other minority workers in the North were finding inspiration in the mass struggles for integration in the South. Local 1199’s hospital organizing campaign tapped into the clear will of black workers in NYC to fight against their own racist degradation, too.
In that campaign, Davis and Teddy Mitchell, a black leader of Local 1199, worked together with Moe Foner and Elliott Godoff, who had led a sit-down strike in 1937 to build a union local in what is now Maimonides Hospital. Moe Foner, the Local 1199 public relations officer, and his twin brothers Philip and Jack (both academic historians) were driven out of City College during WWII for Communist activities. As a pharmacist, Godoff was known to dispense the CP’s paper, the Daily Worker, along with medications.
No Reliance on the Democrats!
The 1958 deal that recognized the union at Montefiore Hospital was brokered by Mayor Wagner. Notably, it included increased city subsidies to the voluntary hospitals to help cover the medical costs of uninsured patients. These funds made it easier for the bosses to swallow the bitter pill of unionization. Government money has become an ever-increasing part of hospital revenue, especially since Medicaid and Medicare were introduced in 1965. In Upheaval in the Quiet Zone (2009), a history of 1199, Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg commented that a hospital boss “seems justified, then, in concluding that by 1968 collective bargaining between the union and the hospitals amounted to finding out how much the government was willing to pay.”
Today, a central activity of the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats is to lobby the government (be it City Hall or Albany or Congress) for money for management. Lobbying is also a rationale for them to support one bourgeois politician or another. But it is not the job of the union to figure out where management can get its money, or how to balance the state budget. The notion that the workers will get a cut of increased revenue is patently false; the bosses will give up only what the workers wrest from them through class struggle.
In all respects, the union bureaucracy operates within the framework set by the capitalist rulers. As Local 1199 took root in the hospital industry, the union tops created guilds within the union that separated off members with more training, like lab techs and clerical workers, reinforcing bourgeois prejudices of “professionalism.” The union didn’t attempt to recruit nurses, who had a professional association, until the 1970s. An industrial hospital union would join together all non-management titles, including nurses as well as clerical, skilled trades, cleaning, food service and laboratory workers.
Local 1199 (now 1199SEIU) represents a huge multiracial workforce providing an essential public service to millions of people, including in U.S. imperialism’s financial center, where many capitalists themselves receive health care. But the union leaders tell the membership that their power lies in the fact that they are voters and that the union Political Action Committee has a lot of money. In so doing, the bureaucracy keeps the workers atomized and demoralized, rather than mobilizing their social power as a union—an organization of workers who make the hospitals function.
The union tops promote Democratic Party constituency politics, with each oppressed group getting a page in the 1199News magazine, all for the purpose of being hustled into supporting the class enemy. The aura of 1199 as a progressive and democratic union is really a device for tying the workers to the Democrats.
For Socialized Medicine!
Since the 1980s, there has been a one-sided class war against the unions. Today, hospital executives take home seven-digit sums, and rents are being raised much more than wages are. In order to protect their own livelihoods and to fight for the interests of the class as a whole, hospital workers would do well to learn the lessons of the past in preparation for future battles. To counter the increasing immiseration of the class, the union movement must be invigorated through a concerted drive to organize the unorganized, not least in low-paying industries where black and other minority workers are concentrated.
There is a burning need for a class-struggle leadership of the unions, one dedicated to breaking all ties to the Democrats and building a revolutionary workers party to arm working people with a program for sweeping away the capitalist system in which class exploitation and racial oppression are rooted. A central component of that program is the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution. Such a party would strive to mobilize health care workers, especially those in strategically placed unions like 1199SEIU, as a crucial part of the vanguard of a popular struggle for quality health care for all, free at the point of service. It would fight to get the capitalist parasites out of health care altogether by expropriating them without compensation.
The call for socialized medicine must be linked to the struggle for a workers government. Only in a society where those who labor rule will high-quality health care be provided based on need, not private profit. A workers government alone can bring about racial and social equality by ensuring a decent life for all through a planned, collectivized economy.
