Click On Title To Link To PBS's Online Link To Ken Burns'"Thomas Jefferson".
DVD Review
In The Time Of The Promise Of The American Republic
Thomas Jefferson, a film documentary by Ken Burns, Florentine Films, 1997
Parts of this review have been used previously in reviewing John Dos Passos’ “The Shackles of Power”. Many of the points addressed in that review on Jefferson and the nature of the Jeffersonian period in American history apply here as well.
I have spent gallons of ink around this July 4th celebratory time every year, and I believe justifiably so given the objectives of this site, drawing some strong distinction between various periods of the common American historical experience. I have extolled the early days of the American Republic when it held out, to paraphrase what Lincoln noted later in the crucible of the Civil War, another high point in the American experience, the promise that the “America democratic experiment represented the last, best hope of mankind”. And Lincoln was right then. In contrast I have heaped scorn, and that is an appropriate word here, on later periods lambasting the turn to the American imperium that we still suffer under. Of course, none of this periodization is all cut and dried but today; at least, I want to go back to that earlier, more hopeful period of the birth of the American Republic.
Normally, when one thinks of the early period of the American Republic one’s thoughts turn to the struggle for independence from impetuous British imperialism, the subsequent fights to create some workable form of government and the consolidation of the American state, against all comers, as a factor in world history. The names Washington, Adams, Morris, Franklin and the like come easily to mind in that narrative. Moreover, lately, the period had been worked over almost to exhaustion as if resurrecting that heroic period will shed some reflected light on today’s ugly political scene.
Today, though, in reviewing master documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ “Thomas Jefferson” I want to look at, as I did in reviewing John Dos Passos’ older historical narrative (1966), “The Shackles Of Power”, the period just after that consolidation when the contours of the disputes that would form the two major political philosophies that govern American politics got pushed center stage. This is the time of Jefferson and his acolytes, Madison and Monroe, and their partisans in the various state Democratic Republican organizations centered on the plebeian-supported local newspapers. And it is also the time when the original Hamiltonian federalist impulse that governed the firs period of American life petered out in that form with the passing away of its old leadership, its cranky secessionist politics and its elitist conceits. That is a good enough time span for our work, basically the period from Jefferson’s hotly contested election in 2000 (oops, 1800) through the period formerly known as “the era of good feelings” (quaint, right?) to the period, today, now, tentatively, in the academy known as the period of the rise of “Jacksonian democracy”. This is the heart of the Burns documentary and the part that makes for the most interesting aspect of the film.
Those last points in the paragraph above are germane to Burns' view of the Jeffersonian story. This is, after, all the age where the Alexander Hamilton-led Federalist pro-mercantile strong central government policies and the Jefferson-led Democratic Republican weak central government, strong state governments pro-“yeoman farmer” policy fights came front and center. Those trends, in various guises, have continued to this day in the hurly-burly of every day democratic politics. Needless to say, this little capsule comment of mine concerning the outlines of the disputes is merely that, an outline. As with any documentary, Burns is confronted with that same problem of merely outlining the various political struggles. Take this documentary as a primer on the period. Not as the final word
One of Burns' virtues as a literary-oriented film man is that he, unlike many professional historians some of whom like Gary Wills populate this production, brings a snappy literary style to his narrative. Thus, he spends less time on the arcania of the internal politics of the Federalist and Democratic Republicans and more on outcomes. Thus, although Thomas Jefferson is the central character of this work, plenty of space is given to other secondary characters central to this narrative like the on/off relationship between Jefferson and his predecessor John Adams, the rise of James Madison and James Monroe in the early 1800’s as adherents of the Jeffersonian tradition. And so on.
Of course no history of this period is complete without a nod to Jefferson’s inspired acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase as an important, if not defining, aspect of creating what would be come the American nation-state, the development of an internal transportation system, the rise of public education fostered by the post-presidential Jefferson and the increasing politicization of the governing process through increased literacy, broadening the suffrage franchise and the formation, in embryo, of the party system.
As I mentioned in the Dos Passos review, obviously a history documentary , well researched or not, that dates from an earlier time (even, if as here, only ten years) will neither reflect the evolving tendencies in historical studies, such as they are, or the incredible increase in material sources to be drawn from that have become available since then. For example, the now “hot” issue of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, and their children is a case in point. The “talking heads”, including Professor John Hope Franklin, that always drive documentaries , reflecting the received wisdom of the time pass on a rather agnostic view of their relationship, if not outright acceptance of the ‘evidence’ for denial of the relationship. Also far too little critical mention is given to the importance of slave ownership to Jefferson’s personal financial fate, whatever his philosophical views on the matter. Jefferson, in effect, is given pass on this issue. If a greater presidential figure like Abraham Lincoln can “take heat” for his racial views from today’s historians then the slave-owner Jefferson does not deserve that pass. Notwithstanding those problems this is a good Jefferson primer. Watch it.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
*In The Time Of The Promise Of The American Republic- John Dos Passos’ Jeffersonian America
Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For John Dos Passos.
Book Review
The Shackles Of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades, John Dos Passos, Doubleday&Company, New York, 1966.
I have spent gallons of ink around this July 4th celebratory time every year, and I believe justifiably so given the objectives of this site, drawing some strong distinction between various periods of the common American historical experience. I have extolled the early days of the American Republic when it held out, to paraphrase what Lincoln noted later in the crucible of the Civil War, another high point in the American experience, the promise that the “America democratic experiment represented the last, best hope of mankind”. And Lincoln was right then. In contrast I have heaped scorn, and that is an appropriate word here, on later periods lambasting the turn to the American imperium that we still suffer under. Of course, none of this periodization is all cut and dried but today; at least, I want to go back to that earlier, more hopeful period of the birth of the American Republic.
Normally, when one thinks of the early period of the American Republic one’s thoughts turn to the struggle for independence from impetuous British imperialism, the subsequent fights to create some workable form of government and the consolidation of the American state, against all comers, as a factor in world history. The names Washington, Adams, Morris, Franklin and the like come easily to mind in that narrative. Moreover, lately, that period had been worked over almost to exhaustion as if resurrecting that heroic period will shed some reflected light on today’s ugly political scene.
Today, though, in reviewing John Dos Passos’ older historical narrative (1966), “The Shackles Of Power”, I want to look at the period just after that consolidation when the contours of the disputes that would form the two major political philosophies that govern American politics got pushed center stage. This is the time of Jefferson and his acolytes, Madison and Monroe, and their partisans in the various state Democratic Republican organizations centered on the plebeian-supported local newspapers. And it is also the time when the original federalist impulse that governed the firs period of American life petered out in that form with the passing away of its old leadership, its cranky secessionist politics and its elitist conceits. That is a good enough time span for our work, basically the period from Jefferson’s hotly contested election in 2000 (oops, 1800) through the period formerly known as “the era of good feelings” (quaint, right?) to the period, today, now, tentatively, in the academy known as the period of the rise of “Jacksonian democracy”.
For those not familiar with the novelist John Dos Passos it should enough to know that he first came onto the American literary stage in a big way with his USA trilogy that both chronicled the changes in American life brought about by World War I and created a literary style, using slogans, headlines, brief bios and the like to present his story. This literary technique was later used, most famously, by E.L. Doctorow in such historical novels as “Ragtime” and the thinly-veiled Julius and Ethel Rosenberg story, “The Book Of Daniel”. Moreover, Dos Passos did more than his fair share of literary work for the defense in the famous Sacco and Vanzetti case on the 1920’s and later in the 1930’s in reportage on the Spanish Civil War. Alas, as is all to familiar among the American literati and intelligentsia from that period (and today, as well), Dos Passos turned against those strong social impulses of his youth and at the end became a devotee of the likes of Barry Goldwater in the 1960’s, as well as a “godfather” to the conservative youth then organized in the Young Americans For Freedom.
Those last points in the paragraph above are germane to Dos Passos’ view of the Jeffersonian story. This is, after, all the age where the Alexander Hamilton-led Federalist pro-mercantile strong central government policies and the Jefferson-led Democratic Republican weak central government, strong state governments pro-“yeoman farmer” policy fights came front and center. Those trends, in various guises, have continued to this day in the hurly-burly of every day democratic politics. Needless to say, this little capsule comment of mine concerning the outlines of the disputes is merely that, an outline. However, the contrasts presented here are central to Dos Passos’s views of Jefferson in the 1960’s when he would have been a Goldwaterite “small government” man. In the 1930’s, while he may have admired Jefferson and his coterie on other grounds, I believe that he would have taken a much different view on Jefferson.
One of Dos Passos’ virtues as a literary man is that he, unlike many professional historians then and now, brings a snappy literary style to his narrative. Thus, he spends less time on the arcana of the internal politics of the Federalist and Democratic Republicans and more on outcomes. Thus, although Thomas Jefferson is the central character of this work, plenty of space is given to other secondary characters central to this narrative like the on/off relationship between Jefferson and his predecessor John Adams, the rise of James Madison and James Monroe in the early 1800’s as adherents of the Jeffersonian tradition. The dog fight between Virginia and Massachusetts, as exemplars of contrasting governing styles, gets full play. As does the early work of rising politicians like John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay who really do not come into their own until that later “Jacksonian” period mentioned earlier.
Of course no history of this period is complete without a nod to Jefferson’s inspired acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase as an important, if not defining, aspect of creating what would be come the American nation-state, the development of an internal transportation system, the rise of public education fostered by the post-presidential Jefferson and the increasing politicization of the governing process through increased literacy, broadening the suffrage franchise and the formation, in embryo, of the party system. The various problems with ‘Mother’ England (most notably the impressments of American sailors into the British navy during ‘their” Napoleonic wars) culminating in the almost forgotten War of 1812 also receive plenty of coverage, including the knotty maneuverings on the diplomatic front (Treaty of Ghent).
Obviously a history book, well written or not, that dates from the 1960’s will neither reflect the evolving tendencies in historical studies, such as they are, or the incredible increase in material sources to be drawn from that have become available since then. For example, the now “hot” issue of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, and their children is a case in point. Dos Passos, reflecting the received wisdom of the time (read: cover-up) passes on a rather agnostic view of their relationship, if not outright acceptance of the ‘evidence’ for denial of the relationship. Also far too little is mentioned about the importance of slave ownership to Jefferson’s personal financial fate, whatever his philosophical views on the matter. No historian today, other than one who wants to whitewash the slave-dependency common to many of the “founding fathers”, would make such an “omission”.
Finally, Dos Passos spends far too much time on the character, exploits and legal difficulties of one Aaron Burr, former Vice President of The United States and possibly “the once and future king” of some Trans-Louisiana state. Burr is set up, in fact is made to order, as the prime rascal of the age. And, perhaps, he was although this was an age of swashbucklers, solders of fortune, swindlers and confidence men. Hell, how do you think most nation-states got formed? I think Gore Vidal’s fictional treatment of Mr. Burr in his novel “Burr” is the place to go if you want to “learn” about that man. With these caveats, if you want a readable narrative about a key, if relatively neglected, period of the American historical experience this is not a bad place to start. If this read perks your interest this book is definitely not the place to finish though.
Book Review
The Shackles Of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades, John Dos Passos, Doubleday&Company, New York, 1966.
I have spent gallons of ink around this July 4th celebratory time every year, and I believe justifiably so given the objectives of this site, drawing some strong distinction between various periods of the common American historical experience. I have extolled the early days of the American Republic when it held out, to paraphrase what Lincoln noted later in the crucible of the Civil War, another high point in the American experience, the promise that the “America democratic experiment represented the last, best hope of mankind”. And Lincoln was right then. In contrast I have heaped scorn, and that is an appropriate word here, on later periods lambasting the turn to the American imperium that we still suffer under. Of course, none of this periodization is all cut and dried but today; at least, I want to go back to that earlier, more hopeful period of the birth of the American Republic.
Normally, when one thinks of the early period of the American Republic one’s thoughts turn to the struggle for independence from impetuous British imperialism, the subsequent fights to create some workable form of government and the consolidation of the American state, against all comers, as a factor in world history. The names Washington, Adams, Morris, Franklin and the like come easily to mind in that narrative. Moreover, lately, that period had been worked over almost to exhaustion as if resurrecting that heroic period will shed some reflected light on today’s ugly political scene.
Today, though, in reviewing John Dos Passos’ older historical narrative (1966), “The Shackles Of Power”, I want to look at the period just after that consolidation when the contours of the disputes that would form the two major political philosophies that govern American politics got pushed center stage. This is the time of Jefferson and his acolytes, Madison and Monroe, and their partisans in the various state Democratic Republican organizations centered on the plebeian-supported local newspapers. And it is also the time when the original federalist impulse that governed the firs period of American life petered out in that form with the passing away of its old leadership, its cranky secessionist politics and its elitist conceits. That is a good enough time span for our work, basically the period from Jefferson’s hotly contested election in 2000 (oops, 1800) through the period formerly known as “the era of good feelings” (quaint, right?) to the period, today, now, tentatively, in the academy known as the period of the rise of “Jacksonian democracy”.
