Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails?

Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails?

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Every hobo, tramp, and bum and there are social distinctions with the hobo, “the kings and queens of the transient peoples,” merely a migrant or walking through the land rucksack on the back day laborer-type worker, what Oswald Spengler and Jack Kerouac called the fellahin, the outcasts, who has not forgotten the dignity of labor, just not for him (or occasionally her) the nine to five grind and such brethren can be found out back in many a restaurant through the land especially diners and truck shop eateries “diving for pearls” as dishwashers. Every hobo has some problem, usually some Phoebe Snow problem, a woman problem, that forced him or her on the road (I don’t know what it would be for the distaff side so call him Jack Snow, any other sexual combination more acceptable today although definitely not unknown in the male-heavy “jungle camps” along the transcontinental railroad lines). But fear of work is not what drove the person out on to the roads.

See that royalty, the hobo, and his or her ability to work is why the Industrial Worker of the World (IWW, Wobblies, moniker origin unknown so Wobblies) went into the jungle camps (and gin mills too) in order to recruit labor fighters against the bosses when the deal went down, particularly in the West (although more famously in the great Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike of 1912. Of course that transient work habit was also the down side when it came to defending the unions over the long hauler. As for the other two, the tramp who only worked when forced to like on some thirty day county jailhouse for vagrancy gig or some Salvation Army work program to keep the body and soul together for a few days and the bum, Jesus, the bum wouldn’t work if he was Rockefeller himself, the dregs, winos, the crippled up, and the dumb to put the matter plainly in the old- fashioned parlance.   

Now that you are all caught up on the differences, the “class differences,” between each cohort recognized among themselves, oh how recognized, and subject to fierce dispute including some faux fists, if not quite so definitely by rump sociologists who lump them all together but that is a story for another day. What they do have in common since they are out in the great outdoors more than the rest of us gentile folk is that they to a person have seen starlight on the rails. Yeah, had their fill of train smoke and dreams. Now all these sullen subtle distinctions among the brethren I probably would have not been able to draw in my youth when I would have lumped the lot together as collective losers and riff-raff, before I hit the hitchhike road heading west at one time in search of the blue-pink great American West out there somewhere. I had on one more than one occasion along with the late Peter Paul Markin who led the way among the North Adamsville corner boys on that trail been forced to stop along a railroad trestle “jungle camp,” under a cardboard city bridge, or out in the arroyos if you got far enough west to live for a few days and rest up for the road further west.

The hobos of the “jungle” were princes among men (there was no room for women then in such a male-dominated society, not along the jungle although at the missions and Sallys, Salvation Army Harbor-lights, that might be a different story) as long as you did not ask too many damn questions. Shared olio stews, cigarettes, cheap rotgut wine, Thunderbird or Ripple whichever was cheapest after cadging the day’s collective pennies together. Later, after the big dream American West busted me up when my “wanting habits” (getting many worldly goods off easy street paid for by working the drug trade down south of the border along with Markin before he became the late Markin face down in some dusty Mexican bracero fellahin town when a drug deal he was trying to finagle caught him short, two slugs to the head short) built up from the edges of that sullen youth got the better of me and my addictions placed me out in that same “jungle” for keeps for a while that distinction got re-enforced.  

But hobo, bum or tramp each had found him or herself (mainly hims though like I said out on the “jungle” roads) flat up against some railroad siding at midnight having exhausted every civilized way to spent the night. Having let their, our, collective wanting habits get the best of them, us. Maybe penniless, maybe thrown out of some flophouse in arrears and found that nobody bothers, or did bother you out along the steel rails when the train lost its luster to the automobile and plane and rusted and abandoned railroads gone belly up for lack of use provided safe haven from the vagaries of civilization. So sure I too have seen with the brethren the stars out where the spots are darkest and the brilliance of the sparkle makes one think of heaven for those so inclined, think of the void for the heathen among them. Has dreamed penitent dreams of shelter against life’s storms, had dreamed while living for the moment trying to get washed clean after the failure of the new dispensation to do the job (hell, what did they/Markin/me think just because the drugs or alcohol flowed freely once, just because the fixer man fixed, fixed fine, that that was the Garden of Eden, that was Nirvana, hell, those ancient forebears all after they had been expelled from the earthly paradise saw that same starlight as they/he did).   