If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren
From The 2017 Archives- French Rocker Johnny Halliday Passes At 74-Hail, Hail Rock and Roll-“The Greatest Rocker You Have Never Heard Of”
By Josh Breslin
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
*****
If you have read the above note you know that there has been great internal turmoil on this site of late with the “exile” to as of today an unknown place Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site, a man he knew from high school and I knew from meeting out in the Summer of Love, 1967 San Francisco) the former site administrator, really managing editor and publisher combined. A commentary on a passing public figure, in this case legendary rocker, Johnny Halliday, the French “Elvis” of cancer at 74 would not normally be the place to bring up those squabbles however enlightening in other contexts. But as noted in the headline of this piece Johnny was according to more than one source “the greatest rocker that you have never heard of.” At least in the English-speaking world that he was never able to break into.
As I write this short tribute/commentary I have just noticed on the news feed that in Paris something like a million people have lined the streets of Paris, including every high-ranking dignitary and political of the past generation, to bid farewell to Johnny as the casket goes by. And every self-respecting French “Motorcycle Bill” as well so you can see that in France he was without any doubt he was beloved. The place where Johnny virtually unknown in America and the recently concluded internal strife at American Left History meet is what I want to mention since it was at least partially Allan’s stubbornness which if you check the archives makes not a single mention of Johnny despite the overwhelming space given to his, our growing up rock and roll music which has been given more than amble space. More than amble space for Anglo-American rock and roll but has given, had consciously given, short shrift to other rock and roll traditions, I guess you would call it “world music” traditions due entirely to the whims of Allan Jackman. (I would note here that I whole-heartedly supported Allan in the struggle against the “Young Turks” but he certainly was, is a man who had his short-comings including a certain narrowing of subject matter vision with age.)
As I have mentioned I have known Allan for a long time and up until a few years ago he acted much as he had when I first met him out in San Francisco those many years ago when we were all trying to turn the world upside down but then something changed, maybe like Zack James, one of the “Young Turks” noted, he just grew old (he is over seventy)-and cranky. He just wanted to withdraw back to that 1960s personal experience stuff and the hell with the rest of it. Part of the problem I think is that Allan finally realized that he would not outshine the long gone and still lamented despite his tragic and unnecessary fate Scribe’s star (the “real” Markin moniker). Even back in the day he was always in the shadow of Scribe, always a bit off-putting when around him. That is why the direct causes of his downfall, the eternal Dylan syndrome and the over-the-top stuff around the Summer of Love, loomed so large since he had somehow staked his whole reputation to finally best Scribe on those twice pillars. Twin pillars of sand.
Lest you think that I am getting off point here, not doing real justice to the late Johnny Halliday far from it. This fatal flaw stubbornness, obtuseness in Allan was always somewhere in the background. Where it came up in relationship to Johnny (and the whole emergence of “world music” in Johnny’s wake, or a strand of it anyway) was that narrow definition in his mind of rock and roll being in a time warp from about 1955 to 1965 and anything after or different did not exist. And in America with a slight tolerance for England. It might have been worse since he hated the Beatles (as in truth we all did mocking them as a modern day vaudeville act, what they call in England a music hall act except when they covered American rock and roll songs from the 1950s from guys like Chuck Berry) but loved the Stones to perdition since they cherished the blues root of rock as much as he did (under Scribe’s guidance I might add). Beyond that if you asked him to assign you say African drum music, or Latin America rhumbas, he would frown that imperial frown that said no dice, forget it, get out of town.
But you see I, maybe alone in America, in critic circles anyway, knew Johnny Halliday as part of my growing up rock and roll immersion back in the 1960s during my high school days (Class of 1967). I grew up in Olde Saco in Maine, in French-Canadian come down form the farms in Quebec to the Maine and New Hampshire mill towns to find that pot of American streets gold through my mother (nee LeBlanc) so I spoke the patois growing up as much as English. Knew from cousins in Quebec this big Johnny Elvis-like sound coming from France-rock and roll in French forget the Maurice Chevalier chanson noise my mother loved. Belt out rock for bikers, babes and be-boppers to go crazy over. I tried more than a few times to get Allan interested in my doing stuff on Johnny over the years so that he could get a hearing in the English-speaking world. A little beachhead as Elvis, as the Stones found out would go a long way. So this site, Allan, must take their small part as millions of French people bid their Johnny adieu is why he is the greatest rocker you have never heard of. Meanwhile, RIP, Johnny, RIP.