For those not familiar with the novelist John Dos Passos it should enough to know that he first came onto the American literary stage in a big way with his USA trilogy that both chronicled the changes in American life brought about by World War I and created a literary style, using slogans, headlines, brief bios and the like to present his story. This literary technique was later used, most famously, by E.L. Doctorow in such historical novels as “Ragtime” and the thinly-veiled Julius and Ethel Rosenberg story, “The Book Of Daniel”. Moreover, Dos Passos did more than his fair share of literary work for the defense in the famous Sacco and Vanzetti case on the 1920’s and later in the 1930’s in reportage on the Spanish Civil War. Alas, as is all to familiar among the American literati and intelligentsia from that period (and today, as well), Dos Passos turned against those strong social impulses of his youth and at the end became a devotee of the likes of Barry Goldwater in the 1960’s, as well as a “godfather” to the conservative youth then organized in the Young Americans For Freedom.
Those last points in the paragraph above are germane to Dos Passos’ view of the Jeffersonian story. This is, after, all the age where the Alexander Hamilton-led Federalist pro-mercantile strong central government policies and the Jefferson-led Democratic Republican weak central government, strong state governments pro-“yeoman farmer” policy fights came front and center. Those trends, in various guises, have continued to this day in the hurly-burly of every day democratic politics. Needless to say, this little capsule comment of mine concerning the outlines of the disputes is merely that, an outline. However, the contrasts presented here are central to Dos Passos’s views of Jefferson in the 1960’s when he would have been a Goldwaterite “small government” man. In the 1930’s, while he may have admired Jefferson and his coterie on other grounds, I believe that he would have taken a much different view on Jefferson.
One of Dos Passos’ virtues as a literary man is that he, unlike many professional historians then and now, brings a snappy literary style to his narrative. Thus, he spends less time on the arcana of the internal politics of the Federalist and Democratic Republicans and more on outcomes. Thus, although Thomas Jefferson is the central character of this work, plenty of space is given to other secondary characters central to this narrative like the on/off relationship between Jefferson and his predecessor John Adams, the rise of James Madison and James Monroe in the early 1800’s as adherents of the Jeffersonian tradition. The dog fight between Virginia and Massachusetts, as exemplars of contrasting governing styles, gets full play. As does the early work of rising politicians like John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay who really do not come into their own until that later “Jacksonian” period mentioned earlier.
Of course no history of this period is complete without a nod to Jefferson’s inspired acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase as an important, if not defining, aspect of creating what would be come the American nation-state, the development of an internal transportation system, the rise of public education fostered by the post-presidential Jefferson and the increasing politicization of the governing process through increased literacy, broadening the suffrage franchise and the formation, in embryo, of the party system. The various problems with ‘Mother’ England (most notably the impressments of American sailors into the British navy during ‘their” Napoleonic wars) culminating in the almost forgotten War of 1812 also receive plenty of coverage, including the knotty maneuverings on the diplomatic front (Treaty of Ghent).
Obviously a history book, well written or not, that dates from the 1960’s will neither reflect the evolving tendencies in historical studies, such as they are, or the incredible increase in material sources to be drawn from that have become available since then. For example, the now “hot” issue of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, and their children is a case in point. Dos Passos, reflecting the received wisdom of the time (read: cover-up) passes on a rather agnostic view of their relationship, if not outright acceptance of the ‘evidence’ for denial of the relationship. Also far too little is mentioned about the importance of slave ownership to Jefferson’s personal financial fate, whatever his philosophical views on the matter. No historian today, other than one who wants to whitewash the slave-dependency common to many of the “founding fathers”, would make such an “omission”.
Finally, Dos Passos spends far too much time on the character, exploits and legal difficulties of one Aaron Burr, former Vice President of The United States and possibly “the once and future king” of some Trans-Louisiana state. Burr is set up, in fact is made to order, as the prime rascal of the age. And, perhaps, he was although this was an age of swashbucklers, solders of fortune, swindlers and confidence men. Hell, how do you think most nation-states got formed? I think Gore Vidal’s fictional treatment of Mr. Burr in his novel “Burr” is the place to go if you want to “learn” about that man. With these caveats, if you want a readable narrative about a key, if relatively neglected, period of the American historical experience this is not a bad place to start. If this read perks your interest this book is definitely not the place to finish though.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
*"Come To Mama"- The Blues Of Etta James
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Etta James Performing "Tell Mama".
This is a little quick entry for a blues queen that I will write more, much more, about later in connection with a review of "Cadillac Blues", a film based on the history of Chicago's Chess Records that gave Etta her start. Feast on.
*********
Here is a little tribute to a kindred spirit that the old time blues singer, Sippy Wallace, would call "sister".
"Come To Mama”- The Blues Of Ms. Etta James
Etta James And The Roots Band: Burning Down The House, Etta James and various artists, NTSC, 2001
The name Etta James goes back in my memory to associations with my first listening to rock music on the old transistor radio in the late 1950’s. At that time, I believe, her music was in the old doo wop tradition of the late 1950’s, a music that I was fairly soon to dismiss out of hand as the ‘bubble gum’ music that was prevalent in that period between the height of Elvis/Jerry Lee/Carl Perkins classic rock & rock and the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That is where things were left until a dozen years ago or more when Etta ‘stole the show’ at the Newport Folk Festival. Well, we live and learn.
Here we have Etta, in a 2001 concert being recorded for this album, doing all the songs that she is justly famous for like “Born Blue” and “I Rather Be A Blind Girl” as well as some nice covers in her own style of the likes of Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”. Just a nice solid performance with a good back up band, including a couple of her sons.
Etta James- "Come To Mama" Lyrics
If the Sun goes behind the clouds
And you feel it's gonna rain
And if the moon ain't shinin bright
And the Stars, the Stars
Won't shine for you tonight
If your life is hard to understand
And your lovelife is out of hand
Oh, Come to Mama
Come on to Mama
If you need, if you need a satisfyer
Let me be, let me be your pacifyer
And if you feel, feelin like a horse
Chompin at the bit
Call my number 777-6969, I'll give you a fix
Cause I've got your favorite toy
Guaranteed to bring you joy
Come to Mama
Come on to Mama
Lead Solo
+ de parolesAt Last I Just Want To Make Love To You Stormy Weather (keeps Rainin' All The Time) All I Could Do Was Cry Don't Cry Baby Hickory Dickory Dock Oh Happy Day Amen, This Little Light of Mine A Sunday Kind Of Love A Change Is Gonna Do Me Good
If your soul is on fire
Let me take you to the corner of the sky
Hey - Come to Mama
Come on to Mama
Come to Mama
Come on come on to Mama
COME ON TO MAMA.....
This is a little quick entry for a blues queen that I will write more, much more, about later in connection with a review of "Cadillac Blues", a film based on the history of Chicago's Chess Records that gave Etta her start. Feast on.
*********
Here is a little tribute to a kindred spirit that the old time blues singer, Sippy Wallace, would call "sister".
"Come To Mama”- The Blues Of Ms. Etta James
Etta James And The Roots Band: Burning Down The House, Etta James and various artists, NTSC, 2001
The name Etta James goes back in my memory to associations with my first listening to rock music on the old transistor radio in the late 1950’s. At that time, I believe, her music was in the old doo wop tradition of the late 1950’s, a music that I was fairly soon to dismiss out of hand as the ‘bubble gum’ music that was prevalent in that period between the height of Elvis/Jerry Lee/Carl Perkins classic rock & rock and the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That is where things were left until a dozen years ago or more when Etta ‘stole the show’ at the Newport Folk Festival. Well, we live and learn.
Here we have Etta, in a 2001 concert being recorded for this album, doing all the songs that she is justly famous for like “Born Blue” and “I Rather Be A Blind Girl” as well as some nice covers in her own style of the likes of Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”. Just a nice solid performance with a good back up band, including a couple of her sons.
Etta James- "Come To Mama" Lyrics
If the Sun goes behind the clouds
And you feel it's gonna rain
And if the moon ain't shinin bright
And the Stars, the Stars
Won't shine for you tonight
If your life is hard to understand
And your lovelife is out of hand
Oh, Come to Mama
Come on to Mama
If you need, if you need a satisfyer
Let me be, let me be your pacifyer
And if you feel, feelin like a horse
Chompin at the bit
Call my number 777-6969, I'll give you a fix
Cause I've got your favorite toy
Guaranteed to bring you joy
Come to Mama
Come on to Mama
Lead Solo
+ de parolesAt Last I Just Want To Make Love To You Stormy Weather (keeps Rainin' All The Time) All I Could Do Was Cry Don't Cry Baby Hickory Dickory Dock Oh Happy Day Amen, This Little Light of Mine A Sunday Kind Of Love A Change Is Gonna Do Me Good
If your soul is on fire
Let me take you to the corner of the sky
Hey - Come to Mama
Come on to Mama
Come to Mama
Come on come on to Mama
COME ON TO MAMA.....
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
***Our Homeland, The Sea- Work Songs Of The Old Tars
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of The Clancy Brothers Doing "Paddy West"
CD REVIEW
Blow Boys Blow, Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd, Tradition Records, 1990
This review is a little off the beaten path for this writer. Oh no, not on the subject matter of the sea. There are a thousand primordial links between me and that great swirl of ocean which I will mention below. No, what is unusual is that I would discuss sea shanties, a form of musical expression that is not normally in my world view. I have explored the roots of rock & roll and engaged in the polemics about whether rhythm & blues, rockabilly or country formed the basis of that music revolution. I have gone on and on about the various manifestations of the blues, country and urban, acoustic and electric. I have endlessly discussed the urban folk revival of the early 1960s, ad nauseaum.
I have, moreover, tipped my hat to the precursors of that folk revival by reviewing the work of the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the course of which I have discussed work songs, prison labor songs, cowboy songs, songs of the Spanish Civil War and so on. I have gladly thrown a bouquet or two to jazz singers, and to an occasional scat artist like Louis Armstrong. I have even gone down and dirty in bayou country to praise Cajun music. But nowhere have I previously been inclined to give mention to the work songs of the old tars, the sailor/workers of the age of the wooden ship which was the early means of "globalization" of international commerce in the early days of capitalist development. I make amends here to the boyos who sailed, slaved and survived on the wide oceans.
As mentioned above, this is a rather strange previous musical omission. I have many serious links to the sea. I grew up in a town so close to the ocean that I probably smelled sea air from an open hospital window the day I was born. From one house I grew up in I could tumble down a hill to the beach. In another I didn't need to even tumble. I have walked more beach miles than I care to recount. I have stood as hurricane winds came up and drove the waves over two double sea walls in an off-hand demonstration of her power. I have, from land and sea, seen cays, bays, narrows, wide empty expanses, and every other form of ocean creation. I have seen oceans as blues as the heavens, and as dark as the darkest night.
All of this is by way of saying, as I have on other occasions in discussing the old hobo skills of `riding the rails' in the days when trains were the common form of fast transportation, the old sailors, as least in their youths (if they had not been shanghai-ed, a common form of impressment), were trying to go THERE in order not to be HERE. And that, my friends, is the link that binds me to the work and off-time songs of the old salts and to their miseries and, few, joys.
So here in these CD selections we get a second-hand chance to listen to what Jack Tar was singing about in the days when men were made of steel, and ships of wood. Or so the lads would have us believe. One can appreciate, as an almost universal proposition, that music makes the hard task of work easier. But behind the singsong nature of the music lies some kind of undefined longing that has haunted humankind since it first walked on two legs. Here, that return to our homeland, the sea. In the meantime though the talk was of getting the sails up; getting a few hours of sleep or sneaking some; worrying over an impeding storm and its effects; dreaming, always dreaming of port and the girls left behind (or to be avoided); and that eternal thirst for that ration of rum, the `nectar of the gods' to benighted seaman (check to "All For Me Grog" for the inside dope on that subject). Listen up, mates.
Note: Probably the most interesting song here is "Handsome Cabin Boy" about the twisted fate of a beautiful young girl who shipped out as cabin boy, whose looks caught the attention of both the captain and his wife aboard ship (to speak nothing of the sex-hungry sailors), and who became pregnant (mysteriously?). I would think that it would take some serious psychological study to get to the "inner" meaning of that little ditty in the psyche of the closed-in sailor. Also give a close listen to "Paddy West", "Blow Boys Blow", and "South Australia".
"The Handsome Cabin Boy"
It's of a pretty female
As you may understand.
Her mind being bent for rambling
Unto some foreign land,
She dressed herself in sailor's clothes,
Or so it does appear,
And she hired with a captain
To serve him for a year.
[The captain's wife she being on board,
She seemed in great joy
To think the captain had engaged
Such a handsome cabin boy,
That now and then she'd slip him a kiss,
And she'd have liked to toy,
But 'twas the captain found out the secret
Of the handsome cabin boy.]
Her cheeks they were like roses
And her hair rolled in a curl.
The sailors often smiled and said
He looked just like a girl.
But eating of the captain's biscuit
Her colour did destroy,
And the waist did swell of pretty Nell,
The handsome cabin boy.
It was in the bay of Biscay
Our gallant ship did plow.
One night among the sailors
Was a fearful flurry and row.*
They tumbled from their hammocks
For their sleep it did destroy,
And they sworn about the groaning
Of the handsome cabin boy.
"Oh doctor, dear, oh doctor,"
The cabin boy did cry.
"My time has come, I am undone,
And I will surely die."
The doctor come a-runnin'
And a-smilin' at the fun.
To think a sailor lad should have
A daughter or a son.
The sailors when they saw the joke
They all did stand and stare.
