In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

By Lance Lawrence 

[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 solely 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 by Green 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]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. As far as Phil Larkin’s, what did Si call them, yes, rantings about older writers heads rolling, about purges and the like seem like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime and are dubious at best. The gripe the former two writers have about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too, as Si pointed out, while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stoped young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire” and bring in Greg Green and surrounded him with an Editorial Board. (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks around retire as definite proof that Allan was purged.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of these embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done.  Lance Lawrence] 

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Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart said when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after. 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

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

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

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

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

By Si Lannon

[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 solely 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 by Green 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 noted in a review posted here (and in the on-line version of American Folk Gazette) on Woody Guthrie’s forever influence on generations of folk musicians if not other genres as well I agreed with Bart Webber in a previous article of his about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to a fourth article I have contributed in this space which has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Not directly, no not directly from this crew. No matter how tough Allan Jackson was, and he was, he spoke his mind and let the devil take the hinter post. So once again I plead once would have been enough, more than enough.

That brings me back to the additional point I in my last review that those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. I noted Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Moreover what originally appeared to me to be the rantings of a cranky old man (I am an old man but usually not cranky) by Phil Larkin, who in the interest of transparency is an old growing up friend, about a purge of older writers, or maybe a putting them on the back-burner seems more rational each day. Si Lannon]    

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A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s. After some thought I pinpointed the first time to a seventh grade music class (Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well) when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of music made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.

In thinking about when I first heard Pete Seeger sign I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time I heard the emerging folk minute. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene. In those days, the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush. Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized. Interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle. Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. 

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 Si Lannon

[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 solely 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 by Green 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 agree with Bart Webber in a previous article about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to three articles I have contributed in this space which has pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Once would have been enough, more than enough.

Those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Disinterested readers who want to read the main piece without disruptions are nevertheless presented with this excess baggage under some theory that it is informative about such inner social media workings seems rather preposterous in this day in age. Si Lannon]    

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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 chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when 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.    

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 (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation 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, rock and roll) 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 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, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving 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. 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 true 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 would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Batman, starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, 1989

WTF. Yeah WFT I am still standing although for the life of me I don’t why after the screed I ran through in the last film review I did if you could call it that Marvel Comics’ The Avengers. WTF too that I am still doing kids’ silly super-hero comic book airheads turned to the multi-plex screens all because everybody, boy or girl from the look of things, between the age of a about eight to twenty-one no longer can sit through the twenty minutes it takes to read a comic book. Said kids will only sit through a couple of hours of swill, as long as the dialogue doesn’t exceed short sentences and grunts, there is kick-ass action every thirty seconds for no apparent reason, and there is an ample supply of vat- tubbed butter-drenched popcorn and gigantic refillable soda cups.

Although you and I both know if you have been following this race to the bottom of filmdom being forced on me with this brainless twit stuff that this is the first stages of a purge by the recently installed new leadership which seems to be making every effort to get rid of the old writers who held this operation together in the days when the assuredly purged, don’t believe that voluntary retirement stuff, Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin on this site) was made to fall on his sword. We who voted for his retention, meaning against the installation of the new pope Greg Green and his flunky Ed Board, are expected to follow suit. And assuredly as well the quickest way to get rid of senior writers is to give them assignments picking up the popcorn tubs and soda cups after a bunch of lazy kids who won’t read.          

Here is the latest Greg Green has ordered me put on “probation” and hence this disciplinary assignment from hell  (yeah, yeah through the Ed Board but even those know nothing eight to twenty-one year olds know this has the earmarks of the “boss” making the decision and not some hireling nonsense). The reason? Well off that last review if not the first one there are a million possibilities. Start off with my WFT that might offend those eight to twenty year olds who emphatically don’t read much less review screed-like film review. Even there PG parents don’t care as long as they don’t hear their precious Jills and Johnnies don’t use that language around the house. How very liberal. But strangely, or maybe not so strangely since “teacher’s pet” Kenny Jacobs mimicking me started using salty language that is not the reason. Although given this new crew’s kind of left-handed way of doing things since Allan’s purge now that they have wind in their sails that could be the disguised reason. Probably not though since in some weird modern let’s be hip and let everything but the very worse language slide through they are catering to that younger crowd which see the whole thing as picturesque. How very liberal.       