Maybe this will explain it better. An old man, or at least he has the marks of old age, although among the iterant travelling peoples, the hoboes, tramps, and bum, who have weathered many of life’s storms bottle or needle in hand, panhandled a million quarters now lost, old age, or their marks wear a soul down early so a guy who has been on the road enough years if he is say thirty looks about fifty by the time the train smoke and the busted dreams have broken his will, white beard, unkempt, longish hair, also unkempt, a river of lines in his face, deep crow’s feet setting off his vacant eyes, a second-hand soiled hat atop his head, a third-hand miner’s jacket “clipped” off some other lonesome traveler (“clipped- stolen for clueless or those who lead sheltered childhood and did not in order to satisfy some youthful wanting habit stakeout a jewelry store say and grab a few trinkets while the salesperson was looking the other way), shredded at the cuffs chino pants of indeterminate hand, and busted up shoes, soles worn, heels at forty-five degree angles from crooked walks on crooked miles and game legs is getting ready to unroll his bedroll, ground cloth a tablecloth stolen from Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s somewhere, a blanket stolen from a Sally [Salvation Army] Harbor Light house in salad days, rolled newspapers now for a mattress for the hundredth, hundredth time against the edge of the railroad trestle just outside Gallup, New Mexico. Do not ask him, if you have the nerve to approach him, and that is an iffy proposition just ask a guy going under the moniker of Denver Shorty how he got that deep scar across his face, where he is going or where he has come from because just that moment, having scratched a few coins in the town together for a jug of Thunderbird he is ready to sleep his sleep against the cold-hearted steel of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just ten yards from where he stands.      

And this night, this starlit brown, about eight colors of brown, desert night he hopes that he will not dream, not dream of that Phoebe Snow whom he left behind in Toledo when he had no beard, no longish unkempt hair, and no rivers of lines on his misbegotten face. (Why the brethren called every long gone sweetheart Phoebe Snow, why they would get misty over the dying campfire after some younger traveler stopped by and told his tale of leaving some young thing behind is unknown except, according to some old wizened geezer who might have just made the story up, in the old, old day when the railroads finally figured out how to keep people from being blackened by the train smoke every trip they took they started advertising this the fact with this white-dressed  virginal young woman who went under the name Phoebe Snow. That’s probably as good an explanation as any since whatever the name, or the young woman almost every guy in camp would in his sorrows get weepy about that situation.) Dream as he always did about whatever madness made him run from all the things he had created, all the things that drove him west like a million other guys who needed to put space between himself and civilization.

Dream too about the days when he could ride the rails in the first-class cars (having not only left Phoebe Snow behind but a growing specialty printing business started from scratch before the alcohol, and later the dope although now back to cheapjack alcohol got the better of him), and about the lure of the rails once he got unhinged from civilization. About how the train pace had been chastised by fast cars and faster planes when a the speed of a train fitted a man’s movements, about the days when they first built the transcontinental, this line that he was about to lie his head down beside, about the million Chinks, Hunkies, Russkies, Hibernians, hell, Micks, Dagos who sweated to drive the steel in unforgiving ground, many who laid down their heads down to their final rest along these roads, and later guys he knew on the endless road like Butte Bobby, Silver Jones, Ding-dong Kelly, who did not wake up the next morning and were carried out to the carcass vulture desert having left no way to get a hold of kin. Almost all guys had left no forwarding address, no real one anyway, no back address, for fear of the repo man or some other dunning, an angry wife or about ten thousand other reasons. So the desert was good enough as a potter’s field as any other place.