The child belonged to none of them,
They solemnly did swear.
The captain's wife, she says to him,
"My dear, I wish you joy,
For 'tis either you or me's betrayed
The handsome cabin boy!"
[Now sailors, take your tot of rum
And drink success to trade,
And likewise to the cabin boy
That was neither man nor maid.
Here's hoping the wars don't rise again
Our sailors to destroy,
And here's hoping for a jolly lot more
Lyrics To South Australia
In South Australia I was born
To me heave away, haul away
In South Australia round Cape Horn
Chorus
We're bound for South Australia
Haul away you rolling kings
To me heave away, haul away
Haul away, you'll hear me sing
We're bound for South Australia
2. As I walked out one morning fair
To me heave away, haul away
'Twas there I met Miss Nancy Blair
Chorus:
3. I shook her up and I shook her down
To me heave away, haul away
I shook her round and round the town
Chorus:
4. I run her all night and I run her all day
To me heave away, haul away
And I run her until we sailed away
Chorus:
5. There ain't but one thing grieves me mind
To me heave away, haul away
To leave Miss Nancy Blair behind
Chorus:
6. And as we wallop around Cape Horn
To me heave away, haul away
You'll wish to God you'd never been born
Chorus:
7. In South Australia my native land
To me heave away, haul away
Full of rocks and thieves and fleas and sand
Chorus:
8. I wish I was on Australia's strand
To me heave away, haul away
With a bottle of whiskey in my hand
Chorus:
Paddy West
Lyrics:
As I was walking down London road
I come to Paddy West's inn
He taught me the ropes of a seafaring swob
While he filled my glass with gin
He said there's a ship that's waiting lad
And on her you quickly sign
Her mate is a black-guard her bow is worse,
But she will suit you fine
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Well when I had my drink my boys
The wind began to blow
He sent me up in the attic
The main royal for to stow
But when I got up in the attic
No main royal could I find
So I turned around to the window
And I furled the window blind
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now suppose we're on the starboard boys
To Frisco we'd be bound
Oh Paddy he called for a length of rope
And he laid it on the ground
We all step over and back again
And he says to me "That's fine"
Now when they ask if you ever been to sea
You can say you've crossed the line
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now there's a more thing for you to do
Before you sail away
That's to step around the table
Where the bullock's horn does lay
And when they ask "Were you ever at sea?"
You can say "Ten times ´round the Horn"
And Be Jesus you were a sailor
Since the day that you was born
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Blow Boys Blow Lyrics
A yankee ship came down the river.
Blow, boys, blow!
A yankee ship with a yankee skipper.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And how do you know that she's a yankee clipper?
Blow, boys, blow!
Her masts and yards they shine like silver.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the captain of her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it's Bully Haines, th' hoodlum scoffer.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the mate aboard her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Santander James is the mate aboard her.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he loves us sailors.
Blow, boys, blow!
Yes he does, like hell and blazes.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he's a rocket from hell boys.
Blow, boys, blow!
He'll ride you down as you ride the spanker.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Blow, boys, blow - the sun's drawing water.
Blow, boys, blow!
Three cheers for the cook and one for his daugher.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Traditional, arranged by Peter Webster.
CD REVIEW
Blow Boys Blow, Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd, Tradition Records, 1990
This review is a little off the beaten path for this writer. Oh no, not on the subject matter of the sea. There are a thousand primordial links between me and that great swirl of ocean which I will mention below. No, what is unusual is that I would discuss sea shanties, a form of musical expression that is not normally in my world view. I have explored the roots of rock & roll and engaged in the polemics about whether rhythm & blues, rockabilly or country formed the basis of that music revolution. I have gone on and on about the various manifestations of the blues, country and urban, acoustic and electric. I have endlessly discussed the urban folk revival of the early 1960s, ad nauseaum.
I have, moreover, tipped my hat to the precursors of that folk revival by reviewing the work of the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the course of which I have discussed work songs, prison labor songs, cowboy songs, songs of the Spanish Civil War and so on. I have gladly thrown a bouquet or two to jazz singers, and to an occasional scat artist like Louis Armstrong. I have even gone down and dirty in bayou country to praise Cajun music. But nowhere have I previously been inclined to give mention to the work songs of the old tars, the sailor/workers of the age of the wooden ship which was the early means of "globalization" of international commerce in the early days of capitalist development. I make amends here to the boyos who sailed, slaved and survived on the wide oceans.
As mentioned above, this is a rather strange previous musical omission. I have many serious links to the sea. I grew up in a town so close to the ocean that I probably smelled sea air from an open hospital window the day I was born. From one house I grew up in I could tumble down a hill to the beach. In another I didn't need to even tumble. I have walked more beach miles than I care to recount. I have stood as hurricane winds came up and drove the waves over two double sea walls in an off-hand demonstration of her power. I have, from land and sea, seen cays, bays, narrows, wide empty expanses, and every other form of ocean creation. I have seen oceans as blues as the heavens, and as dark as the darkest night.
All of this is by way of saying, as I have on other occasions in discussing the old hobo skills of `riding the rails' in the days when trains were the common form of fast transportation, the old sailors, as least in their youths (if they had not been shanghai-ed, a common form of impressment), were trying to go THERE in order not to be HERE. And that, my friends, is the link that binds me to the work and off-time songs of the old salts and to their miseries and, few, joys.
So here in these CD selections we get a second-hand chance to listen to what Jack Tar was singing about in the days when men were made of steel, and ships of wood. Or so the lads would have us believe. One can appreciate, as an almost universal proposition, that music makes the hard task of work easier. But behind the singsong nature of the music lies some kind of undefined longing that has haunted humankind since it first walked on two legs. Here, that return to our homeland, the sea. In the meantime though the talk was of getting the sails up; getting a few hours of sleep or sneaking some; worrying over an impeding storm and its effects; dreaming, always dreaming of port and the girls left behind (or to be avoided); and that eternal thirst for that ration of rum, the `nectar of the gods' to benighted seaman (check to "All For Me Grog" for the inside dope on that subject). Listen up, mates.
Note: Probably the most interesting song here is "Handsome Cabin Boy" about the twisted fate of a beautiful young girl who shipped out as cabin boy, whose looks caught the attention of both the captain and his wife aboard ship (to speak nothing of the sex-hungry sailors), and who became pregnant (mysteriously?). I would think that it would take some serious psychological study to get to the "inner" meaning of that little ditty in the psyche of the closed-in sailor. Also give a close listen to "Paddy West", "Blow Boys Blow", and "South Australia".
"The Handsome Cabin Boy"
It's of a pretty female
As you may understand.
Her mind being bent for rambling
Unto some foreign land,
She dressed herself in sailor's clothes,
Or so it does appear,
And she hired with a captain
To serve him for a year.
[The captain's wife she being on board,
She seemed in great joy
To think the captain had engaged
Such a handsome cabin boy,
That now and then she'd slip him a kiss,
And she'd have liked to toy,
But 'twas the captain found out the secret
Of the handsome cabin boy.]
Her cheeks they were like roses
And her hair rolled in a curl.
The sailors often smiled and said
He looked just like a girl.
But eating of the captain's biscuit
Her colour did destroy,
And the waist did swell of pretty Nell,
The handsome cabin boy.
It was in the bay of Biscay
Our gallant ship did plow.
One night among the sailors
Was a fearful flurry and row.*
They tumbled from their hammocks
For their sleep it did destroy,
And they sworn about the groaning
Of the handsome cabin boy.
"Oh doctor, dear, oh doctor,"
The cabin boy did cry.
"My time has come, I am undone,
And I will surely die."
The doctor come a-runnin'
And a-smilin' at the fun.
To think a sailor lad should have
A daughter or a son.
The sailors when they saw the joke
They all did stand and stare.
The child belonged to none of them,
They solemnly did swear.
The captain's wife, she says to him,
"My dear, I wish you joy,
For 'tis either you or me's betrayed
The handsome cabin boy!"
[Now sailors, take your tot of rum
And drink success to trade,
And likewise to the cabin boy
That was neither man nor maid.
Here's hoping the wars don't rise again
Our sailors to destroy,
And here's hoping for a jolly lot more
Lyrics To South Australia
In South Australia I was born
To me heave away, haul away
In South Australia round Cape Horn
Chorus
We're bound for South Australia
Haul away you rolling kings
To me heave away, haul away
Haul away, you'll hear me sing
We're bound for South Australia
2. As I walked out one morning fair
To me heave away, haul away
'Twas there I met Miss Nancy Blair
Chorus:
3. I shook her up and I shook her down
To me heave away, haul away
I shook her round and round the town
Chorus:
4. I run her all night and I run her all day
To me heave away, haul away
And I run her until we sailed away
Chorus:
5. There ain't but one thing grieves me mind
To me heave away, haul away
To leave Miss Nancy Blair behind
Chorus:
6. And as we wallop around Cape Horn
To me heave away, haul away
You'll wish to God you'd never been born
Chorus:
7. In South Australia my native land
To me heave away, haul away
Full of rocks and thieves and fleas and sand
Chorus:
8. I wish I was on Australia's strand
To me heave away, haul away
With a bottle of whiskey in my hand
Chorus:
Paddy West
Lyrics:
As I was walking down London road
I come to Paddy West's inn
He taught me the ropes of a seafaring swob
While he filled my glass with gin
He said there's a ship that's waiting lad
And on her you quickly sign
Her mate is a black-guard her bow is worse,
But she will suit you fine
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Well when I had my drink my boys
The wind began to blow
He sent me up in the attic
The main royal for to stow
But when I got up in the attic
No main royal could I find
So I turned around to the window
And I furled the window blind
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now suppose we're on the starboard boys
To Frisco we'd be bound
Oh Paddy he called for a length of rope
And he laid it on the ground
We all step over and back again
And he says to me "That's fine"
Now when they ask if you ever been to sea
You can say you've crossed the line
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now there's a more thing for you to do
Before you sail away
That's to step around the table
Where the bullock's horn does lay
And when they ask "Were you ever at sea?"
You can say "Ten times ´round the Horn"
And Be Jesus you were a sailor
Since the day that you was born
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Blow Boys Blow Lyrics
A yankee ship came down the river.
Blow, boys, blow!
A yankee ship with a yankee skipper.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And how do you know that she's a yankee clipper?
Blow, boys, blow!
Her masts and yards they shine like silver.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the captain of her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it's Bully Haines, th' hoodlum scoffer.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the mate aboard her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Santander James is the mate aboard her.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he loves us sailors.
Blow, boys, blow!
Yes he does, like hell and blazes.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he's a rocket from hell boys.
Blow, boys, blow!
He'll ride you down as you ride the spanker.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Blow, boys, blow - the sun's drawing water.
Blow, boys, blow!
Three cheers for the cook and one for his daugher.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
*Update On McKinney Trip To Aid Gaza- Israel Hands Off!
Click On Title To Link To Message about Former Congresswomen (And 2008 U.S. Green Party Presidential Candidate) Cynthia McKinney's Trip In Aid Of The Palestinian People In Gaza. Hands OFF McKinney! Defend The Palestinian People!
*A Bluesy Slice Of Neo-Film Noir- The Film “Dark Streets”-A Review
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Dark Streets"
DVD Review
Dark Streets, starring Gabriel Mann, Sony Entertainment, 2009
Admittedly it is tough, very tough to make a modern film noir in color that gives that gritty feel of something like Bogart and Bacall in the 1940s classic age of film noir in the “Big Sleep”. And this small film doesn’t try to do that. However, its does have a very bluesy feel to it as advertised. The plot line is a familiar one of a good guy (here in the guise of a debt-ridden nightclub owner dealing with his father’s mysterious death) of greed , intrigue and treachery, in this case involving the nefarious doings of covering up a crime in the process of cornering the electric market of an obviously corrupt and wide open city (and state). The dialogue is also somewhat stilted. One would think that such a combination calls for a thumbs down. Not so. Why? Go back to that bluesy feel. From the two fetching femme fatale torch singers who vie for said night club owner’s attentions, to the chorus girls doing, well doing their thing, to the black dancer/singer/narrator who holds the whole thing together (and puts on amazing Michael Jackson-like song and dance performances to boot). And here’s the topper- a sound track with the likes of Etta James, Solomon Burke and Doctor John in the back. My friends, this is a no-brainer in these quarters.
DVD Review
Dark Streets, starring Gabriel Mann, Sony Entertainment, 2009
Admittedly it is tough, very tough to make a modern film noir in color that gives that gritty feel of something like Bogart and Bacall in the 1940s classic age of film noir in the “Big Sleep”. And this small film doesn’t try to do that. However, its does have a very bluesy feel to it as advertised. The plot line is a familiar one of a good guy (here in the guise of a debt-ridden nightclub owner dealing with his father’s mysterious death) of greed , intrigue and treachery, in this case involving the nefarious doings of covering up a crime in the process of cornering the electric market of an obviously corrupt and wide open city (and state). The dialogue is also somewhat stilted. One would think that such a combination calls for a thumbs down. Not so. Why? Go back to that bluesy feel. From the two fetching femme fatale torch singers who vie for said night club owner’s attentions, to the chorus girls doing, well doing their thing, to the black dancer/singer/narrator who holds the whole thing together (and puts on amazing Michael Jackson-like song and dance performances to boot). And here’s the topper- a sound track with the likes of Etta James, Solomon Burke and Doctor John in the back. My friends, this is a no-brainer in these quarters.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
*As American Troops Draw Down From The Cities In Iraq- The Need To Continue The Fight Against The Obama War Policy-U.S. Out Of Iraq And Afghanistan
Click On Title To Link To New York Times News Article About The Increased Insurgent Activity In The Wake Of The Scheduled U.S. Troop Draw-down From Iraqi Cities On June 30, 2009.