       

You might think that daring them to print the damn review after skewering not only the film’s reasons for existence but basely calling the whole thing an empty shell would be the reason. After all a bad review, which by the way Alan Jackson cared less about which way the review went as long as it was well-written and less than three thousand words (so he didn’t have to pay a premium bonus number of words in cyberspace being meaningless). This crew from what I have heard in order to grab some extra revenue is taking “advertisements” from the movie companies in this space. And the surest way to lose such lucrative emoluments is to have one of your writers declare their whole operation a house of cards However Greg mentioned to I think Lance Lawrence that these modern day studios still work on the old premise that the only bad publicity is no publicity.     

You might, and again be wrong, that skewering the characters and their personal identities would draw the line and put me beyond the pale. Calling patriotic Captain America a brawny brainless twit who would be hard-pressed to figure out how to use a spoon if he ever had occasion to use one. Ditto the Hulk except dumber when he goes off the deep end and turns into a green balloon-ish cretin. Calling beautiful Thor a wooden head, as wooden as those Valhalla Viking ships that faded from history fast. Sorrowfully calling Black Widow nothing but a commie bitch, eye candy for the jet set, and not to be trusted under any circumstances. Mutants, social misfits and rogues all. Even the brainy Ironman who in the end didn’t want to play ball, got all crazy and stuff.       

No, the reason if you can believe this that I am on “probation’ is that as has been standard policy at this site since the old days when Sam Lowell, now really retirement but of late muzzled, ruled the roost as official Senior film critic, a title now abolished in the new ‘democratic’ era I did not give an adequate plot-line summary. What? What plot beyond kick-ass bad guys every thirty seconds in between gulps of soda or throated popcorn for the audience and don’t get any scratches on the uniforms or one’s person. Does it matter if the “enemy” is Hydra or Thor’s aunt? No, I think not and so there is the very real substance to my feeling that my days in this space are numbered. Once they say they have a pressing assignment for me out with the exiled Allan Jackson out in Utah I can kiss my ass good-bye.    

That brings to the so-called plot-line of this Batman film from 1989. I am doomed anyway so once again I will say –what plot. Batman, played by mild-mannered Michael Keaton in between bouts of going under the Wayne mansion downy billow beds with investigative reporter Kim Basinger has a run-in or seven with the Joker, played by living maniac Jack Nicholson, who got caught short in an acid vat after killing his mobster boss. In the end, ho-hum, the Joker takes the big fall, takes the trip six feet under. Any more plot-line summary than that Greg Green can sue me. Enough said.     

When Super-Heroes Do Their Thing- Marvel Comics “The Avengers” (2012)-A Film Review

When Super-Heroes Do Their Thing- Marvel Comics “The Avengers” (2012)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

         

The Avengers, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johannsson, 2012

WFT-again. Phil Larkin here to tell one and all that I am ticked off once again having been pieced off for the second time in recent memory by one site manager Greg Green to do another review of the freaking seemingly endless Marvel Studio productions. This time The Avengers which is strictly kid’s comic book stuff thrown on the screen since somebody there realized that today’s kids don’t read, don’t even read comic books but will sit through a couple of hours of some mutants ass-kicking a second set of mutants, the latter bad dudes who get no sympathy from anybody, munching giant tubs of buttered popcorn swilled down with giant sodas. Yeah so now you get WTF is all about.

This time I am not putting my screed like I did the first time in brackets so the disinterested reader did not have to bother to read about the flaming internal politics behind this social media site. I don’t expect, frankly, that this plea for sanity, my sanity to see the light of day and that is to be expected from this new regime, Greg Green and his toady rubber-stamp so-called Editorial Board which seems intent on getting rid of all the old writers who sided with Allan Jackson the previous site manager before he was purged (and I am not putting that word in quotation marks since it has become apparent, at least to me, that Allan’s so-called retirement was just a publicity ruse to cover a dirty deed removal. Even if any of this does see the light of day Green will probably have cyber-red penciled the thing so it reads like the mutterings of a craze maniac. So yes, WTF I have nothing to lose either way since I am probably headed for that same Siberian fate as my old friend Alan Jackson.     