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger's now famous 1960s (black and white, that's the give-away)"Rainbow Quest" for the performer in this entry's headline.
Markin comment:
This series, featuring Pete Seeger and virtually most of the key performers in the 1960s folk scene is a worthy entry into the folk archival traditions for future revivalists to seek out. There were thirty plus episodes (some contained more than one performer of note, as well as Pete solo performances). I have placed the YouTube film clips here one spot over four days, November 10-13, 2009 for the reader's convenience.
Jacobs Vision - Lyrics & Chords
G Halle lujah to Jesus who died on the tree D G To raise up this ladder of mercy for me
Press onward, climb upward, the top is in view
D G There's a crown of bright glory a waiting for you
As Jacob was traveling, was weary one day While at night on a stone for a pillow did lay A vision appeared of a ladder so high It stood on the earth while the top reached the sky Chorus
This ladder is tall and yet so well made Stood thousands of years and never decayed High winds from the heavens they reel and they rock But the angels they guard it from bottom to top Chorus
***Sagas Of The Irish-American Diaspora- Albany-Style- William Kennedy's "Very Old Bones"
Book Review
Very Old Bones, William Kennedy, Viking Press, New York, 1992
Recently, in reviewing an early William Kennedy Albany-cycle novel, “Ironweed” I mentioned that he was my kind of writer. I will let what I stated there stand on that score here. Here is what I said:
“William Kennedy is, at least in his Albany stories, my kind of writer. He writes about the trials and tribulations of the Irish diaspora as it penetrated the rough and tumble of American urban WASP-run society, for good or evil. I know these people, my people, their follies and foibles like the back of my hand. Check. Kennedy writes, as here with the main characters Fran Phelan and Helen Archer two down at the heels sorts, about that pervasive hold that Catholicism has even on its most debased sons and daughters, saint and sinner alike. I know those characteristics all too well. Check. He writes about that place in class society where the working class meets the lumpen-proletariat-the thieves, grifters, drifters and con men- the human dust. I know that place well, much better than I would ever let on. Check. He writes about the sorrows and dangers of the effects alcohol on working class families. I know that place too. Check. And so on. Oh, by the way, did I mention that he also, at some point, was an editor of some sort associated with the late Hunter S. Thompson down in Puerto Rico. I know that mad man’s work well. He remains something of a muse for me. Check.”
Although “Very Old Bones” is structurally part of Kennedy’s Albany-cycle of novels it is far more ambitious than the other novels in the cycle that I have read. Those previous efforts, led by the premier example, “Ironweed” set themselves the task of telling stories about particular characters in the Phelan clan and their neighbors in particular periods of the cycle that runs from approximately the 1880s to, as in the present novel, the late 1950s. Here we get a vast view of the clan, its trials and tribulations and its cursedness as a result of the insularity of the Irish diaspora, Albany style.
I am, frankly, ambitious about the success of this endeavor. While it is very good to have a summing up of the history of the Phelan clan, it struggle for "lace curtain" respectablity, and its remarkable stretch of characters from the cursed Malachi generation through to Fran (of “Ironweed”), and here his brother Peter as well, and on to Orton, the narrator’s generation (and Billy Phelan’s) there is almost too much of this and it gets in the way of the plot line here, basically the current survivors trying to cope with the traumas brought on by those previous generations. Conversely, I ran through the book at breakneck speed. Why? Change the names and a few of the incidentals, and a few f the specific pathologies, and this could have been the story of my Irish-derived family in that other diaspora enclave, Boston. Hence the ambiguity. Moreover, there is just a little too much of that “magical realism” in the plot that was all the rage in the 1990s in telling the sub-stories here and then expecting us the sober, no nonsense reader to suspend our disbelieve. Is this effort as good as "Ironweed"? No, that is the standard by which to judge a Kennedy work and still the number one contender from this reviewer's vantage point.