As he settled in to sleep the wine’s effect settling down too he noticed the bright half- moon out that night reflecting off the trestle, and the arroyos edges, and thought about what a guy, an old wizard like himself told him about the rails one time when he was laid up Salt Lake City, in the days when he tried to sober up. The guy, a guy who had music in his soul or something said to him that it was the starlight on the rails that had driven him, rumble, stumble, tumble him to keep on the road, to keep moving away from himself, to forget who he was. And here he was on a starlit night listening down the line for the rumble of the freight that would come passing by before the night was over. But as he shut his eyes, he began to dream again of Phoebe Snow, always of Phoebe Snow.         

But not everybody has the ability to sing to those starlit heavens (or to the void if that is what chances to happen as the universe expands quicker than we can think, bang- bang or get smaller into dust if that is the deal once the philosopher-king physicists figure out the new best theory) about the hard night of starlight on the rails and that is where Rosalie Sorrels, a woman of the American West out in the Idahos, out where, as is said in the introduction to the song by the same name ripping some wisdom from literary man Thomas Wolfe who knew from whence he spoke, the states are square (and at one time the people, travelling west people and so inured to hardship, played it square, or else), sings old crusty Utah Phillips’ song to those hobo, tramp, bum heavens. Did it while old Utah was alive to teach the song (and the story behind the song) to her and later after he passed on in a singular tribute album to his life’s work as singer/songwriter/story-teller/ troubadour.         

Now, for a fact, I do not know if Rosalie in her time, her early struggling time when she was trying to make a living singing and telling Western childhood stories had ever along with her brood of kids been reduced by circumstances to wind up against that endless steel highway but I do know that she had her share of hard times. Know that through her friendship with Utah she wound up bus-ridden to Saratoga Springs up in the un-squared state of New York where she performed and got taken under the wing of Lena from the legendary Café Lena during some trying times. And so she flourished, flourished as well as any folk-singer could once the folk minute burst it bubble and places like Café Lena, Club Passim (formerly Club 47), a few places in the Village in New York City and Frisco town became safe havens to flower and grow some songs, grow songs from the American folk songbooks and from her own expansive political commentator songbook. And some covers too as her rendition of Starlight on the Rails attests to as she worked her way across the continent.

Worked her way to a big sold out night at Saunders Theater at Harvard too when she called the road quits a decade or so ago. Sang some nice stuff speaking about the west, about the Brazos, about the great Utah desert which formed Utah Phillips a little too, formed him like his old friend Ammon Hennessey, the old saint Catholic Worker brother who sobered some guys up, made them take some pledges, made them get off the railroad steel road. Sobered me up too, got me off that railroad track too, but damn if I didn’t see that starlight too. So listen up, okay.    

Join The 2015 Maine Walk For Peace-In The Desperate Search For Peace- The Maine March For Peace and Protection Of The Planet From Rangeley To North Berwick -October 2014

From The Pen Of Sam Eaton

[This sketch is written as a warm-up to get people to commit to this year’s annual Maine VFP-led Peace Walk which will concentrate on the Militarization of the Seas and take a route from Ellsworth, Maine (near Bar Harbor) to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from October 9 to October 24.  For more information contact Maine Veterans For Peace www.vfpmaine.org

207-443-9502 globalnet@mindspring.com 207-422-8273  Join us.]  

“You know I never stepped up and opposed that damn war in Vietnam that I was part of, a big part of gathering intelligence to direct those monster B-52s to their targets. Never thought about much except to try and get my ass out of there alive. Didn’t get “religion” on the issues of war and peace until sometime after I got out when I ran into a few Vietnam veterans who were organizing a demonstration with the famous Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) down in Washington and they told me what was what. So since then, you know, even if we never get peace, and at times that seems like some kind of naïve fantasy I have to be part of actions like today to let people know, to let myself know, that when the deal went down I was where the action was, ’’ said Jack Scully to his fellow Vietnam veteran Pete Markin.