For those who missed the previous piece quickly this whole new indignity started, or this second chapter of the assignment distribution problem started, when a few readers wrote in to Greg Green to complain about my use of the “f” word in the introduction to my I almost blush to say “review” on the Marvel production Captain America: Civil War. (I won’t even bother to write the “f” word all out since I know that simple every day word will never make it pass the Puritan censors here who think we are back in the gentile 1950s when such thing would never be mentioned in public, especially in mixed company.) The reason for the foul language was that I was extremely ticked off that I had not been given a plum assignment for me doing a lesser Humphrey Bogart film 1952’s Deadline-USA and was pieced off doing that Captain America thing according to Greg to broaden my reach with some modern material. Like I had been stuck in 1950 and never had done a modern film review before.

Moreover, and this I think is the core of Greg’s real reason, was in trying to reach younger audiences which had been drifting away from the site as the older writers allegedly were stuck in that same 1950s as me, he took umbrage at my language and not for any other reason. But see if he had talked to any of the other writers like Josh Breslin, Si Lannon, Bart Webber, even staid old political commentator Frank Jackman, guys who knew Allan Jackson in the old days he would have known that in my youth I was called Foul-mouthed Phil for just that language. And they had written, at least Bart had written about it in this space. The funny thing is that under Allan my pieces, especially the foul language ones, had the highest reader ratings. What Greg doesn’t know and the guys from back in the day, including Bart, could never figure out was that back then the girls, even the proper go to Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church on Sunday and who had Bibles between their knees, were crazy to hear me swear. How silly the times have changed for the worse when a few “fs” blow up the planet, or at least the regime.                   

The so-called real reason according to a couple of the younger writers it turned out though was that Greg had just brought young, twenty-something young Kenny Jacobs on board and allegedly gave him that assignment so he could broaden his reach as well. Here is a kid who wasn’t even born and as he admitted neither were his parents when that film was originally presented against the expertise of a guy like me who was both a Bogie aficionado and had seen the film a few times in retrospective film festival theaters. Moreover how was a kid who grew up on cellphones, texting, social media, Internet and all the rest supposed to get a handle on the declining fate of modern day hard copy newspapers. Against a kid who spent many a lonely get out of the house Strand Theater Saturday afternoon double-feature matinee watching just such material. “F” the reason just didn’t hold up and I responded in fiery anger.

Adding salt to the wound Greg after that first review said to Kenny that there would be more coming up if he felt he would like to continue his education. That brings us to chapter two when another obvious Phil Larkin assignment came up doing the bright and witty Howard Hawk-directed Bringing Up Baby starring the versatile Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Strictly a home run type review for me and who knows what the kid will do with it since I am sure he will not get either the social commentary or wit involved. And I am once again stuck with a f—king kid’s movie review.               

Stuck is just the right word. Look I am no stranger to tough to read about films, films hard to get a hook on. Figure it out for yourself on these various comic book action publication thinks. Whoever produced them they run to a type. Start with the characters once you branch out of the single hero-type productions like Ironman, Batman, and Superman and have the action involve a clot of super-hero mutants, yes, mutants. Take a guy like Captain America, played by brawny Chris Evans. He started out as a 4-F ninety-eight pound weakling out of some 1950s matchbook cover Charles Atlas girls throw sand in your face advertisement back in World War II, got into this weird junkie steroid program that created an over-sized guy who could jump high, run like the wind, maybe faster and bonk bad guys by the carload who got put in deep- freeze for some seventy years only to be found among the wreckage of a plane up in the Artic and ready to do battle against I don’t know bad guys, Hydra guys. But the guy has the personality of a flounder and the brain of an amoeba who had trouble multiplying four times three because he had run out of fingers at ten and got stymied after that.     

And the Captain is not the worst of the lot (I will only detail who is in this currently reviewed film since there are some changes from the crew in that first review.) Take the Hulk, played by Mark Ruffalo, aka mild-mannered nerdy Doctor Banner, another junkie,  when he is not angry or brought to anger which is pretty easy. (If you have watched that green-etched transformation in action when Hulk balloons up to King Kong size as his shirt is torn to shreds have you ever noticed that he pants not only are Puritan-approved intact but have unlike that unlucky shirt ballooned up too-WFT) When riled which isn’t hard to do the guy is a brainless twit as likely to cross friend as foe and moreover hard as this is to believe he is dumber, sorry if I offend anybody by not saying mentality challenged, than dishwater, dumber even than the Captain who at least can count to ten.