Commentary
Okay, the eyes of the world lately have, rightly, been focused on the struggle of the Iranian masses and the need to stand in solidarity with them in their fight against the rigged elections and police and para-military weapons of the theocratic Islamic Republic. And there has been plenty of hoopla over the current American legislation to effect climate change, assumedly for the better. Added to that the crush of news about the struggle for an American national healthcare policy and a few tears in the direction of Michael Jackson and his seemingly tragic life and the political air appears to have little room for what is seen as “old” news. Still, I have this compelling need to offer this quick little reminder about those quirky little American wars that nevertheless still go blazing away in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (to speak nothing of the escalations in Pakistan but that are is not “our” war- yet).
The immediate purpose of this little reminder is that today, June 30, 2009, is the date that American (and allied, if there is such a thing anymore) troops are scheduled to withdraw from the major Iraqi cities and for the Iraqi security forces to take over. That said, the position of labor militants and other progressive forces must continue to be for immediate unconditional withdrawal of all American troops from that benighted country. That is the slogan we of the anti-imperialist left started off with almost seven years ago , and notwithstanding many liberal illusions in the good will of one Barack Obama, President of the United States, that remains our position until that task is accomplished. Oh, by the way, we might as well add for the sake of completeness- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan. There, I have been short and sweet today, but let us stay focused. More later.
Commentary
Okay, the eyes of the world lately have, rightly, been focused on the struggle of the Iranian masses and the need to stand in solidarity with them in their fight against the rigged elections and police and para-military weapons of the theocratic Islamic Republic. And there has been plenty of hoopla over the current American legislation to effect climate change, assumedly for the better. Added to that the crush of news about the struggle for an American national healthcare policy and a few tears in the direction of Michael Jackson and his seemingly tragic life and the political air appears to have little room for what is seen as “old” news. Still, I have this compelling need to offer this quick little reminder about those quirky little American wars that nevertheless still go blazing away in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (to speak nothing of the escalations in Pakistan but that are is not “our” war- yet).
The immediate purpose of this little reminder is that today, June 30, 2009, is the date that American (and allied, if there is such a thing anymore) troops are scheduled to withdraw from the major Iraqi cities and for the Iraqi security forces to take over. That said, the position of labor militants and other progressive forces must continue to be for immediate unconditional withdrawal of all American troops from that benighted country. That is the slogan we of the anti-imperialist left started off with almost seven years ago , and notwithstanding many liberal illusions in the good will of one Barack Obama, President of the United States, that remains our position until that task is accomplished. Oh, by the way, we might as well add for the sake of completeness- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan. There, I have been short and sweet today, but let us stay focused. More later.
Monday, June 29, 2009
*The Latest From "The Jena Six" Case
Click On Title To Link To Associated Press, June 27, 2009, Article On The Latest News On The Fate Of The Jena Six. As always we use the courts as best we can, when we can but I believe that without that massive mobilization of a couple of years ago the fate of the Jena Six in the Louisiana "justice" system might have been quite different. As it is the charges should have dropped long ago without any so-called deals as noted in the article.
**************
As background on this case I have reposted a guest commentary from the archives, dated February 3, 2008.
February is Black History Month
The following statement is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning the latest protest action in the fight for justice in Jena, Louisiana. Nothing need be added here. Send letters of support to the Jena Defense Committee P.O Box 2798, Jena La. 71342 and of protest to the LaSalle Parish (not county,remember this is Louisiana) District Attorney J. Reed Walters. Pronto.
Drop Charges Against Anti-Fascist Protestor
We print below a January 27 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Sparta-cist League.
The Partisan Defense Committee demands that the charges be dropped against William Winchester Jr., a supporter of the New Black Panther Party who was arrested in Jena, Louisiana, for demonstrating against a fascist provocation on January 21, Martin Luther King Day. Mr. Winchester was charged with battery of a police officer and resisting arrest.
The white supremacists, led by the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement, came to Jena armed, waving the Confederate flag of black chattel slavery and brandishing lynch-rope nooses. The race-terrorists staged their murderous threats under the protection of several hundred state, local and federal law enforcement officers, including deputies from other parishes, SWAT teams and police snipers stationed on roofs.
The fascist bands spewing their racist filth through the streets of Jena are part of a wave of racist provocations, many involving hanging nooses to terrorize black people, that have swept the U.S. after the September 20 demonstration in Jena. That day, as many as 50,000 overwhelmingly black people protested against Jim Crow "justice" and in defense of the Jena Six, black high school students framed up for defending themselves after months of racist attacks. Mychal Bell of the Jena Six is now in prison. Free Mychal Bell! Drop all charges against the Jena Six! Drop the charges against William Winchester Jr.! •
The following is an article of interest to the radical public and black liberation fighters on the demonstrations down in Jena, Louisiana in September 2007. This is taken from the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 899, dated September 28, 2007. I would only add that many of the political points made in the article are worthy of attention as we fight for the immediate goal of freedom for the Jena Six and the ultimate goal of victory in the black liberation struggle. And friends, that does not mean Obama as president, as significant as that may be in this deeply racist country.
Workers Vanguard No. 899 28 September 2007
Jena Six: Racist "Justice" U.S.A.
Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party! Finish the Civil War—For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Young Spartacus pages)
On September 20, as many as 50,000 protesters—overwhelmingly black and comprising workers, students, retirees and church groups—poured into the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana. Alerted by black radio and Internet networks, they came on buses from all over the South, from Detroit and Harlem and as far away as Los Angeles, to express their outrage at the Jim Crow "justice" meted out to six black Jena high school students. After months of racist insults and threats prompted by black students sitting under the "white tree," with racists putting hangman's nooses on the tree, five of the youth were charged with attempted murder following a schoolyard scuffle with a white student, while the sixth was charged as a juvenile (see "Outrage Over Jim Crow Justice in Louisiana," JFFNo. 896, 3 August). On campuses and workplaces across the country, the case of the Jena Six has touched a raw nerve among black people. One protester in Jena held up a sign reading, "There Would Be More of Us Here But So Many of Us Are in Jail."
The day after the protesters left, Jim Crow justice in Jena reasserted itself. Earlier, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, the only one of the six students who has been continuously imprisoned since the schoolyard fight, saw his aggravated assault and conspiracy charges thrown out because he had been tried as an adult. But outrageously, on September 21 he was denied bail. Bell remains incarcerated in a town in the central Louisiana pine woods that has been a stronghold for KKKer David Duke. The other five still await trial, although charges against four of them have been reduced. Hours after the Jena demonstration, two young whites, one an admitted Klansman, provocatively drove through the nearby city of Alexandria, threatening people who had returned from the protest by dragging two nooses from their pickup truck, which contained a rifle and brass knuckles. Free Mychal Bell now! Drop all the charges against the Jena Six!
"Jena justice" is not some aberration. In Georgia, black youth Genarlow Wilson is still in prison for having had consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. After a court reduced his sentence to time already served, prosecutors appealed the ruling, keeping him behind bars. In New York City, Sean Bell, a young black man celebrating his upcoming wedding, was cut down in a hail of 50 cop bullets last December, and six months later black and Latino high school students in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood were rounded up by cops as they tried to attend a friend's wake. The prisons, and the barbaric death rows within the prisons, are overflowing with black men in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Many of the protesters who poured into Jena appreciated the connection made by Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club comrades between the case of the Jena Six and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst racist atrocities in modern U.S. history. But Democratic politicians Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton, central leaders of the Jena protest, did not organize any significant protests over Katrina. The Katrina disaster could not be blamed solely on the criminal policies of the Bush administration but also indicted the Democratic Party, which for decades helped preside over the deterioration of the flood control system and ran the notoriously racist and corrupt New Orleans cops. A featured speaker on September 20 was New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who ordered the city's evacuation while abandoning those without cars—overwhelmingly black and poor—to the Katrina floodwaters. We wrote in a 4 September 2005 Spartacist League statement titled "New Orleans: Racist Atrocity" (WV No. 854,16 September 2005):
"This disaster has laid bare the class and race divisions in America. The logic of U.S. capitalism is that whites mainly lost property, blacks mainly lost lives. It is overwhelmingly black people, deemed 'expendable' by the rulers, who suffered and died by the thousands in this two-thirds black city.... This catastrophic destruction of lives and livelihoods underlines that the oppression of black people is rooted in the very bedrock of American capitalism and will not be ended short of a socialist revolution that rips power and the means of production from the greedy rulers and places them in the hands of the working people."
We look to the working class and its strategic black component as the social force that can overturn the capitalist order. With its hands on the means of production—the factories, mines, transportation systems—the working class produces the profits of the capitalist exploiters. We fight to build a workers party based on the perspective of revolutionary integrationism. While combatting racist segregation and state repression, we understand that black liberation can be achieved only through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. This program is counterposed to the liberal myth that black people—an oppressed race-color caste—can achieve equality within the confines of the capitalist profit system. It is also counterposed to black nationalism, which capitulates to and helps perpetuate the racist segregation fostered by this country's rulers and despairs of multiracial class struggle.
Liberal Misleaders
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose longtime role as "black leaders" has been to quell social unrest, came down to Jena to preach reliance on the same "justice" system that from the county sheriff on up is a machine of racial and class oppression. Sharpton called in Jena for "federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice," intoning that "our fathers in the 1960's had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing" (Associated Press, 20 September).
It is a lie that the federal government is a friend of black equality. Fifty years ago during the battle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent in troops to head off efforts by black people to defend themselves against racist mobs and KKK nightriders. Federal intervention into anti-racist and other social struggles has meant spying on and murderous repression of activists. President Bush, cynically claiming to be "saddened" by the events in Jena, noted that "the Justice Department and the FBI are monitoring the situation." We're sure they are—just like they "monitored" the Black Panther Party and thousands of other radicals, black and white, in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and New Left movements.
Under the FBI's Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds of others framed up. FBI "infiltrators" made up about 20 percent of Ku Klux Klan membership in the 1960s and were involved in bombings and murders, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in her car in 1965. The November 1979 Klan/Nazi massacre of five leftists and union officials in Greensboro, North Carolina, was aided by a government agent who helped train the killers and by a "former" FBI informant who rode shotgun in the fascists' motorcade of death.
A living symbol of the system of racist capitalist injustice today is the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and later a MOVE supporter and radical journalist who has been imprisoned on death row for a quarter century, framed up on false charges of killing a Philadelphia policeman in December 1981. From the time he was a 15-year-old leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in the late 1960s, Mumia was a target of COINTELPRO spying and harassment. The cops, prosecutors, bourgeois politicians and their media jackals have howled for Mumia's legal lynching because they see in him the spectre of black revolt.
The big-name black liberals who organized the Jena Six protest have done nothing at all comparable on behalf of Mumia. While Jena is a small Southern town, Philadelphia is a major Northern city long run by the Democratic Party machine. And it was the local Democrats who joined with the cops and prosecutors in putting Mumia on death row. The D.A. who prosecuted Mumia in 1982, Ed Rendell, is now the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. Since first taking up Mumia's cause two decades ago, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have urged all opponents of racist oppression to join the fight for his freedom and to abolish the racist death penalty. But we understand that this fight must be waged independently of the capitalist courts and political parties that conspired to railroad Mumia.
Democrats: The Other Party of Racist Capitalist Rule
What politicians like Sharpton, who admits that he wore a wire for the FBI in the 1980s, want above all else is to keep black people tied to the Democratic Party as the "lesser evil" to the Republicans, who openly appeal to the white racist vote. All the major GOP presidential candidates recently refused to appear in a debate at Baltimore's historically black Morgan State University. In an earlier calculated insult, all but one Republican candidate turned down the chance to debate on the Spanish-language Univision network. In his New York Times (24 August) column, liberal commentator Paul Krugman noted that the Republicans' "electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity." He pointed out that "Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination," despite his big-city social life and record on abortion, because he "comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who."
The impoverishment of the black populace is perpetuated by the American capitalist government—federal, state and city—whether run by Democrats or Republicans. It was the Clinton administration in the mid 1990s that axed the main federal welfare program, thereby condemning millions of women and children, disproportionately black, to destitution while further depressing wages at the low end of the labor market, where black workers are concentrated. Today in response to the Jena atrocity, Hillary Clinton has joined the call for an "investigation," while Barack Obama says he just wants "fairness" and claims it "isn't a matter of black and white." Tell that to the marchers who passed Confederate flags on the way out of Jena!
The bulk of the "socialist" left, which sows the illusion that the capitalist system can be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed, has offered no criticism of the Sharpton and Jackson leadership of the Jena protest. Typical are the eccentric Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who went to Jena with stickers to "Impeach Bush!"—their longstanding gimmick to promote the Democratic Party of racism and imperialist war. The RCP's Revolution has pumped out a lot of newsprint on Jena that includes some ritualistic denunciations of capitalism and white supremacy. But you won't hear from them that Jackson, Sharpton & Co. have repeatedly moved to steer anger over racist abuses into toothless "reforms" and bourgeois electoral politics.