The Founding Myths From Mother Africa And The African-American Diaspora-Professor Henry Louis Gates And Maria Tatar Hold Forth-“The Annotated African-American Folktales”
By Jeffery Jones
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[I am fairly new to working on this site although I got the full treatment concerning the internal dispute alluded to above about the short-comings which led to the demise of Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin) long time administrator. I will after some further reflection put my “two cents” worth in but for now the only comment I have is about the dearth of black writers here and subject matter except the heroic civil rights struggles from the 1960s. Strange, or maybe not so strange since Jackson (and the real Markin) had cut their eyeteeth supporting those struggles in the 1960s both in Boston and by heading down south. Jeff Jones]
I think it was Joseph Campbell a man who spent something like a lifetime studying world-wide foundation myths, and if not him then somebody like him doing the same kind of research, who noted that all societies across all the civilizations since humankind started wondering, wondering about this place they found themselves and why have created foundation myths to keep them going in good times and bad. Added to that though were later myths, first passed down orally in cultures which did not have written languages or as the case here when African slaves were denied under penalty of death reading and writing skills, created to explain why things turned out as they did. How to survive in the dreaded diaspora when stolen away from Mother Africa where strangely, and to some incomprehensible if not downright scary, all subsequent civilizations emerged.
All of this to point to a recent gigantic anthology of African-American both in Africa where a lot of the material originated and then got transmuted by the slavery experience mainly in the American south edited by Professor Henry Louis Gates out of Harvard University and folklorist Maria Tatar where they go root and branch to the cross-transmission from the old countries via the horrible Middle Passage to the plantation death knell. Along the way they have done a great service to line up, and not shabbily either, these myth-drawn folktales right alongside more universal myth tales from Christianity, from Greek days, and from ancient India and China times. Sustaining people hungry for some hope of salvation if not in this life then as Gates mentioned “fly away time.”
To get a full hearing, an earful of not just what Professor Gates and Ms. Tatar have to say but how listeners responded to those foundational tales in their own lives when prompted by the show’s ideas I have linked up the NPR On Point show where the pair held forth:
Searching For The American Songbook - In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With The Joy Street Coffeehouse In Mind-Introduction
Introduction
Sketches by Jack Callahan
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[As many readers may know now and if not then the above note should inform you in general there had been a serious shake-up on this blog site (which is linked in with several related although independent other websites that have cross-posted relevant materials) with the untimely, untimely by my lights, ouster of long time administrator Allan Jackson (who as is not unusual in cyberspace for all kinds of reasons simple or nefarious used the moniker Peter Paul Markin, a name which has much meaning to me but which will be explained soon by either Zack James, formerly the cultural czar here, or the new administrator Greg Green so I will move on). Although his current whereabouts are unknown to me since what some of us call a “purge” which will also be gone into by others at some later point Allan and I go back a long way to our high school days in seriously working poor North Adamsville (he said we met in junior high school but I don’t remember him that far back). We have been permitted, encouraged in fact to air our perspectives about what has gone on over the past several months (years really but things have come to a head in this period).
I always got along with Allan even in high school when he stood deep in the shadow of the real Peter Paul Markin whose name he appropriated for his on-site moniker and whom he feared above all for being both intellectually smarter than him and more larcenous. I don’t want to tell tales out of school but will say that I stood by Allan in the recent onslaught against his management mostly by the younger writers who dubbed themselves somewhat dramatically as the “Young Turks” like nobody ever used that designation before and am sorry to see him go.
On one point though and this can be taken as either a new introductory point or as a second introduction where Allan and I locked was over this project that I started several years ago to look back to the folk minute of the early 1960s as my vivid part of discovering the American songbook that I was interested in. I wished to continue well beyond what I had started and he had posted but he put a stop to the series when he told me that he needed me more for political work and so scrubbed what I was doing.
As it turned out the real story behind Allan’s denial of my project was that he was putting together his own series in the days when he used to write material for the site and solely manage as he has done the past couple of years entitled “Not Bob Dylan” (and later another series “Not Joan Baez”) and wanted no competition for his folk minute work. When I asked Greg Green, by the way no fan of folk music which he said made him want to throw up since he heard it constantly in his growing up home from his old folkie parents who had it on the recorder player or tape deck all day, if I could revive the series he gave me the green light. So I have an initial very good opinion of him and the new direction. Maybe like the younger writers kept harping on Allan’s time had come but I still miss the old bastard wherever he is these days. Jack Callahan]
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(Praise be work-saving computers below is the original introduction I had written before I was dragooned into other work. It reads well enough to start with only a couple of points needing updating.)