Let’s go on with the roll call. Take the only female this time out, the long Russia-named which I can’t pronounce Black Widow played by Scarlett Johannsson, who admitted looks really good in black leather but whose only positive skills are karate chops and bam-bam two-fisted gun play. She is inherently untrustworthy in my book having probably been a commie agent or worse one of Putin’s people. Strangely and maybe they know something we don’t about the Widow nobody among the male mutant clot takes much interest in her romantically. Of course watching her bam-bam away even the ever romantic Phil Larkin would think twice about taking a run at her. The master archer whose archaic weaponry of bow and arrow should have put him out to pasture long ago is a cipher and we best leave it at that-strictly cannon-fodder. The beautiful Thor, fresh out of Wodin or some Norse myth bullshit who had originally been ready to kill off earthlings got “turned” is another one of those brawny guys whose muscle count is higher than their I.Q.  In this film the poor bastard has the added disadvantage of being the brother of bad guy HYDRA agent Loki, the guy with the tell-tale heart and big plans to run the universe between lunges.           

To round out the crew. Two guys, one mutant, one average world citizen, who might have amounted to something are of a little more interest. This poor little rich boy inventor freak with some serious heart-trouble wise-cracking Stark, played by Robert Downey, Jr, aka Ironman, could have been a great leader if he took the whole caper seriously, could have figured out a way to really lead if he had not been taken over root and branch by assorted A.I. agents making him yet another beast of burden like Hulk except with some brains. The last character, the only non-freak in the bunch meaning he might bleed if he were wounded Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, seems to be amused by all the freaks he and his S.H.E.I.L.D organization have inherited (which at some point in one of these freaking story-lines had been a front, had been infiltrated by Hydra loyalist so much for the good guys being good. Probably is amused that a half dozen otherwise unemployable misfits are leaven to save this wicked old world from those dark forces who wish to take charge and ask questions later.

Since I know this review will never see the light of day or be so red-penciled by Greg that it amounts to the same thing I will not spent much time on plot. In that I am just taking after the Marvel producers who didn’t either. Actually what plot?  X-bad guys (name your organization or bad guy renegade special forces crew that however seems to be composed mostly of cannon-fodder for the good mutants) are out to take over the world using plenty of muscle and technology are confronted by half a dozen specially skilled elite special forces mutants who take a long-drawn out but predictable victory while humankind watches and wonders. (Taking a serious amount of casualties along the way as these super-heroes rack up “collateral damage” galore WTF. WTF let the kid Jacobs do the next one of these mass production jobs.              

In Defense Of Urban Flight-Cary Grant and Myra Loy’s “Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House” (1948)-A Film Review

In Defense Of Urban Flight-Cary Grant and Myra Loy’s “Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House” (1948)-A Film Review

DVD Review

   

By Sandy Salmon

Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House, starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy,  

[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]

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Nowadays the great flight from the big cities started in the immediate post-World War II period with the construction of Levitttown-type suburbs has run its course and there is a creep back to the cities by the non-auto hungry Generation X. Maybe it is the economics of purchase but I have listened in disbelief as father after father of my acquaintance has told me that their young charges do not own, do not lust after their won automobile. In some cases do not have a driver’s license at twenty-something. Heresy, sheer heresy to our generation hitting the road at sixteen and at least pining for an owned automobile around the same time. That strange sociology phenomenon aside back then every even marginally prosperous family was itching to join the exodus. (And maybe from smaller town too when you remember back to the days when places like downtown Mill Valley outside of Trenton, New Jersey where I grew up in the 1950s used to be thriving places where you would spent plenty of time doing this and that before the big malls sucked the life out of basically Mom and Pop Main Street operations.)  That is the working premise of the film under review, Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House, as Cary Grant and Myra Loy go through their paces trying to make the damn thing come true without bankrupting them and not without seemingly every pitfall known to house-building man (and woman).

Mad man, you know Madison Avenue, New York City upwardly mobile advertising man fresh for the war, World War II, Mr. Blanding, played by versatile Cary Grant who could play for laughs or suspense at the flip of a coin, is sick and tired of his cramped quarters in an apartment in the city and dreams of getting out in the great fresh suburban, or what will be suburban air of Connecticut. Housewife and good mother Mrs. Blanding, played by equally versatile Myra Loy couldn’t agree more, as long as the operation doesn’t set them “underwater” as the more recent expression post-2008 housing bubble burst would have it. The problem, serious problem is that these city slickers don’t know from nothing about such things as old time Victorian houses and farms, allegedly cheap ones to fix up, which is what they have their ignorant little hearts set on to be able to bring up their two precocious young daughters in a non-city environment.  