Peter was sitting in the passenger seat of the car Jack was driving (Mike Kelly, a younger veterans from the Iraq wars sat in back silently drinking in what these grizzled old activists were discussing) as they were travelling back to Jack’s place in York after they had just finished participating in the last leg of the Maine Veterans for Peace-sponsored walk for peace and preservation of the planet from Rangeley to North Berwick, a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles over a ten day period in the October breezes. The organizers of the march had a method to their madness since Rangeley was projected to be a missile site, and the stopping points in between were related to the war industries or to some environmental protection issue ending in North Berwick where the giant defense contractor Pratt-Whitney has three shifts running building F-35 missiles and parts for fighter jets. The three veterans who had come up from Boston to participate in the action had walked the last leg from Saco (pronounced “socko” as a Mainiac pointed out to Peter when he said “sacko”) to the Pratt-Whitney plant in North Berwick, some fifteen miles or so along U.S. Route One and Maine Route Nine.   

After Peter thought about what Jack had said about his commitment to such actions he made this reply, “You know I didn’t step up and oppose the Vietnam War very seriously until pretty late, after I got out of the Army and was working with some Quaker-types in a GI bookstore near Fort Dix down in New Jersey (both of the other men gave signs of recognition of that place, a place where they had taken their respective basis trainings) and that is where I got, what did you call it Jack, “religion” on the war issue. You know I have done quite a few things in my life, some good, some bad but of the good that people have always praised me for that social work I did, and later teaching I always tell them this- there are a million social workers, there are a million teachers, but these days, and for long time now, there have been very few peace activists on the ground so if you want to praise me, want to remember me for anything then let it be for this kind of work, things like this march today when our forces were few and the tasks enormous.”             

With that the three men, as the sun started setting, headed back to the last stretch to York in silence all thinking about what they had accomplished that day.  

******
It had been a long day starting early for Peter since, due to other commitments, he had had to drive up to York before dawn that morning. Jack and Mike already in York too had gotten up early to make sure all the Veterans for Peace and personal gear for the march was in order. They were expected in Saco (you know how to say it now even if you are not from Maine, or even been there) for an 8:30 start to the walk and so left York for the twenty-five mile trip up to that town about 7:30. They arrived at the inevitable Universalist-Unitarian Church (U-U) about 8:15 and prepared the Veterans for Peace flags that the twelve VFPers from the Smedley Butler Brigade who came up from Boston for the last leg would carry.

That inevitable U-U remark by the way needs some explanation, or rather a kudo. Of all the churches with the honorable exception of the Quakers the U-Us have been the one consistent church which has provided a haven for peace activists and their projects, various social support groups and 12- step programs and, of course, the thing that Peter knew them for was as the last gasp effort to preserve the folk minute of the early 1960s by opening their doors on a monthly basis and turn their basements or auditoria into throw-back coffeehouses with the remnant folk performers from that milieu playing, young and old.                  

And so a little after 8:30 they were off, a motley collection of about forty to fifty people, some VFPers from the sponsoring Maine chapter, the Smedleys, some church peace activist types, a few young environmental activists, and a cohort of Buddhists in full yellow robe regalia leading the procession with their chanting and pacing drum beating. Those Buddhists, or some of them, had been on the whole journey from Rangeley unlike most participants who came on one or a few legs and then left. The group started appropriately up Main Street although if you know about coastal Maine that is really U.S. Route One which would be the main road of the march until Wells where they would pick up Maine Route Nine into North Berwick and the Pratt-Whitney plant.

Peter had a flash-back thought early on the walk through downtown Saco as he noticed that the area was filled with old red brick buildings that had once been part of the thriving textile industry which ignited the Industrial Revolution here in America. Yes, Peter “knew” this town much like his own North Adamsville, another red brick building town, and like old Jack Kerouac’s Lowell which he had been in the previous week to help celebrate the annual Kerouac festival. All those towns had seen better days, had also made certain come-backs of late, but walking pass the small store blocks in Saco there were plenty of empty spaces and a look of quiet desperation on those that were still operating just like he had recently observed in those other towns.    