MLK and the Failure of Liberal Reformism
There was a lot of talk at the Jena protest about the need for a "new civil rights movement." It's obvious to millions of oppressed black people that something needs to be done. The bipartisan "war on drugs" campaign has led to the mass incarceration of black as well as Latino youth. A decision by the Supreme Court this summer effectively put the last nail in the coffin of school integration. The mass of black people is forced to live in ghettos that are little more than rotting shells: no jobs, no health care, primary and high schools little more than prisons. In some inner cities, infant mortality rates approach Third World conditions.
The civil rights movement succeeded in eliminating legalized racial segregation (the Jim Crow system) in the South. That system had taken hold in the late 19th century after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the period of racial equality and black political empowerment that followed the smashing of the slavocracy in the Civil War. An important factor leading to the end of Jim Crow was that by the late 1950s legalized segregation had become an increasing embarrassment for the U.S. imperialist rulers in their Cold War with the Soviet Union, especially in the former colonial countries of Asia and Africa.
But the civil rights movement was defeated in the mid 1960s when it came North, where blacks already had the same formal democratic rights as whites but remained segregated at the bottom of society. For here it ran straight into the conditions of black impoverishment and oppression rooted in the basic structure of American capitalist society: mass unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality. These conditions could not be eradicated by Congress passing a new civil rights act.
However, the civil rights movement—in which the black masses courageously confronted the white-supremacist police states of the South—also had the possibility of developing into a working-class-centered struggle for black equality. Such a struggle was obstructed and sabotaged by Martin Luther King Jr. and the other black misleaders who tied the movement to the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
The main organization of young civil rights militants in the South was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in the early 1960s underwent a leftward radicalization. Through their own bitter experience, SNCC militants came to recognize that the Kennedy/Johnson White House was a lot closer to the racist Dixiecrats than it was to them. At the same time, they also came to recognize that the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, were a party of imperialist militarism, seeking to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and escalating the war in Vietnam in the name of anti-Communism.
Tensions between the young militants and King & Co. came to the surface during the 1963 March on Washington. The liberal leaders pressured then SNCC chairman John Lewis into deleting from his prepared speech the following passage: "We cannot depend on any political party for both the Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence." Subsequently, Lewis, like many other activists, came to terms with the racist capitalist order, becoming a Democratic Congressman.
To black people, King preached "non-violent resistance" in the face of racist police repression as well as attacks by the Klan. And when in the summer of 1965 blacks in the Watts district of Los Angeles rose up against police brutality, King, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, endorsed their bloody suppression by the L.A. cops and National Guard. King's support for the suppression of the Watts rebellion widely discredited him among young black militants who were already derisively calling him "De Lawd."
Our own political tendency emerged during this convulsive period. The Spartacist League originated as a left opposition, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), in the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). When the Southern civil rights struggles erupted in the late 1950s, the SWP was beginning to move away from the Trotskyist program, finally descending into reformism in 1965. The SWP leadership abstained from intervening in the mass struggles for democratic rights while acting as cheerleaders for both King and the black nationalists of the Nation of Islam.
The RT fought for the SWP to intervene into the civil rights movement based on a program of linking the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the working-class struggle against capitalist exploitation. Concretely, we called on civil rights militants to break with the Democratic Party and form a Freedom Labor Party. We called as well for a Southern organizing drive backed by the labor movement. Then as now, only on the basis of common class interests and struggle can the deep racial divide between black and white workers be overcome. After being expelled from the SWP, the early Spartacist League intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North, to the best of the ability of our very small forces.
Recoiling against the liberal reformism of King and identifying the labor movement with its bureaucratic misleaders, many SNCC and other militants turned toward black nationalism. Black nationalism or, more accurately, separatism is at bottom a doctrine of despair. This outlook accepts that the racist character of American society is unchangeable and that no significant section of the white populace can be won to the struggle for black equality. The best of the young black radicals of this period were represented by the Black Panther Party, which was destroyed largely through murderous state repression. Many Panthers subsequently returned to the fold of liberal reformism and the Democratic Party.
The Class-Struggle Road to Black Liberation
Black nationalism obscures the class divide in this society, denying the potential power that black workers have as a strategic component of the multiracial proletariat. Despite the destruction of many industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, whose rate of union membership is significantly higher than that of white workers, continue to be integrated into such industries as steel, auto, urban transit and longshore. The proletariat alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program and under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party, black workers will be the living link between the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses and the social power of the proletariat.
The two main obstacles preventing black workers from playing that historic role are the Democratic Party, especially its black component, and the trade-union bureaucracy, which chains workers to the capitalist Democrats. Beginning in the mid 1960s, the Republican Party positioned itself as the party of the "white backlash" while the Democrats moved to co-opt young black activists into the government bureaucracy. Black Democrats became mayors of major cities, where they acted as overseers of the ghetto masses and implemented the killing cuts in social welfare programs. One of those mayors, Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, ordered the firebombing of the MOVE commune in May 1985, killing eleven black men, women and children and destroying an entire black neighborhood in the process.
The failure of the trade-union misleadership to mobilize labor's power to combat the oppression of black people is a major factor underlying the decline of the union movement. This is nowhere clearer than in the South, where the legacy of Jim Crow racism has made it the main regional bastion of anti-labor reaction since the building of the integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. Nonetheless, black workers retain considerable social power alongside their white and Latino class brothers and sisters. The strike of 7,000 shipyard workers at Northrop Grumman, the world's largest naval shipbuilder, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, earlier this year demonstrated the potential power of the integrated labor movement, which under class-struggle leadership could spearhead a drive to organize the open shop South.
Organizing the region's working class, which now includes increasing numbers of immigrants, especially from Latin America, cannot be achieved on the basis of narrow business unionism. Labor needs a leadership which does not bow to this country's harsh anti-labor laws and which mobilizes unions to fight the systematic oppression of black people and to defend the rights of immigrants and all the oppressed. Black and working-class militants must stand for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Our perspective of revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. There will be no social revolution in this country without a united struggle of black, white and immigrant workers led by their multiracial workers party. As stated in the preamble to the program of the Labor Black Leagues, which are fraternally allied to the Spartacist League: "The civil rights movement, tied to pro-Democratic Party pressure politics and sold out by liberal reformism, failed to complete the unfinished business of the Civil War. We fight to win the entire working class, including white workers as well as the growing number of Latino and other immigrants, to the fight for black liberation, strategic to the American revolution."
**************
As background on this case I have reposted a guest commentary from the archives, dated February 3, 2008.
February is Black History Month
The following statement is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning the latest protest action in the fight for justice in Jena, Louisiana. Nothing need be added here. Send letters of support to the Jena Defense Committee P.O Box 2798, Jena La. 71342 and of protest to the LaSalle Parish (not county,remember this is Louisiana) District Attorney J. Reed Walters. Pronto.
Drop Charges Against Anti-Fascist Protestor
We print below a January 27 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Sparta-cist League.
The Partisan Defense Committee demands that the charges be dropped against William Winchester Jr., a supporter of the New Black Panther Party who was arrested in Jena, Louisiana, for demonstrating against a fascist provocation on January 21, Martin Luther King Day. Mr. Winchester was charged with battery of a police officer and resisting arrest.
The white supremacists, led by the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement, came to Jena armed, waving the Confederate flag of black chattel slavery and brandishing lynch-rope nooses. The race-terrorists staged their murderous threats under the protection of several hundred state, local and federal law enforcement officers, including deputies from other parishes, SWAT teams and police snipers stationed on roofs.
The fascist bands spewing their racist filth through the streets of Jena are part of a wave of racist provocations, many involving hanging nooses to terrorize black people, that have swept the U.S. after the September 20 demonstration in Jena. That day, as many as 50,000 overwhelmingly black people protested against Jim Crow "justice" and in defense of the Jena Six, black high school students framed up for defending themselves after months of racist attacks. Mychal Bell of the Jena Six is now in prison. Free Mychal Bell! Drop all charges against the Jena Six! Drop the charges against William Winchester Jr.! •
The following is an article of interest to the radical public and black liberation fighters on the demonstrations down in Jena, Louisiana in September 2007. This is taken from the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 899, dated September 28, 2007. I would only add that many of the political points made in the article are worthy of attention as we fight for the immediate goal of freedom for the Jena Six and the ultimate goal of victory in the black liberation struggle. And friends, that does not mean Obama as president, as significant as that may be in this deeply racist country.
Workers Vanguard No. 899 28 September 2007
Jena Six: Racist "Justice" U.S.A.
Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party! Finish the Civil War—For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Young Spartacus pages)
On September 20, as many as 50,000 protesters—overwhelmingly black and comprising workers, students, retirees and church groups—poured into the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana. Alerted by black radio and Internet networks, they came on buses from all over the South, from Detroit and Harlem and as far away as Los Angeles, to express their outrage at the Jim Crow "justice" meted out to six black Jena high school students. After months of racist insults and threats prompted by black students sitting under the "white tree," with racists putting hangman's nooses on the tree, five of the youth were charged with attempted murder following a schoolyard scuffle with a white student, while the sixth was charged as a juvenile (see "Outrage Over Jim Crow Justice in Louisiana," JFFNo. 896, 3 August). On campuses and workplaces across the country, the case of the Jena Six has touched a raw nerve among black people. One protester in Jena held up a sign reading, "There Would Be More of Us Here But So Many of Us Are in Jail."
The day after the protesters left, Jim Crow justice in Jena reasserted itself. Earlier, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, the only one of the six students who has been continuously imprisoned since the schoolyard fight, saw his aggravated assault and conspiracy charges thrown out because he had been tried as an adult. But outrageously, on September 21 he was denied bail. Bell remains incarcerated in a town in the central Louisiana pine woods that has been a stronghold for KKKer David Duke. The other five still await trial, although charges against four of them have been reduced. Hours after the Jena demonstration, two young whites, one an admitted Klansman, provocatively drove through the nearby city of Alexandria, threatening people who had returned from the protest by dragging two nooses from their pickup truck, which contained a rifle and brass knuckles. Free Mychal Bell now! Drop all the charges against the Jena Six!
"Jena justice" is not some aberration. In Georgia, black youth Genarlow Wilson is still in prison for having had consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. After a court reduced his sentence to time already served, prosecutors appealed the ruling, keeping him behind bars. In New York City, Sean Bell, a young black man celebrating his upcoming wedding, was cut down in a hail of 50 cop bullets last December, and six months later black and Latino high school students in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood were rounded up by cops as they tried to attend a friend's wake. The prisons, and the barbaric death rows within the prisons, are overflowing with black men in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Many of the protesters who poured into Jena appreciated the connection made by Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club comrades between the case of the Jena Six and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst racist atrocities in modern U.S. history. But Democratic politicians Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton, central leaders of the Jena protest, did not organize any significant protests over Katrina. The Katrina disaster could not be blamed solely on the criminal policies of the Bush administration but also indicted the Democratic Party, which for decades helped preside over the deterioration of the flood control system and ran the notoriously racist and corrupt New Orleans cops. A featured speaker on September 20 was New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who ordered the city's evacuation while abandoning those without cars—overwhelmingly black and poor—to the Katrina floodwaters. We wrote in a 4 September 2005 Spartacist League statement titled "New Orleans: Racist Atrocity" (WV No. 854,16 September 2005):
"This disaster has laid bare the class and race divisions in America. The logic of U.S. capitalism is that whites mainly lost property, blacks mainly lost lives. It is overwhelmingly black people, deemed 'expendable' by the rulers, who suffered and died by the thousands in this two-thirds black city.... This catastrophic destruction of lives and livelihoods underlines that the oppression of black people is rooted in the very bedrock of American capitalism and will not be ended short of a socialist revolution that rips power and the means of production from the greedy rulers and places them in the hands of the working people."
We look to the working class and its strategic black component as the social force that can overturn the capitalist order. With its hands on the means of production—the factories, mines, transportation systems—the working class produces the profits of the capitalist exploiters. We fight to build a workers party based on the perspective of revolutionary integrationism. While combatting racist segregation and state repression, we understand that black liberation can be achieved only through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. This program is counterposed to the liberal myth that black people—an oppressed race-color caste—can achieve equality within the confines of the capitalist profit system. It is also counterposed to black nationalism, which capitulates to and helps perpetuate the racist segregation fostered by this country's rulers and despairs of multiracial class struggle.
Liberal Misleaders
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose longtime role as "black leaders" has been to quell social unrest, came down to Jena to preach reliance on the same "justice" system that from the county sheriff on up is a machine of racial and class oppression. Sharpton called in Jena for "federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice," intoning that "our fathers in the 1960's had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing" (Associated Press, 20 September).
It is a lie that the federal government is a friend of black equality. Fifty years ago during the battle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent in troops to head off efforts by black people to defend themselves against racist mobs and KKK nightriders. Federal intervention into anti-racist and other social struggles has meant spying on and murderous repression of activists. President Bush, cynically claiming to be "saddened" by the events in Jena, noted that "the Justice Department and the FBI are monitoring the situation." We're sure they are—just like they "monitored" the Black Panther Party and thousands of other radicals, black and white, in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and New Left movements.