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I recently completed the second leg of this American Songbook series, sketches from the time of my coming of age classic rock and roll from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, record player, television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. This series was not intended to be placed in any chronological order so the first leg dealt, and I think naturally so given the way my musical interests got formed, with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s.
This third leg is centered on the music of the folk minute that captured a segment of my generation of ’68 as it came of social and political age in the early 1960s. It is easy now to forget in the buzz of the moment that this segment was fairly small to begin with cluttered up people who stayed with it for a few years and then like the rest of us got back to the new rock and roll driving by the British “invasion” and the West Coast “acid” rock that was taking center stage by the time of the summers of love in the mid to late 1960s. Today when talking to people, to those who slogged through the 1960s with me, those who will become very animated about Deadhead experiences, Golden Gate Park Airplane goings on, their merry-prankster-like “on the bus” experiences, even death Altamont when I ask about the influence of folk they will look at me with pained blank expressions or cite ritualistically Bob Dylan confirms how small and where that folk minute was concentrated.
Early on though some of us felt a fresh breeze was coming through the land, were desperately hoping that it was not some ephemeral rising and then back to business as usual, although we certainly being young did not dwell on that ebb tide idea since like with our physical selves we thought our ideas once implanted would last forever. Silly kids. Maybe it was the change in political atmosphere pulling us forward as men (and it was mostly men then) born in the 20th century were beginning to take over from the old fogies (our father/uncle/godfather Ike, General Ike, Ike Eisenhower and his ilk) and we would fall in behind them. Maybe it was the swirl just then being generated questioning lots of old things like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) red scare investigations, like Mister James Crow in the South and the ghettos of the North, like why did we need all those nuclear bombs that were going to do nothing but turn us into flames. Maybe it was that last faint echo of the “beats” with their poetry, their be-bop jazz, their nightly escapade trying to hold onto that sullen look of Marlon Brando, that brooding look of James Dean, that cool pitter-patter of Alan Ginsberg against the night-stealers, and Preacher Jack, Jean-bon Kerouac, pushing us on to roads not taken. Heady stuff, no question.
Maybe too since it involved cultural expression (although we would be clueless to put what we felt in those terms, save that for the folk music academics complete with endnotes and footnotes in bigh dissertations to warm their night-fires after the fire had burned out) and our cultural expression centered around jukeboxes and transistor radios it was that we had, some of us, tired of the Fabians, the various Bobbys (Vee, Darin, Rydell, etc.), the various incarnations of Sandra Dee, Leslie Gore, Brenda Lee, etc., wanted a new sound, or as it turned out a flowing back to the roots music, to the time and place when people had to make their own music or go without (it gets a little mixed up once the radio widened the horizons of who could hear what and when). So, yes, we wanted to know what on those lonely Saturday nights gave our forebears pause, let them sit back maybe listen to some hot-blooded black man with a primitive guitar playing the blues (a step up from the kids’ stuff nailed one-eyed string hung from the front porch but nowhere near that coveted National Steel beauty they eyed in the pawnshop in town just waiting to rise up singing), some jazz, first old time religion stuff and then the flicker of that last fade be-bop with that solid sexy sax searching for the high white note, mountain music, all fiddles and mandolins, playing against that late night wind coming down the hills and hollows reaching that red barn just in time to finish up that last chance slow moaning waltz. Yes, and Tex-Mex, Western swing, Child ballads and the “new wave” protest sound that connected our new breeze political understandings with our musical interests.
The folk music minute was for me, and not just me, thus something of a branching off for a while from rock and roll in its doldrums since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a small musical break-out from the music that we came of chronological age to unlike the big break-out that rock and roll represented from the music that was wafting through many of our parents’ houses in the early 1950s.