That sociological observation was about the only one that Peter (or anybody) on the march could make since once outside the downtown area heading to Biddeford and Kennebunk the views in passing were mainly houses, small strip malls, an occasional gas station and many trees. As the Buddhists warmed up to their task the first leg was uneventful except for the odd car or truck honking support from the roadway. (Peter and every other peace activist always counted honks as support whether they were or not, whether it was more a matter of road rage or not in the area of an action, stand-out or march). And so the three legs of the morning went. A longer stop for lunch followed and then back on the road for the final stages trying to reach the Pratt-Whitney plant for a planned vigil as the shifts were changing about three o’clock.   

[A word on logistics since this was a straight line march with no circling back. The organizers had been given an old small green bus for their transportation needs. That green bus was festooned with painted graffiti drawings which reminded Peter of the old time 1960s Ken Kesey Merry Prankster bus and a million replicas that one could see coming about every other minute out of the Pacific Coast Highway hitchhike minute back then. The green bus served as the storage area for personal belongings and snack and, importantly, as the vehicle which   would periodically pick up the drivers in the group and leaf-frog their cars toward North Berwick. Also provided rest for those too tired or injured to walk any farther. And was the lead vehicle for the short portion of the walk where everybody rode during one leg before the final walk to the plant gate.]       

So just before three o’clock they arrived at the plant and spread out to the areas in front of the three parking lots holding signs and waving to on-coming traffic. That was done for about an hour and then they formed a circle, sang a couple of songs, took some group photographs before the Pratt-Whitney sign and then headed for the cars to be carried a few miles up the road to friendly farmhouse for a simple meal before dispersing to their various homes. In all an uneventful day as far as logistics went. Of course no vigil, no march, no rally or anything else in the front of some huge corporate enterprise, some war industries target, or some high finance or technological site would be complete without the cops, public or private, thinking they were confronting the Russian Revolution of 1917 on their property and that was the case this day as well. 

 

Peter did not know whether the organizers had contacted Pratt-Whitney, probably not nor he thought should they have, or security had intelligence that the march was heading their way but a surly security type made it plain that the marchers were not to go on that P-W property, or else. As if a rag-tag group of fifty mostly older pacifists, lukewarm socialists, non-violent veterans and assorted church people were going to shut the damn place done, or try to, that day.         

Nothing came of the security agent’s threats as there was no need for that but as Peter got out of Jack’s car he expressed the hope that someday they would be leading a big crowd to shut that plant down. No questions asked. In the meantime they had set the fragile groundwork. Yes, it had been a good day and they had all been at the right place. 

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” (and their womenfolk as they liked to call them, battalions of snot-nosed kids, half naked against the weathers, and kin, always kin) thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property, Mister's property, the King's property, Sir somebody's property, usually poaching, stealing pigs or coveting horses, hanging offenses way back when, and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge.

But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn (or what was left of it including clues about the color of the paint) the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few misplaced Cajun swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart had mentioned when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes “what goes around comes around” as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the cheap high school and college date night coffeehouses (cheap at the price of a couple of coffee, a shared pastry and a couple of bucks for the "basket" for the hard-pressed singer) Beacon Hill and Harvard Square who had “hipped” her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Let 's Win The Fight For $15-And More

Let 's Win The Fight For $15-And More

Sam Lowell comment:

When even run-of-the-mill politicians like Governor Cuomo of New York are jumping on the fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage band wagon you know the idea's time has come (as the politicians are as usual way behind the grassroots on issues like this, bedrock pocketbook issues which have not bothered them since they were kids).  Still if you do the math for a full workweek (not usual these days when a full-workweek means health benefits kick in under Obamacare) 40 X 15 =600 x 52 weeks =$31,200. For a family of four, hell, for a childless couple, hell, for an independent single adult that's not enough. We can squeeze more out of these guys. Lots more until we get to an adequate living wage-if we fight. Yes, "if we fight for it" are the operative words.    

The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

 
Click below to link to the Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism blog  

http://histomatist.blogspot.com/
 

Markin comment:

While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items promoted it is not clear to me that this British-centered blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.