Under the FBI's Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds of others framed up. FBI "infiltrators" made up about 20 percent of Ku Klux Klan membership in the 1960s and were involved in bombings and murders, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in her car in 1965. The November 1979 Klan/Nazi massacre of five leftists and union officials in Greensboro, North Carolina, was aided by a government agent who helped train the killers and by a "former" FBI informant who rode shotgun in the fascists' motorcade of death.
A living symbol of the system of racist capitalist injustice today is the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and later a MOVE supporter and radical journalist who has been imprisoned on death row for a quarter century, framed up on false charges of killing a Philadelphia policeman in December 1981. From the time he was a 15-year-old leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in the late 1960s, Mumia was a target of COINTELPRO spying and harassment. The cops, prosecutors, bourgeois politicians and their media jackals have howled for Mumia's legal lynching because they see in him the spectre of black revolt.
The big-name black liberals who organized the Jena Six protest have done nothing at all comparable on behalf of Mumia. While Jena is a small Southern town, Philadelphia is a major Northern city long run by the Democratic Party machine. And it was the local Democrats who joined with the cops and prosecutors in putting Mumia on death row. The D.A. who prosecuted Mumia in 1982, Ed Rendell, is now the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. Since first taking up Mumia's cause two decades ago, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have urged all opponents of racist oppression to join the fight for his freedom and to abolish the racist death penalty. But we understand that this fight must be waged independently of the capitalist courts and political parties that conspired to railroad Mumia.
Democrats: The Other Party of Racist Capitalist Rule
What politicians like Sharpton, who admits that he wore a wire for the FBI in the 1980s, want above all else is to keep black people tied to the Democratic Party as the "lesser evil" to the Republicans, who openly appeal to the white racist vote. All the major GOP presidential candidates recently refused to appear in a debate at Baltimore's historically black Morgan State University. In an earlier calculated insult, all but one Republican candidate turned down the chance to debate on the Spanish-language Univision network. In his New York Times (24 August) column, liberal commentator Paul Krugman noted that the Republicans' "electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity." He pointed out that "Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination," despite his big-city social life and record on abortion, because he "comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who."
The impoverishment of the black populace is perpetuated by the American capitalist government—federal, state and city—whether run by Democrats or Republicans. It was the Clinton administration in the mid 1990s that axed the main federal welfare program, thereby condemning millions of women and children, disproportionately black, to destitution while further depressing wages at the low end of the labor market, where black workers are concentrated. Today in response to the Jena atrocity, Hillary Clinton has joined the call for an "investigation," while Barack Obama says he just wants "fairness" and claims it "isn't a matter of black and white." Tell that to the marchers who passed Confederate flags on the way out of Jena!
The bulk of the "socialist" left, which sows the illusion that the capitalist system can be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed, has offered no criticism of the Sharpton and Jackson leadership of the Jena protest. Typical are the eccentric Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who went to Jena with stickers to "Impeach Bush!"—their longstanding gimmick to promote the Democratic Party of racism and imperialist war. The RCP's Revolution has pumped out a lot of newsprint on Jena that includes some ritualistic denunciations of capitalism and white supremacy. But you won't hear from them that Jackson, Sharpton & Co. have repeatedly moved to steer anger over racist abuses into toothless "reforms" and bourgeois electoral politics.
MLK and the Failure of Liberal Reformism
There was a lot of talk at the Jena protest about the need for a "new civil rights movement." It's obvious to millions of oppressed black people that something needs to be done. The bipartisan "war on drugs" campaign has led to the mass incarceration of black as well as Latino youth. A decision by the Supreme Court this summer effectively put the last nail in the coffin of school integration. The mass of black people is forced to live in ghettos that are little more than rotting shells: no jobs, no health care, primary and high schools little more than prisons. In some inner cities, infant mortality rates approach Third World conditions.
The civil rights movement succeeded in eliminating legalized racial segregation (the Jim Crow system) in the South. That system had taken hold in the late 19th century after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the period of racial equality and black political empowerment that followed the smashing of the slavocracy in the Civil War. An important factor leading to the end of Jim Crow was that by the late 1950s legalized segregation had become an increasing embarrassment for the U.S. imperialist rulers in their Cold War with the Soviet Union, especially in the former colonial countries of Asia and Africa.
But the civil rights movement was defeated in the mid 1960s when it came North, where blacks already had the same formal democratic rights as whites but remained segregated at the bottom of society. For here it ran straight into the conditions of black impoverishment and oppression rooted in the basic structure of American capitalist society: mass unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality. These conditions could not be eradicated by Congress passing a new civil rights act.
However, the civil rights movement—in which the black masses courageously confronted the white-supremacist police states of the South—also had the possibility of developing into a working-class-centered struggle for black equality. Such a struggle was obstructed and sabotaged by Martin Luther King Jr. and the other black misleaders who tied the movement to the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
The main organization of young civil rights militants in the South was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in the early 1960s underwent a leftward radicalization. Through their own bitter experience, SNCC militants came to recognize that the Kennedy/Johnson White House was a lot closer to the racist Dixiecrats than it was to them. At the same time, they also came to recognize that the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, were a party of imperialist militarism, seeking to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and escalating the war in Vietnam in the name of anti-Communism.
Tensions between the young militants and King & Co. came to the surface during the 1963 March on Washington. The liberal leaders pressured then SNCC chairman John Lewis into deleting from his prepared speech the following passage: "We cannot depend on any political party for both the Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence." Subsequently, Lewis, like many other activists, came to terms with the racist capitalist order, becoming a Democratic Congressman.
To black people, King preached "non-violent resistance" in the face of racist police repression as well as attacks by the Klan. And when in the summer of 1965 blacks in the Watts district of Los Angeles rose up against police brutality, King, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, endorsed their bloody suppression by the L.A. cops and National Guard. King's support for the suppression of the Watts rebellion widely discredited him among young black militants who were already derisively calling him "De Lawd."
Our own political tendency emerged during this convulsive period. The Spartacist League originated as a left opposition, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), in the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). When the Southern civil rights struggles erupted in the late 1950s, the SWP was beginning to move away from the Trotskyist program, finally descending into reformism in 1965. The SWP leadership abstained from intervening in the mass struggles for democratic rights while acting as cheerleaders for both King and the black nationalists of the Nation of Islam.
The RT fought for the SWP to intervene into the civil rights movement based on a program of linking the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the working-class struggle against capitalist exploitation. Concretely, we called on civil rights militants to break with the Democratic Party and form a Freedom Labor Party. We called as well for a Southern organizing drive backed by the labor movement. Then as now, only on the basis of common class interests and struggle can the deep racial divide between black and white workers be overcome. After being expelled from the SWP, the early Spartacist League intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North, to the best of the ability of our very small forces.
Recoiling against the liberal reformism of King and identifying the labor movement with its bureaucratic misleaders, many SNCC and other militants turned toward black nationalism. Black nationalism or, more accurately, separatism is at bottom a doctrine of despair. This outlook accepts that the racist character of American society is unchangeable and that no significant section of the white populace can be won to the struggle for black equality. The best of the young black radicals of this period were represented by the Black Panther Party, which was destroyed largely through murderous state repression. Many Panthers subsequently returned to the fold of liberal reformism and the Democratic Party.
The Class-Struggle Road to Black Liberation
Black nationalism obscures the class divide in this society, denying the potential power that black workers have as a strategic component of the multiracial proletariat. Despite the destruction of many industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, whose rate of union membership is significantly higher than that of white workers, continue to be integrated into such industries as steel, auto, urban transit and longshore. The proletariat alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program and under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party, black workers will be the living link between the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses and the social power of the proletariat.
The two main obstacles preventing black workers from playing that historic role are the Democratic Party, especially its black component, and the trade-union bureaucracy, which chains workers to the capitalist Democrats. Beginning in the mid 1960s, the Republican Party positioned itself as the party of the "white backlash" while the Democrats moved to co-opt young black activists into the government bureaucracy. Black Democrats became mayors of major cities, where they acted as overseers of the ghetto masses and implemented the killing cuts in social welfare programs. One of those mayors, Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, ordered the firebombing of the MOVE commune in May 1985, killing eleven black men, women and children and destroying an entire black neighborhood in the process.
The failure of the trade-union misleadership to mobilize labor's power to combat the oppression of black people is a major factor underlying the decline of the union movement. This is nowhere clearer than in the South, where the legacy of Jim Crow racism has made it the main regional bastion of anti-labor reaction since the building of the integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. Nonetheless, black workers retain considerable social power alongside their white and Latino class brothers and sisters. The strike of 7,000 shipyard workers at Northrop Grumman, the world's largest naval shipbuilder, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, earlier this year demonstrated the potential power of the integrated labor movement, which under class-struggle leadership could spearhead a drive to organize the open shop South.
Organizing the region's working class, which now includes increasing numbers of immigrants, especially from Latin America, cannot be achieved on the basis of narrow business unionism. Labor needs a leadership which does not bow to this country's harsh anti-labor laws and which mobilizes unions to fight the systematic oppression of black people and to defend the rights of immigrants and all the oppressed. Black and working-class militants must stand for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Our perspective of revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. There will be no social revolution in this country without a united struggle of black, white and immigrant workers led by their multiracial workers party. As stated in the preamble to the program of the Labor Black Leagues, which are fraternally allied to the Spartacist League: "The civil rights movement, tied to pro-Democratic Party pressure politics and sold out by liberal reformism, failed to complete the unfinished business of the Civil War. We fight to win the entire working class, including white workers as well as the growing number of Latino and other immigrants, to the fight for black liberation, strategic to the American revolution."
*Solidarity- Defend The Iranian Protesters-U.S. Hands Off Iran!
Click On To Title To Link To Associated Press Article On The Latest Demonstrations In Iran. Information is sketchy, the motives of the protesters are varied but this we know- we stand with the people in the streets as they struggle for some form of democratic voice on this one. Needless to say though at the governmental level-Obama-U.S. Hands Off Iran!
*Guest Commentary-"The Future Of Same-Sex Marriage"- A "New York Review Of Books" Article By David Cole
Click On Title To Link To July 2, 2009 "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "The Same-Sex Future" By David Cole That Gives An Update On This Struggle And A Capsule Of The Various Positions On The Issue.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
*The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry On Harvey Milk.
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
(See "Honor Stonewall" headline on this date for the following article.)Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White
And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 effects by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet’’ ( as seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
(See "Honor Stonewall" headline on this date for the following article.)Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White
And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 effects by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet’’ ( as seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for "Communism and homosexuality".
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.
In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.
Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon
"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.
In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.
Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon
"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935
*Hollywood's "Harvey Milk" vs. The Other Milk Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Click on title to link to a left wing review of the Hollywood-produced film starring Oscar-winner Sean Penn by Amy Rath in the "Women And Revolution" of "Workers Vanguard".
Markin comment:
I have decided to let the comments below stand for my appreciation of the Hollywood production of "Milk" starring Sean Penn. Politically there is much more to learn from the "other" Milk film although "Milk" had some interesting points and Penn certainly earned his Oscar.
************
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
(See "Honor Stonewall" headline on this date for the following article.)Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White
And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 effects by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet’’ ( as seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
Markin comment:
I have decided to let the comments below stand for my appreciation of the Hollywood production of "Milk" starring Sean Penn. Politically there is much more to learn from the "other" Milk film although "Milk" had some interesting points and Penn certainly earned his Oscar.
************
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
(See "Honor Stonewall" headline on this date for the following article.)Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White
And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 effects by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet’’ ( as seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
*T For Texas- The Blues Of Lightnin' Hopkins
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Lightnin' Hopkins Doing A Couple Of Songs.
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Lightning Hopkins & The Blues Summit, Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Big Joe Williams, EMI-Capitol Records, 2001
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Lightning Hopkins & The Blues Summit, Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Big Joe Williams, EMI-Capitol Records, 2001
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
*T For Texas- The Blues Of Lightnin' Hopkins
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Lightnin' Hopkins Doing "Mojo Hand".
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Blue Lightning, Lightning Hopkins, Paula Records, 1995
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Blue Lightning, Lightning Hopkins, Paula Records, 1995
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
*T For Texas- The Blues Of Lightnin' Hopkins
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Lightnin' Hopkins Doing "Goin' Down Slow".
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Free Form Patterns, Lightning Hopkins, Fuel 2000 Records, 2003
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Free Form Patterns, Lightning Hopkins, Fuel 2000 Records, 2003
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
*T For Texas- The Blues Of Lightnin' Hopkins
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Lightnin' Hopkins Doing "Baby Please Don't Go".
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Lightnin'!, Lightning Hopkins, Arhoolie Records, 1993
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Lightnin'!, Lightning Hopkins, Arhoolie Records, 1993
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
*T For Texas- The Blues Of Lightnin' Hopkins
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Lightnin' Hopkins Doing "Lonesome Road".
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Lightnin'!, Lightning Hopkins, Arhoolie Records, 1993
Free Form Patterns, Lightning Hopkins, Fuel 2000 Records, 2003
Blue Lightning, Lightning Hopkins, Paula Records, 1995
Lightning Hopkins & The Blues Summit, Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Big Joe Williams, EMI-Capitol Records, 2001
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
If the blues is synonymous with the black struggle to get by day to day, to make ends meet and to make it to Saturday night and some relieve then the very big locale of Texas and its harsh hard scrabble life and strict Jim Crow laws hardly seems out of place as a key blues outpost. From the days, in the 1920's and 1930's, of Blind Lemon Jefferson working the streets of rural small town Texas, cup in hand, up to the artist under review, Lightning Hopkins, working the small black clubs and "juke joints" of the cities (like Houston) and beyond to the sounds of blues revivalists like Stevie Ray Vaughn and his brother there has been more than enough misery to create a separate Texas blues tradition.