Naturally not knowing anything about rural real estate markets they grab a nice old place on the cheap. No, not on the cheap when the hi-jinx are through since this place is a “lemon,” a dead-end which has to be torn down and another mighty dwelling put in its place which really does almost bankrupt the pair especially when Mad man Mr. Balnding can’t come up with some hammy slogan to sell, well, hams in order to keep his job and keep from going under water like a million other people before and after them. Not Cary or Myra’s best work which has to do with the limits of the story-line after all how many pratfalls and exasperating experiences can you work out, or get worked up about, over your so-called dream house before you simply don’t care anymore. Or we in that Saturday movie audience or now DVD home watching crowd either.  

   

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With The Late Odetta In Mind

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With The Late Odetta In Mind

By Ray Carter   

They say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody sunken hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times. 

I do believe however they are off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats, those that survived the Middle Passage of seasick death and disease making one think of once owned by William Ruskin W.B.T. Turner’s Slave Ship painterly masterpiece of the sick and dying thrown overboard for bloody insurance wagers which should have made everyone an abolitionist but didn’t and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows. Took peoples, proud Nubians, builders and artifacters, who had created very sharp civilizations when Mister’s forbears were wondering what the hell a spoon was when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, still wondered later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them churched religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights and sang high white collar blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of other guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals. 

Kept alive by some sisters like Odetta, did she need another name, a Mister slave name to complete his domination, big-voiced, who made lots of odd duck searching for roots white college students mainly marvel that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization. Our collective birth home.           

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind  

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlowe on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola and Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able unlike my older brother, Prescott, to call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You, Sweet Little Sixteen, Let’s Have A Party, Be-Bop-a-Lula, Bo Diddley, Peggy Sue and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family, Buell Kazell, Jimmy Rodgers, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country), the blue grass music , and the protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know Chicago, blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and of course Mississippi John Hurt. But those guys basically stayed in the South and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they had made their own pacts with the devil. Praise be.               

When The Blues Was Dues- The Slide Guitar Of Elmore James

When The Blues Was Dues- The Slide Guitar Of Elmore James

By Ray Carter

 [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 solely 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 by Green 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, Kenny Evans, will get to a CD review of Elmore James’ work in a second. Now I want to tell, no retell, the tale that had me and a few of my corner boys who hung out in front of, or in if we had dough for food or more likely the jukebox, Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Carver where I came of age in the early 1960s going for a while. On one lonesome Friday night, lonesome meaning, no dough, no wheels, no girls, or any combination of the three, with time of our hands Billy Bradley, Jack Dawson and I went round and round about what song by what artist each of us thought was the decisive song that launched rock and roll. Yeah, I know, I know now, that the world then, like now, was going to hell in a hand-basket, what with the Russkies breathing hard on us in the deep freeze Cold War red scare night, with crazy wars going on for no apparent reason, and the struggle for black civil rights down in the police state Mister James Crow South (that “police state" picked up later after I got wise to what was happening there, that it was not some ill-thought out aberration by a few raggedly rednecks by a deeply conscious social policy formulated at the highest local levels, and carried out from the top down in a crazy quill iron front which almost took a second civil to unravel) but what were three corner boys to do to while away the time.  

Here is the break-down though. We knew, knew without anybody telling us that while Elvis gave rock and roll a big lift in his time before he went on to silly movies (after Jail House Rock where the jail house rock scene was worth the price of admission alone) that debased his talent he was not the “max daddy,” not the guy who rolled the dice. For one thing and this was Billy’s position he only covered Big Joe Turner’s classic R&B classic Shake, Rattle, and Roll and when we heard Joe’s finger-snapping version we flipped out. So Billy had his choice made, no question. Jack had heard on some late Sunday night radio station out in Chicago on his transistor radio a thing called Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour where he first heard this guy wailing on the piano a be-bop tune. It turned out to be Ike Turner (without Tina then and using another name like Johnny and the Dee Drops, something like that, due to onerous and one-sided contractual problems) blasting Rocket 88. So Jack had his position firm, and a good choice. Me, well I caught this obscure folk music station (obscure then but not a few years later though) which played not just folk but what would be later called “roots music.” And the blues is nothing but roots music in America. One night I heard Elmore James slide guitar his way through Look On Yonder Wall. That is the song I defended that night. Did any of us change each other’s mind that night. Be serious this was teenage boys turf war and the last I heard it was about 1926 the last time a teenage boy succumbed to reason. I later, several years later well out of teenage boy angst and alienation so easier to un-clutch wrong opinions, saw the wisdom of Jack’s choice and switched but old Elmore still was a close second. Enough said.       