Since 2014 the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught in the summer. That is to be commended. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the Milibrands. I continue to stand willingly with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.      

No question since the demise of the Soviet Union as a flawed but vital counter-weight to world imperialism and the rise of the basically one-superpower American world theories and politics based on socialism, communism, hell, even left radicalism as poles of attraction except in spots (like South Africa or Greece) to the working and oppressed masses of the world has taken a serious hit. Have become seen something like “utopian” schemes by pro-labor leftist militants in the world despite the desperate situations today in many parts of the world, including America and Great Britain, which cry out to high heaven for socialist solutions.

As the weight of that demise has set in there has been a corresponding demise in the level of programmatic and theoretical understandings by those who still espouse the good old cause. The events and works by socialist commentators emphasized by this Histomat blog amply demonstrates the proposition that in the post- Soviet period (if not before) there has been a dramatic tendency to throw out all the experiences since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and try to begin anew as if that event never occurred. Unfortunately that means generally to go back to pre-World War I theories of revolutionary organization (and in some cases to forgo the necessity of revolution as if capitalism were the permanent condition of humankind). The main organizational form to face the scrap heap is Lenin’s theory, a theory many times honored more in the breech than in the observance, of the “vanguard party” of conscious revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers working as full-time professionals revolutionaries.           

The clearest example of this is the revival of certain pre-World War I theorists like the “Pope of Marxism,” Karl Kautsky, although interestingly not back to Marx and Engels of the post-1848 period. A main organization concept of Kautsky’s German Social-Democratic of which he was a leading theorist was the “party of the whole class,” a concept which denied, or muted the differences in the working class movement in the interest of numbers (numbers of votes in parliamentary elections really) that would somehow be worked out in the course of the revolution. Well life itself, with many, many examples, has shown how worthless that type of organization was when the deal went down. The date August 4^th 1914 when the German Social-Democrats piled onto the Kaiser’s bandwagon by voting for his war budget should be etched in the brain of every serious leftist militant. There are, granted, many new concepts necessary in the 21^st century to reach the masses in order to revive the socialist message with the new technology, the new urgency, and the new allies necessary to fight for socialism but the threadbare theory of the “party of the whole class” is not one of them.        

Additional Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

One of the great sins of Stalinism (which the latter-day Social-Democrats of various stripes have honed to a fine art as well) was to silence both internal dissent inside the party and try like hell to keep other tendencies silent outside the party. Instead of letting various positions and programs be fought out to see who had something to add to the revolutionary arsenal the “word” came down (sometimes changing overnight) and that was that. It looks to be from this great distance that the very much still Stalinized Greece Communist Party is saddled with some of those old-time attributes when there should be in the Greek situation a bubbling up of discussion and clash of programs. Else the capitalists will once again prevail in a situation where they should be sent to the dustbin of history as Leon Trotsky once said.   

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

When Little Johnny S. Got “Religion”-With Edward G. Robinson’s Brother Orchid In Mind

When Little Johnny S. Got “Religion”-With Edward G. Robinson’s Brother Orchid In Mind

Fritz Jasper couldn’t believe the news once it got to him up in the joint, up in Sing-Sing if you want to know. (Fritz was doing a nickel for armed robbery where the money was, a bank, having gotten caught for doing exactly what he never had been touched for when Johnny S. ran things, ran the show with style, ran it without rancor, and without enemies, live enemies anyway but time were tough lately and so the nickel.) Yeah, couldn’t believe that Johnny, Little Johnny S had gone off on a tangent, had gone underground from what he got of the story.  Fritz wasn’t alone, a lot of guys around New York City, a lot of guys on the island of Manhattan especially, guys just like Fritz Jasper from the old Five Points  hell-hole neighborhood where Johnny got his start stealing candy from Angelo’s candy store at about age six (stealing it with ease against the hawk-like Angelo who had nabbed Fritz more times than the liked to remember until he wised up about getting in trouble for two-bit stuff like penny ass candy and graduated to banks and short terms growing longer in Sing-Sing although never when he worked for Johnny, worked the best wheel in town before the “junk” got to him, got him short-nerved). Betting guys too, guys who bet on everything including the color of their mother’s underwear if the price was right, who liked to look at every proposition from every angle couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t figure out, couldn’t put the price on, the how and why when they heard Little Johnny S., Little Johnny without the “S” to guys in the know, walked away from his kingpin crime boss job. (Only “Sky” King put a price on a proposition, a proposition that Johnny was working some king-sized scam and money would come raining down on the old town, everybody would get well in a hurry and many guys, including Fritz through the “trustie” connection to the outside world put a cool  C-note on that one.)  