Moreover, Brother Hopkins brings a distinctive guitar pick of his own to the "dance". He is famous, above all, for what is called the E shuffle sound as he works the guitar to create a sound that is a little "happier" than the forlorn one of the Delta or the "amped up" one of Chicago. I, unfortunately, did not get a chance to hears Lightning live until late in his career in the early 1970's when he had lost a little of his fine-toned edge. One can recapture some of that though through some of these earlier recordings from a tie when he was in full blown Lightning form. Listen up if you want to learn a different way to run a guitar from that of Muddy Waters, Bukka White, B.B. King or, for that matter, Eric Clapton
Needless to say Lightning had covered most of the known blues classics of his time as well as his own material. The borderlines of what is one's own material and what one has reworked from the blues pool is not always clear but you need to hear, for starters, "Mojo Hand", "Hello Central", "Little Girl" and "Rock Me Baby" to get a feel for his sound. Add on such classics as "Wig Wearing Woman", "Lonesome Dog Blues" (with an eerie dog bark included free), "Back Door Friend" and you are ready to become an aficionado. Throw in the talking blues-styled "Mr. Charlie", "Baby Child" and "Cooking Done" for good measure. Finally, team up Lightning with the likes of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the amazing Big Joe Williams (especially on Hopkins' "Ain't Nothing Like Whiskey" and "Chain Gang Blues") at the famous 1960"blues summit" and you are ready for the graduate course.
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
Back Door Friend
What you gonna do with a woman, yeah, when she got a
back do' friend
What are you gonna do with a woman, yes, when she got a back do' friend?
She just prayin' for you to move out, so her back do' friend can move in
Yes, it's hard to love a woman, yes, you know she got a back do' friend
Yes, it's hard to love a woman, oh Lord, yes, you know she got a back do' friend
Yes, when she prayin' for you to move out, so her back do' friend can move in
Yeah, you know I bought that woman a diamond ring, I thought that she would change
I went home one morn' and I caught her doin', whoa, that same old thing
Now what you gonna do with a mad woman, oh, when she got a back do' friend
When she prayin' all the time for you to move out, so her back do' friend, he can move in
__________
Note: this song is also known under the title "Letter To My (Back Door Friend)" on Charly Blues Masterworks Vol. 8, recording of 1963, Houston
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
Coffee Blues
Mama got mad at papa 'cause he didn't bring no coffee home
Mama got mad at papa 'cause he didn't bring no coffee home
She begin to wonder what is going on wrong
Papa said, "Mama, I ain't mad with you, now, don't you get mad with me
Baby, I ain't mad with you, now, don't you get mad with me"
Papa must have been teasing mama 'cause she said, "I ain't mad with you"
Papa must have been teasing mama 'cause she said, "I ain't mad with you"
She said, "Everything's all right; don't make no difference what you do"
(Spoken: You know papa got good with mama somehow)
And I was crying for bread, and yes, I,
baby, I was crying for bread; and these are the words I said
(Spoken: Now look at mama, just trying to shout)
It was early one evening but papa came home late at night
It was early one evening but papa came home late at night
That's when mama was mad and her and papa began to fight
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
Little School Girl
Little school girl,
let me tote
your books to school today
Please, little school girl,
let me tote your books to school today
She said, "I says you's a bad boy,
mama said please keep you away"
(spoken: That's what she said about Lightnin')
Mama want to know what you're doin',
yes, after you get out of her sight
She said "If I let you tote my books,
still I know, Sam, that ain't right"
When I get back home with my mother and dad,
that's where I might have a fight
I told the school teacher,
little school girl carryin' too heavy a load
Yes, I told that school teacher,
little girl was carryin' too heavy a load
She say, "You better get your big, bare feets,
Lightnin', make it down the road"
(spoken: That little school girl was all right in her place,
but she got me, so I walked away and I say...)
Good mornin', little school girl,
how have you been today?
Good mornin' little school girl,
how have you been today?
I say I'll tote your books, I'll tote your books,
darlin', 'cause you are goin' my way
__________
Note 1: tote, to carry by hand.
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
One Kind Favor I Ask Of You
There's one kind favor I'll ask of you
There's one kind favor I'll ask of you
There's one kind favor I'll ask of you
See that my love will come thru
I was down last night on my bended knee
I was down last night on my bended knee
I was down last night on my bended knee
No people in the world seems to care for me
That's all I know darlin' what to do
That's all I know darlin' what to do
That's all I know darlin' what to do
I wouldn't be here worryin' if it hadn't been for you
Wish I had-a died when I was young
Wish I had-a died when I was young
Wish I had-a died when I was young
Wouldn't be here today with my head hung
DVD/CD Reviews
This review has been used to cover several Lightning Hopkins CDs and a DVD review of an instructional film, "The Guitar Of Lightnin' Hopkins", directed and taught by Ernie Hopkins, Stephan Grossman Studio Workshop, 2004, on learning his guitar style. I might add that this film makes abundantly clear that learning Lightning's eccentric style is definitely not for beginners. Go to the Willie Dixon song book for that.
Lightnin'!, Lightning Hopkins, Arhoolie Records, 1993
Free Form Patterns, Lightning Hopkins, Fuel 2000 Records, 2003
Blue Lightning, Lightning Hopkins, Paula Records, 1995
Lightning Hopkins & The Blues Summit, Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Big Joe Williams, EMI-Capitol Records, 2001
I have spilled plenty of ink in this space tracing the main line of the blues from its acoustic origins down in the plantation South up river through the way station of Memphis and then to the electric "Mecca of Chicago. Along the way I have occasionally mentioned some of the other branches of the blues line like the North Carolina pick. I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other important branches of the blues expansion, especially in the post World II period such as the West Coast blues and, as will be noted here, Texas blues.
If the blues is synonymous with the black struggle to get by day to day, to make ends meet and to make it to Saturday night and some relieve then the very big locale of Texas and its harsh hard scrabble life and strict Jim Crow laws hardly seems out of place as a key blues outpost. From the days, in the 1920's and 1930's, of Blind Lemon Jefferson working the streets of rural small town Texas, cup in hand, up to the artist under review, Lightning Hopkins, working the small black clubs and "juke joints" of the cities (like Houston) and beyond to the sounds of blues revivalists like Stevie Ray Vaughn and his brother there has been more than enough misery to create a separate Texas blues tradition.
Moreover, Brother Hopkins brings a distinctive guitar pick of his own to the "dance". He is famous, above all, for what is called the E shuffle sound as he works the guitar to create a sound that is a little "happier" than the forlorn one of the Delta or the "amped up" one of Chicago. I, unfortunately, did not get a chance to hears Lightning live until late in his career in the early 1970's when he had lost a little of his fine-toned edge. One can recapture some of that though through some of these earlier recordings from a tie when he was in full blown Lightning form. Listen up if you want to learn a different way to run a guitar from that of Muddy Waters, Bukka White, B.B. King or, for that matter, Eric Clapton
Needless to say Lightning had covered most of the known blues classics of his time as well as his own material. The borderlines of what is one's own material and what one has reworked from the blues pool is not always clear but you need to hear, for starters, "Mojo Hand", "Hello Central", "Little Girl" and "Rock Me Baby" to get a feel for his sound. Add on such classics as "Wig Wearing Woman", "Lonesome Dog Blues" (with an eerie dog bark included free), "Back Door Friend" and you are ready to become an aficionado. Throw in the talking blues-styled "Mr. Charlie", "Baby Child" and "Cooking Done" for good measure. Finally, team up Lightning with the likes of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the amazing Big Joe Williams (especially on Hopkins' "Ain't Nothing Like Whiskey" and "Chain Gang Blues") at the famous 1960"blues summit" and you are ready for the graduate course.
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
Back Door Friend
What you gonna do with a woman, yeah, when she got a
back do' friend
What are you gonna do with a woman, yes, when she got a back do' friend?
She just prayin' for you to move out, so her back do' friend can move in
Yes, it's hard to love a woman, yes, you know she got a back do' friend
Yes, it's hard to love a woman, oh Lord, yes, you know she got a back do' friend
Yes, when she prayin' for you to move out, so her back do' friend can move in
Yeah, you know I bought that woman a diamond ring, I thought that she would change
I went home one morn' and I caught her doin', whoa, that same old thing
Now what you gonna do with a mad woman, oh, when she got a back do' friend
When she prayin' all the time for you to move out, so her back do' friend, he can move in
__________
Note: this song is also known under the title "Letter To My (Back Door Friend)" on Charly Blues Masterworks Vol. 8, recording of 1963, Houston
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
Coffee Blues
Mama got mad at papa 'cause he didn't bring no coffee home
Mama got mad at papa 'cause he didn't bring no coffee home
She begin to wonder what is going on wrong
Papa said, "Mama, I ain't mad with you, now, don't you get mad with me
Baby, I ain't mad with you, now, don't you get mad with me"
Papa must have been teasing mama 'cause she said, "I ain't mad with you"
Papa must have been teasing mama 'cause she said, "I ain't mad with you"
She said, "Everything's all right; don't make no difference what you do"
(Spoken: You know papa got good with mama somehow)
And I was crying for bread, and yes, I,
baby, I was crying for bread; and these are the words I said
(Spoken: Now look at mama, just trying to shout)
It was early one evening but papa came home late at night
It was early one evening but papa came home late at night
That's when mama was mad and her and papa began to fight
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
Little School Girl
Little school girl,
let me tote
your books to school today
Please, little school girl,
let me tote your books to school today
She said, "I says you's a bad boy,
mama said please keep you away"
(spoken: That's what she said about Lightnin')
Mama want to know what you're doin',
yes, after you get out of her sight
She said "If I let you tote my books,
still I know, Sam, that ain't right"
When I get back home with my mother and dad,
that's where I might have a fight
I told the school teacher,
little school girl carryin' too heavy a load
Yes, I told that school teacher,
little girl was carryin' too heavy a load
She say, "You better get your big, bare feets,
Lightnin', make it down the road"
(spoken: That little school girl was all right in her place,
but she got me, so I walked away and I say...)
Good mornin', little school girl,
how have you been today?
Good mornin' little school girl,
how have you been today?
I say I'll tote your books, I'll tote your books,
darlin', 'cause you are goin' my way
__________
Note 1: tote, to carry by hand.
Blues Lyrics - Lightnin' Hopkins
One Kind Favor I Ask Of You
There's one kind favor I'll ask of you
There's one kind favor I'll ask of you
There's one kind favor I'll ask of you
See that my love will come thru
I was down last night on my bended knee
I was down last night on my bended knee
I was down last night on my bended knee
No people in the world seems to care for me
That's all I know darlin' what to do
That's all I know darlin' what to do
That's all I know darlin' what to do
I wouldn't be here worryin' if it hadn't been for you
Wish I had-a died when I was young
Wish I had-a died when I was young
Wish I had-a died when I was young
Wouldn't be here today with my head hung
Friday, June 26, 2009
*Bob Dylan's Bootleg Legacy- "To Be Young Was Very Heaven"- The 1964 Concert At The Philharmonic Hall
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Bob Dylan Doing "Gates Of Eden".
CD REVIEW
The 1964 Dylan At The Philharmonic Concert, Bootleg Series Volume 6, Sony Records, 2004
As of late I have been railing against various secondary Bob Dylan materials that are mainly of historical interest. In those cases I was describing my reactions to a two-disc set "The Basement Tapes" of about twenty songs and another five volume set entitled "The `Genuine" Basement Tapes of about one hundred songs both done with The Band in 1967 while he was "hiding" out in rural New York after his motorcycle accident. I dubbed both items as strictly for aficionados. I also noted that I was less than enamored of the virtual cottage industry that has grown up around various bootleg, basement, cellar, barn, attic or other odd versions of Dylan's work, electric or acoustic. This archival material is nice for folk, rock and cultural historians but I would argue that Mr. Bob Dylan's usually well-produced mainline albums are after over forty years more than enough to listen to without having to get into the minutia of his career. And, moreover, somehow left to feel that one has missed something without this other more esoteric material in one's collection. Having said that, I am now have to eat a little crow and recommend one bootleg volume that is a notch above the others- the famous October 1964 Philharmonic Concert.
Of course this concert falls into the above-mentioned categories of being for aficionados and music historians. But this one also, unlike some others in these series, gives a glance at what Bob Dylan was like as a performer as he was rising to the top of the folk world before the old electric/acoustic controversy fouled the air. I would draw the reader's attention to a sharp contrast between carefree, light-hearted stage presence and response to his audience here and the later 1966 Prince Albert Royal Hall Concert (Bootleg Volume 4) where he is on the defensive with his British audience and at the end of it practically ignores that audience as a result of their negative response to his going `electric'. I would also note the distant and mumbled answers of his interview style noted in Martin Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home" of a few years ago. Here, though add his duos on Disc Two with his `paramour', folk queen Joan Baez, and the mixture is practically irresistible.