In preparing this part of the series I have been grabbing a lot of anecdotal remarks from some old-time folkies. People I have run into over the past several years in the threadbare coffeehouses and cafes I frequent around New England. You know, and I am being completely unfair here, those guys with the long beards and unkempt balding hair hidden by a knotted ponytail, flannel, clean or unclean, shirt regardless of weather and blue jeans, unclean, red bandana in the back pocket, definitely unclean and harmonica at the ready going on and on about how counter-revolutionary Bob Dylan was to hook up the treasured acoustic guitar to an amp in about 1965 and those gals who are still wearing those shapeless flour bag dresses, letting their hair grow grey or white, wearing the formerly “hip” now mandatory granny glasses carrying some autoharp or other such old-time instrument like they just got out of some hills and hollows of Appalachia (in reality with nice Ivy League resumes after their names and affirmative action-driven jobs-that to the good) arguing about how any folk song created after about 1922 is not really a folk song both sexes obviously having not gotten the word that, ah, times have changed. In short those folkies who are still alive and kicking and still interested in talking about that minute (and continuing to be unfair not much else except cornball archaic references that are supposed to produce “in the know” laughs but which were corny even back then when they held forth in the old Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford of blessed memory).
For those not in the know, or who have not seen the previously described denizens of the folk night in your travels, folk music is still alive and well (for the moment, the demographic trends are more frightening as the dying embers flicker) in little enclaves throughout the country mainly in New England but in other outposts as well. Those enclaves and outposts are places where some old “hippies,” “folkies,” communalists, went after the big splash 1960s counter-cultural explosion ebbed in about 1971 (that is my signpost for the ebb, the time when we tried to “turn the world upside down” in Washington over the Vietnam war by attempting to shut the government down and got nothing but teargas, police sticks and thousands of arrests for our troubles, others have earlier and later dates and events which seemed decisive but all that I have spoken to, or have an opinion on, agree by the mid-1970s that wave had tepidly limped to shore). Places like Saratoga, New York, Big Sur and Joshua Tree out in California, Taos, Eugene, Boise, Butte, Boulder, as well as the traditional Village, Harvard Square, North Beach/Berkeley haunts of memory.
They survive, almost all of them, through the support of a dwindling number of aficionados and a few younger kids, kids who if not the biological off-spring of the folk minute then very much like those youthful by-gone figures and who somehow got into their parents’ stash of folk albums and liked what they heard against the current trends in music, in once a month socially-conscious Universalist-Unitarian church basement coffeehouses, school activity rooms booked for the occasional night, small local restaurants and bars sponsoring “open mics” on off-nights to draw a little bigger crowd, and probably plenty of other small ad hoc venues where there are enough people with guitars, mandos, harmonicas, and what have you to while away an evening.
There seems to be a consensus among my anecdotal sources that their first encounter with folk music back then, other than when they were in the junior high school music class where one would get a quick checkerboard of various types of music and maybe hear This Land Is Your Land in passing, was through the radio. That junior high school unconscious introduction of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land had been my own introduction in Mr. Dasher’s seventh grade Music Appreciation class where he inundated us with all kinds of songs from everywhere like the Red River Valley and the Mexican Hat Dance. For his efforts he was innocently nicknamed by us “Dasher The Flasher,” a moniker that would not serve him well in these child-worried times by some nervous parents.
A few folkies that I had run into back then, fewer now, including a couple of girlfriends back then as I entered college picked up, like some of those few vagrant younger aficionados hanging around the clubs, the music via their parents’ record collections although that was rare and back then and usually meant that the parents had been some kind of progressives back in the 1930s and 1940s when Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Pete Seeger and others lit up the leftist firmament in places like wide-open New York City. Today the parents, my generation parents would have been in the civil rights movement, SDS or maybe the anti-war movement although the latter was drifting more by then to acid rock as the foundational music.
That radio by the way would be the transistor radio usually purchased at now faded Radio Shack by frustrated parents, frustrated that we were playing that loud unwholesome rock and roll music on the family record player causing them to miss their slumbers, and was attached to all our youthful ears placed there away from prying parents and somehow if you were near an urban area you might once you tired of the “bubble gum” music on the local rock station flip the dial and get lucky some late night, usually Sunday and find an errant station playing such fare.
That actually had been my experience one night, one Sunday night in the winter of 1962 (month and date lost in the fog of memory) when I was just flipping the dial and came upon the voice of a guy, an old pappy guy I assumed, singing a strange song in a gravelly voice which intrigued me because that was neither a rock song nor a rock voice. The format of the show as I soon figured out as I continued to listen that night was that the DJ would, unlike the rock stations which played one song and then interrupted the flow with at least one commercial for records, drive-in movies, drive-in theaters, maybe suntan lotion, you know stuff kids with disposable income would take a run at, played several songs so I did not find out who the singer was until a few songs later.