Fritz thought for a moment how jobs like the candy store childhood petty larcenies were so Johnny easy, that was just like minting dough after the hard times flaked away when the Great Depression hit and the, worse, worst of all, liquor became free and easy to get and that cut the tail out of that racket. Johnny moved on though, everything he touched then turned to gold after a few heists, a good dope market connection, and bliss (and no penny ante Al Capone stuff either Johnny “bought” himself a politician who stayed bought and no copper even sneezed on any Johnny operation.

Jesus, walked away, Johnny walked away on two upright legs not carried away by six pall-bearers paid for by some up and coming guy in the food chain like Jack Buck who was Johnny’s viper sidekick on the way up and had maybe figured his own figuring that slicing the pie one way, hell, not slicing it at all was just fine (Jack too had figured the candy store gaff early and never got caught by Ma Singleton, the candy store owner in his neighborhood up in the high number Bronx, walked away without “uncle” laying a hand on him, good old uncle trying to put the squeeze on him to get out from under some crummy rap since they never could get fact one him, couldn’t break that “connection”  and the East River ran red as proof of that assertion. Nada, none of that stuff that no guy from Five Points, certainly not Fritz who rode up with Johnny and had been in on that first heist of the Bank of New York which in turn got that first shipment of opium from Morocco and the rest was history, would shake his head about for two seconds. Walked away, get this, so he could “spread the good word,” spread it around Buffalo for God’s sake, could do good deeds without reward, and really pay attention to this one, to get by with no dough, no dough of his own anyway. Nada. Jesus, double Jesus (a term Fritz hadn’t used since he was a kid but it seemed right just then. What was the world coming to for crying out loud.) Yeah, Little Johnny S. sure got “religion,” sure bought that one-way ticket. And that, dear friends is how Johnny S., Little Johnny, the toughest hombre coming out of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s and that was saying something became Brother Orchid (the brother part is because he got all twisted up with that damn bunch of guys living poor, living real poor, by choice on the outskirts of the city and, at least this part makes sense, Little Johnny S. always loved orchids, always loved to give his lady friends that flower to let them know he cared, cared for that minute anyway).          

Here is what Fritz was able to gather from a few guys who knew Little Johnny S. better than he did later on when Fritz tried one Johnny-less bank heist too many and wound up in the joint that time, guys who knew the ins and outs of the guy, and the ins and outs of what brought Johnny low (besides the obviously dame problem that has sent more than one guy to do screwy stuff, sent more than one guy screaming to high heaven although they usually didn’t take the big step fall down giving up dough and the works like Johnny). Most of the information came from Willie “The Knife” so Fritz knew it has to be pretty close to the truth because Little Johnny and he were tight at the end and because Willie was telling his tale before his own big step-off, his own nickel to a dime up to Sing-Sing and Flo, Flo Addams, you remember her right, Little Johnny’s old flame who wound up on easy street with a big time cattle rancher once Little Johnny saw her as spoiled goods, saw her as an impediment to his new “life.”   