Again, virtually all the material in this set is available in more polished and technically proficient studio performances and if one has to choose, or is a Dylan rookie, then that is the place to look for his copies of his work. However, for those of us who are aficionados (Hey, I never said I wasn't, did I?) then here are some things to look for: "Gates Of Eden"; "Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall"; "It All Right, Mama" (remember that classic line "even the President must sometimes have to stand naked" as we enter the Obamian `new age'); and "Mr. Tambourine Man". Some of the more topical songs of the time (part of the true folk tradition and what keeps this genre moving forward) like "Talking World War III Blues" and "John Birch Blues" will require a translator or a click to Wikipedia to 'get' the references in those pieces. So do a little homework. That's okay here.
BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children
And his cabin fallin' down
You looked for work and money
And you walked a rugged mile
You looked for work and money
And you walked a rugged mile
Your children are so hungry
That they don't know how to smile
Your baby's eyes look crazy
They're a-tuggin' at your sleeve
Your baby's eyes look crazy
They're a-tuggin' at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why
With every breath you breathe
The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare
If there's anyone that knows
Is there anyone that cares?
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
Your empty pockets tell yuh
That you ain't a-got no friend
Your babies are crying louder
It's pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder now
It's pounding on your brain
Your wife's screams are stabbin' you
Like the dirty drivin' rain
Your grass it is turning black
There's no water in your well
Your grass is turning black
There's no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar
On seven shotgun shells
Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That's hangin' on the wall
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can't seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can't seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That you're holdin' in your hand
There's seven breezes a-blowin'
All around the cabin door
There's seven breezes a-blowin'
All around the cabin door
Seven shots ring out
Like the ocean's pounding roar
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born
DON'T THINK TWICE, IT'S ALL RIGHT
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don't know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on
Don't think twice, it's all right
It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right
I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right
GATES OF EDEN
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden
The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden
With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden
Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden
The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what's real and what is not
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden
The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
A HARD RAIN'S A-GONNA FALL
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony,
I met a white man who walked a black dog,
I met a young woman whose body was burning,
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow,
I met one man who was wounded in love,
I met another man who was wounded with hatred,
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
TALKIN' JOHN BIRCH PARANOID BLUES
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1970, 1973 Special Rider Music
Well, I was feelin' sad and feelin' blue,
I didn't know what in the world I was gonna do,
Them Communists they wus comin' around,
They wus in the air,
They wus on the ground.
They wouldn't gimme no peace. . .
So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society,
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin' down the road.
Yee-hoo, I'm a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!
Now we all agree with Hitlers' views,
Although he killed six million Jews.
It don't matter too much that he was a Fascist,
At least you can't say he was a Communist!
That's to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria.
Well, I wus lookin' everywhere for them gol-darned Reds.
I got up in the mornin' 'n' looked under my bed,
Looked in the sink, behind the door,
Looked in the glove compartment of my car.
Couldn't find 'em . . .
I wus lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere,
I wus lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair.
I looked way up my chimney hole,
I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.
They got away . . .
Well, I wus sittin' home alone an' started to sweat,
Figured they wus in my T.V. set.
Peeked behind the picture frame,
Got a shock from my feet, hittin' right up in the brain.
Them Reds caused it!
I know they did . . . them hard-core ones.
Well, I quit my job so I could work alone,
Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes.
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!
That ol' Betty Ross . . .
Well, I investigated all the books in the library,
Ninety percent of 'em gotta be burned away.
I investigated all the people that I knowed,
Ninety-eight percent of them gotta go.
The other two percent are fellow Birchers . . . just like me.
Now Eisenhower, he's a Russian spy,
Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.
To my knowledge there's just one man
That's really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus.
Well, I fin'ly started thinkin' straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
TALKIN' WORLD WAR III BLUES
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963, 1966 Warner Bros Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
Some time ago a crazy dream came to me,
I dreamt I was walkin' into World War Three,
I went to the doctor the very next day
To see what kinda words he could say.
He said it was a bad dream.
I wouldn't worry 'bout it none, though,
They were my own dreams and they're only in my head.
I said, "Hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain."
He said, "Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane,"
He grabbed my arm, I said "Ouch!"
As I landed on the psychiatric couch,
He said, "Tell me about it."
Well, the whole thing started at 3 o'clock fast,
It was all over by quarter past.
I was down in the sewer with some little lover
When I peeked out from a manhole cover
Wondering who turned the lights on.
Well, I got up and walked around
And up and down the lonesome town.
I stood a-wondering which way to go,
I lit a cigarette on a parking meter
And walked on down the road.
It was a normal day.
Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell
And I leaned my head and I gave a yell,
"Give me a string bean, I'm a hungry man."
A shotgun fired and away I ran.
I don't blame them too much though,
I know I look funny.
Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand
I seen a man, I said, "Howdy friend,
I guess there's just us two."
He screamed a bit and away he flew.
Thought I was a Communist.
Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave,
"Let's go and play Adam and Eve."
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin'
When she said, "Hey man, you crazy or sumpin',
You see what happened last time they started."
Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown
And there was nobody aroun',
I got into the driver's seat
And I drove down 42nd Street
In my Cadillac.
Good car to drive after a war.
Well, I remember seein' some ad,
So I turned on my Conelrad.
But I didn't pay my Con Ed bill,
So the radio didn't work so well.
Turned on my record playerÑ
It was Rock-A-Day, Johnny singin',
"Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa,
Our Loves Are Gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah."
I was feelin' kinda lonesome and blue,
I needed somebody to talk to.
So I called up the operator of time
Just to hear a voice of some kind.
"When you hear the beep
It will be three o'clock,"
She said that for over an hour
And I hung it up.
Well, the doctor interrupted me just about then,
Sayin, "Hey I've been havin' the same old dreams,
But mine was a little different you see.
I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me.
I didn't see you around."
Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.
Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all of the people canÕt be right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"
I said that.
CD REVIEW
The 1964 Dylan At The Philharmonic Concert, Bootleg Series Volume 6, Sony Records, 2004
As of late I have been railing against various secondary Bob Dylan materials that are mainly of historical interest. In those cases I was describing my reactions to a two-disc set "The Basement Tapes" of about twenty songs and another five volume set entitled "The `Genuine" Basement Tapes of about one hundred songs both done with The Band in 1967 while he was "hiding" out in rural New York after his motorcycle accident. I dubbed both items as strictly for aficionados. I also noted that I was less than enamored of the virtual cottage industry that has grown up around various bootleg, basement, cellar, barn, attic or other odd versions of Dylan's work, electric or acoustic. This archival material is nice for folk, rock and cultural historians but I would argue that Mr. Bob Dylan's usually well-produced mainline albums are after over forty years more than enough to listen to without having to get into the minutia of his career. And, moreover, somehow left to feel that one has missed something without this other more esoteric material in one's collection. Having said that, I am now have to eat a little crow and recommend one bootleg volume that is a notch above the others- the famous October 1964 Philharmonic Concert.
Of course this concert falls into the above-mentioned categories of being for aficionados and music historians. But this one also, unlike some others in these series, gives a glance at what Bob Dylan was like as a performer as he was rising to the top of the folk world before the old electric/acoustic controversy fouled the air. I would draw the reader's attention to a sharp contrast between carefree, light-hearted stage presence and response to his audience here and the later 1966 Prince Albert Royal Hall Concert (Bootleg Volume 4) where he is on the defensive with his British audience and at the end of it practically ignores that audience as a result of their negative response to his going `electric'. I would also note the distant and mumbled answers of his interview style noted in Martin Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home" of a few years ago. Here, though add his duos on Disc Two with his `paramour', folk queen Joan Baez, and the mixture is practically irresistible.
Again, virtually all the material in this set is available in more polished and technically proficient studio performances and if one has to choose, or is a Dylan rookie, then that is the place to look for his copies of his work. However, for those of us who are aficionados (Hey, I never said I wasn't, did I?) then here are some things to look for: "Gates Of Eden"; "Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall"; "It All Right, Mama" (remember that classic line "even the President must sometimes have to stand naked" as we enter the Obamian `new age'); and "Mr. Tambourine Man". Some of the more topical songs of the time (part of the true folk tradition and what keeps this genre moving forward) like "Talking World War III Blues" and "John Birch Blues" will require a translator or a click to Wikipedia to 'get' the references in those pieces. So do a little homework. That's okay here.
BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children
And his cabin fallin' down
You looked for work and money
And you walked a rugged mile
You looked for work and money
And you walked a rugged mile
Your children are so hungry
That they don't know how to smile
Your baby's eyes look crazy
They're a-tuggin' at your sleeve
Your baby's eyes look crazy
They're a-tuggin' at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why
With every breath you breathe
The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare
If there's anyone that knows
Is there anyone that cares?
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
Your empty pockets tell yuh
That you ain't a-got no friend
Your babies are crying louder
It's pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder now
It's pounding on your brain
Your wife's screams are stabbin' you
Like the dirty drivin' rain
Your grass it is turning black
There's no water in your well
Your grass is turning black
There's no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar
On seven shotgun shells
Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That's hangin' on the wall
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can't seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can't seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That you're holdin' in your hand
There's seven breezes a-blowin'
All around the cabin door
There's seven breezes a-blowin'
All around the cabin door
Seven shots ring out
Like the ocean's pounding roar
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born
DON'T THINK TWICE, IT'S ALL RIGHT
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don't know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on
Don't think twice, it's all right
It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right
I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right
GATES OF EDEN
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden
The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden
With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden
Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden
The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what's real and what is not
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden
The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
A HARD RAIN'S A-GONNA FALL
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony,
I met a white man who walked a black dog,
I met a young woman whose body was burning,
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow,
I met one man who was wounded in love,
I met another man who was wounded with hatred,
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
TALKIN' JOHN BIRCH PARANOID BLUES
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1970, 1973 Special Rider Music
Well, I was feelin' sad and feelin' blue,
I didn't know what in the world I was gonna do,
Them Communists they wus comin' around,
They wus in the air,
They wus on the ground.
They wouldn't gimme no peace. . .
So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society,
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin' down the road.
Yee-hoo, I'm a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!
Now we all agree with Hitlers' views,
Although he killed six million Jews.
It don't matter too much that he was a Fascist,
At least you can't say he was a Communist!
That's to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria.
Well, I wus lookin' everywhere for them gol-darned Reds.
I got up in the mornin' 'n' looked under my bed,
Looked in the sink, behind the door,
Looked in the glove compartment of my car.
Couldn't find 'em . . .
I wus lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere,
I wus lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair.
I looked way up my chimney hole,
I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.
They got away . . .
Well, I wus sittin' home alone an' started to sweat,
Figured they wus in my T.V. set.
Peeked behind the picture frame,
Got a shock from my feet, hittin' right up in the brain.
Them Reds caused it!
I know they did . . . them hard-core ones.
Well, I quit my job so I could work alone,
Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes.
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!
That ol' Betty Ross . . .
Well, I investigated all the books in the library,
Ninety percent of 'em gotta be burned away.
I investigated all the people that I knowed,
Ninety-eight percent of them gotta go.
The other two percent are fellow Birchers . . . just like me.
Now Eisenhower, he's a Russian spy,
Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.
To my knowledge there's just one man
That's really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus.
Well, I fin'ly started thinkin' straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
TALKIN' WORLD WAR III BLUES
Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963, 1966 Warner Bros Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
Some time ago a crazy dream came to me,
I dreamt I was walkin' into World War Three,
I went to the doctor the very next day
To see what kinda words he could say.
He said it was a bad dream.
I wouldn't worry 'bout it none, though,
They were my own dreams and they're only in my head.
I said, "Hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain."
He said, "Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane,"
He grabbed my arm, I said "Ouch!"
As I landed on the psychiatric couch,
He said, "Tell me about it."
Well, the whole thing started at 3 o'clock fast,
It was all over by quarter past.
I was down in the sewer with some little lover
When I peeked out from a manhole cover
Wondering who turned the lights on.
Well, I got up and walked around
And up and down the lonesome town.
I stood a-wondering which way to go,
I lit a cigarette on a parking meter
And walked on down the road.
It was a normal day.
Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell
And I leaned my head and I gave a yell,
"Give me a string bean, I'm a hungry man."
A shotgun fired and away I ran.
I don't blame them too much though,
I know I look funny.
Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand
I seen a man, I said, "Howdy friend,
I guess there's just us two."
He screamed a bit and away he flew.
Thought I was a Communist.
Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave,
"Let's go and play Adam and Eve."
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin'
When she said, "Hey man, you crazy or sumpin',
You see what happened last time they started."
Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown
And there was nobody aroun',
I got into the driver's seat
And I drove down 42nd Street
In my Cadillac.
Good car to drive after a war.
Well, I remember seein' some ad,
So I turned on my Conelrad.
But I didn't pay my Con Ed bill,
So the radio didn't work so well.
Turned on my record playerÑ
It was Rock-A-Day, Johnny singin',
"Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa,
Our Loves Are Gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah."
I was feelin' kinda lonesome and blue,
I needed somebody to talk to.
So I called up the operator of time
Just to hear a voice of some kind.
"When you hear the beep
It will be three o'clock,"
She said that for over an hour
And I hung it up.
Well, the doctor interrupted me just about then,
Sayin, "Hey I've been havin' the same old dreams,
But mine was a little different you see.
I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me.
I didn't see you around."
Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.
Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all of the people canÕt be right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"
I said that.
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