CD REVIEW

The History of Elmore James: The Sky Is Crying, Elmore James, Rhino Records, 1993

When one thinks of the classic blues tune “Dust My Broom” one tends to think of the legendary Robert Johnson who along with his “Sweet Home, Chicago” created two of the signature blues songs of the pre-World War II period. However, my first hearing of “Dust My Broom” was on a hot LP vinyl record (the old days, right?) version covered and made his own by the artist under review, Elmore James. I have heard many cover versions since then, including from the likes of George Thoroughgood and Chris Smither, and they all reflect on the influence of Elmore’s amazing slide guitar virtuosity to provide the "heat" necessary to do the song justice. Moreover, this is only the tip of the iceberg as such blues masters and aficionados as B.B. King and The Rolling Stones have covered other parts of James’ catalog.

Perhaps because Elmore died relativity young at a time when blues were just being revived in the early 1960’s as part of the general trend toward “discovering” roots music by the likes of this reviewer he has been a less well-known member of the blues pantheon. However, for those who know the value of a good slide guitar to add sexiness and sauciness to a blues number James is a hero. Hell, Thoroughgood built a whole career out of Elmore covers (and also, to be sure, of the late legendary Bo Diddly). I never get tired of hearing these great songs. Moreover, it did not hurt to have the famous Broom-dusters backing him up throughout the years. As one would expect of material done in the pre-digital age the sound quality is very dependent on the quality of the studio. But that, to my mind just makes it more authentic.

Well, what did you NEED to listen to here? Obviously,” Dust My Broom". On this CD though you MUST listen to Elmore on "Standing At The Crossroads". Wow, it jumps right out at you. "Look On Yonder Wall" (a song that I used to believe was a key to early rock 'n' rock before I gravitated to Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" as my candidate for that role), "It Hurts Me Too" and the classic "The Sky is Crying" round out the minimum program here. Listen on.

Lyrics To "Dust My Broom"

I'm gonna get up in the mornin',

I believe I'll dust my broom (2x)

Girlfriend, the black man you been lovin',

girlfriend, can get my room

I'm gon' write a letter,

Telephone every town I know (2x)

If I can't find her in West Helena,

She must be in East Monroe, I know

I don't want no woman,

Wants every downtown man she meet (2x)

She's a no good doney,

They shouldn't 'low her on the street

I believe, I believe I'll go back home (2x)

You can mistreat me here, babe,

But you can't when I go home

And I'm gettin' up in the morning,

I believe I'll dust my broom (2x)

Girlfriend, the black man that you been lovin',

Girlfriend, can get my room

I'm gon' call up Chiney,

She is my good girl over there (2x)

If I can't find her on Philippine's Island,

She must be in Ethiopia somewhere

Robert Johnson

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

By Lance Lawrence 

Kenny Jackman heard the late Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe 2005, when he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line. At that time he got into all things Carter Family unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, hipped him to Hazel during his frenzy and he picked up the CD second-hand in Harvard Square. (Really at Sandy’s located between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around town where until recently Sandy had held forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home knocked him out. The latter, moreover, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story.

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation of ’68 was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared 4-F by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown North Adamsville (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, a skill that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do). So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man friend Peter Paul Markin with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his beat brothers (and a few sisters) but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended Kenny told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then).

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia at a road-side campsite. Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised. When he entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats that always accompany the vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit” on (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself and had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place, and, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten . And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old North Adamsville. And denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the south, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time. And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had longish hair and a wisp of a beard), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain.

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that he had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home. Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So Kenny did really hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970, see.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown as Kenny headed west to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos. They were supposed to meet out there a couple of months later after she finished up some family business. They never did, a not unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her and that wind-swept mountain dance night for a long time after that.]