The song was identified by the DJ as the old classic mountain tune “discovered” by Cecil Sharpe in the hills and hollows of Appalachian Kentucky in 1916 Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, the singer the late Dave Von Ronk who, as I found out later doubled up as a very informative folk historian and who now has a spot in the Village in New York where he hailed from named after him, the station WBZ in Boston not a station that under ordinary circumstances youth would have tuned into then since it was mainly a news and talk show station, the DJ Dick Summer a very central figure in spreading the folk gospel and very influential in promoting local folk artists like Tom Rush on the way up as noted in a documentary, No Regrets, about Rush’s fifty plus years in folk music. I was hooked.
That program also played country blues stuff, stuff that folk aficionados had discovered down south as part of our generation took seriously the search for roots, music, cultural, family, and which would lead to the “re-discovery” of the likes of Son House (and that flailing National Steel guitar that you can see him flail like crazy on Death Letter Blues on YouTube these days), Bukka White (all sweaty, all feisty, playing the hell out of his National face up with tunes like Aberdeen, Mississippi Woman and Panama, Limited) Skip James (all cool hand Luke singing that serious falsetto on I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man which got me in trouble more than one time with women including recently), and Mississippi John Hurt (strumming seemingly casually his moaning Creole Belle and his slyly salacious Candy Man).
I eventually really learned about the blues, the country stuff from down south which coincides with roots and folk music and the more muscular (plugged in electrically) Chicago city type blues that connects with the beginnings of rock and roll, which will be the next and final leg of this series, straight up though from occasionally getting late, late at night, usually on a Sunday for some reason, Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour from WXKE in Chicago but that is another story. Somebody once explained to me the science behind what happened on certain nights with the distant radio waves that showed up mostly because then their frequencies overrode closer signals. What I know for sure that it was not was the power of that dinky transistor radio with its two nothing batteries. So for a while I took those faraway receptions as a sign of the new dispensation coming to free us, of the new breeze coming through the land in our search for an earthly Eden. Praise be.
(That Club 47, subject a few years ago to its own documentary, was the spawning grounds and the testing ground for many folk artists like Dylan, Baez, Rush, Von Schmidt, Paxton, and Eric Saint Jean an up and coming performer who got laid low early taking too much sex and too much cocaine before it was the drug of choice among the heads, to perform and perfect their acts before friendly appreciative audiences that would not heckle them. The Club which has had something of a continuous history now operates as a non-profit as the Club Passim in a different location in Harvard Square near the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore.)
The beauty of such places for poor boy high school students like me or lowly cash-poor college students interested in the folk scene was that for the price of a coffee, usually expresso so you could get your high a little off the extra caffeine but more importantly you could take tiny sips and make it last which you wanted to do so you could hold your spot at the table in some places, and maybe some off-hand pastry (usually a brownie or wedge of cake not always fresh but who cared as long as the coffee, like I said, usually expresso to get a high caffeine kick, was fresh since it was made by the cup from elaborate copper-plated coffeemakers from Europe or someplace like that), you could sit there for a few hours and listen to up and coming folk artists working out the kinks in their routines. Add in a second coffee unless the girl had agreed to an uncool “dutch treat,” not only uncool but you were also unlikely to get to first base especially if she had to pay her bus fare too, share the brownie or stale cake and you had a cheap date.
Occasionally there was a few dollar cover for “established” acts like Joan Baez, Tom Rush, the Clancy Brothers, permanent Square fixture Eric Von Schmidt, but mainly the performers worked for the “basket,” the passing around of the hat for the cheap date guys and others “from hunger” to show appreciation, hoping against hope to get twenty buck to cover rent and avoid starving until the next gig. Of course since the audience was low-budget high school students, college kids and starving artists that goal was sometimes a close thing and accordingly the landlord would have to be pieced off with a few bucks until times got better.
For alienated and angst-ridden youth like me (and probably half my generation if the information I have received some fifty years later stands up and does not represent some retro-fitted analysis filtered through a million sociological and psychological studies), although I am not sure I would have used those words for my feelings in those days the coffeehouse scene was the great escape from household independence struggles of which I was always, always hear me, at the short end of the stick.
Probably the best way to put the matter is to say that when I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, over a non-stop weekend I was so engrossed in the page after page happenings, I immediately identified with Holden Caulfield whatever differences of time, place and class stood between us and when asked my opinion of him by my English teacher I made her and the whole class laugh when I said “I am Holden Caulfield”), or when I saw The Wild One at the retro-Strand Theater in downtown North Adamsville if one could call it that term I instinctively sided with poor boy Johnny and his “wanting habits” despite my painfully negative experiences with outlaw motorcycle guys headed by local hard boy Red Riley who hung out at Harry’s Variety Store as they ran through. If I had been able to put the feelings into words and actions it would have been out of sympathy for the outcasts, misfits, and beaten down who I identified with then (not quite in the Jack Kerouac beaten down hipsters or night-dwellers who survived with a certain swagger and low hum existence sense).
So yeah, the coffeehouses offered sanctuary. For others (and me too on occasion) those establishments also provided a very cheap way to deal with the date issue, as long as you picked dates who shared your folk interests. That pick was important because more than once I took a promising date to the Joy Street Coffeehouse up on Boston’s Beacon Hill where I knew the night manager and could get in for free who was looking for something speedier like maybe a guy with a car, preferably a ’57 Chevy or something with plenty of chromes, and that was the end of that promise. For those who shared my interest like I said before for the price of two coffees(which were maybe fifty cents each, something like that, but don’t take that as gospel), maybe a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” to show you appreciated the efforts, got you those hours of entertainment. But mainly the reason to go to the Square or Joy Street early on was to hear the music that as my first interest blossomed I could not find on the radio, except that Dick Summer show on Sunday night for a couple of hours. Later it got better with more radio shows, some television play when the thing got big enough that even the networks caught on with bogus clean-cut Hootenanny-type shows, and as more folkies got record contracts because then you could start grabbing records at places like Sandy’s in between Harvard and Central Squares.
Of course sometimes if you did not have dough, or if you had no date, and yet you still had those home front civil wars to contend with and that you needed to retreat from you could still wind up in the Square. Many a late weekend night, sneaking out of the house through a convenient back door which protected me from sight, parents sight, I would grab the then all-night Redline subway to the Square and at that stop (that was the end of the line then) take the stairs to the street two steps at a time and bingo have the famous (or infamous) all-night Hayes-Bickford in front of me. There as long as you were not rowdy like the winos, hoboes, and con men you could sit at a table and watch the mix and match crowds come and go. Nobody bothered you, certainly not the hired help who were hiding away someplace at those hours, and since it was cafeteria-style passing your tray down a line filled with steam-saturated stuff and incredibly weak coffee that tasted like dishwater must taste, you did not have to fend off waitresses. (I remember the first time I went in by myself I sat, by design, at a table that somebody had vacated with the dinnerware still not cleared away and with the coffee mug half full and claimed the cup to keep in front of me. When the busboy, some high school kid like me, came to clear the table he “hipped me” to the fact that nobody gave a rat’s ass if you bought anything just don’t act up and draw attention to yourself. Good advice, brother, good advice.)
Some nights you might be there when some guy or gal was, in a low voice, singing their latest creation, working up their act in any case to a small coterie of people in front of them. That was the real import of the place, you were there on the inside where the new breeze that everybody in the Square was expecting took off and you hoped you would get caught up in the fervor too. Nice.
As I mentioned in the rock and roll series, which really was the music of our biological coming of age time, folk was the music of our social and political coming of age time. A fair amount of that sentiment got passed along to us during our folk minute as we sought out different explanations for the events of the day, reacted against the grain of what was conventional knowledge. Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That clueless in the past about the draw included a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Village Jack or Jill or Chi Old Town frat or frail. My father in his time, wisely or not considering what ill-fate befell him later, had busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.
Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from the commercial Tin Pan Alley song stuff. The staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he our parents’ organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike). Hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had restless night’s sleep, a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family fall-out shelter bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential. And as we matured Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind.
We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a newer world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.
The truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of old-time corner boys like me and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully.
Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. Those lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days then, and that was about par for the course, wasn’t it. But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.