Here is what they cobbled together between and it makes as much sense as the real story if it isn’t right as what the guy did who we are talking about. No question, Little Johnny Sarto (yeah, that’s his real name, or was, before that “Brother Orchid” moniker got laid on him), who would have been played by the old time classic shoot-‘em-up ask questions later gangster actor Edward G. Robinson in the movies if you had to describe his looks, the way every smart guy told him he looked which played on his vanity no  end) had grown up on some mean streets in the old city, no question either that like every guy (and gal for that matter) who grew up on “the wrong side of the tracks,” grew up “from hunger” poor, had serious wanting habits and was not particular about how he moved up the organized crime food chain during his younger days as a “torpedo” for “Red” Rizzo’s crowd in Flatbush. Illegal liquor, drugs, serious drugs like heroin that guys would go through hell to get (and get off of, some of them anyway), not that silly cocaine that you could buy at any drugstore and sniff your brains out, transporting women, pimping them off too, numbers, a few armed robberies and so on. And Johnny was smart, smart and tough, so he rose pretty swiftly up the chain until one day he was king of his own operation. All without spending day one in some cooped-up jailhouse. As he rose, and as the ways of criminal activity took different turns in the end he confined himself to the very lucrative and safe “protection” racket.                          

But see, and this Fritz (Willie too if you want to know, the name of the means streets might be different but the feelings were the same, almost universal) knew, knew from personal experience, poor boys, poor street urchins, getting to the top of the rackets only goes so far and so Johnny got to thinking about getting the pedigree to be a high-class guy, a high-class guy who guys (and gals) looked up to just because he was high-class. Without sticking a gun, or some fists in their face to prove the point. And that is what “The Knife,” ever-lovin’ Flo and Fritz thought was Little Johnny’s downfall. He moved out of his “safe zone” and tried to play straight up with society fake art and antiques, real estate, hell even royal titles guys and they having a few centuries of experience in the genes took him, like taking candy from a baby, no easier since Johnny didn’t have Jack Buck, Willie, or even Fritz to sniff out those cons while Johnny was in his high society heat.    

Funny one day Johnny checked his bank account, thought he saw that he had more dough than he could use in a lifetime and just walked away from his organization, gone fishing, done. Of course in the rackets, the food chain rackets, leaving doesn’t mean that is the end of the rackets but rather that Johnny was leaving his operation to his lizard right hand man Jack Buck, a guy who if you casting for types in some movie would hands down be played by Humphrey Bogart. Jack who came up the same way as Little Johnny except his was meaner, tougher and more likely to use a little gunplay to settle any problems. (He was also tough on his women, not afraid to throw a punch or two to keep them in line according to Flo.) So Johnny fled the city, leaving everything, and everybody, including his longtime girlfriend, Flo, who if you were casting her in the 1940s would be blonde, very blonde and Johnny would not have cared if it was real or from the bottle, a frilly   played by Ann Sothern type, but get this who was left in the lurch because, well, because she loved Johnny and expected him to marry her. Silly girl.      

Naturally a guy like Johnny from the mean streets figured he could buy class, buy that upscale thing with just enough money but here his instincts played him dirty. He did not know rule number one about how the rich and high class got that way, got there over a mountain of skulls, and so Johnny was an easy pick-off once it got around that he was in the “high-class” market. Poor sap many a guy had been put face down in the East River, put there by Johnny even, for doing less that those master thieves of Europe did to Little Johnny. So he busted out, went flat broke, and decided that he needed to get back to his own kind, get back to easy street, get back his old making money hand over fist operation. And so he headed home.   

But Johnny had a problem, well, really two problems, kind of inter-related. First was one Jack Buck who had built up his operation far beyond the seemingly cheapjack operation Johnny ran and so he was not inclined, very not inclined, to give it up just because some old-time hood was making some noises, and second, Johnny with his soft living had lost a step or two and did not have the current capacity to strong-arm Jack out of his place in the food chain. Christ in the end all Johnny had was “The Knife” and while he was a good guy to have in a fight he was not enough to take on Jack’s wrecking crew, including a couple of new age “torpedoes” who shot first and asked questions later. No, just shot first. One way or the other the heat from Jack’s hired help on was on and Johnny was on the lam.

That “on the lam” part is where things were hazy for Willie and Flo, the part about Johnny getting all shot up by Jack’s goons, being able to escape the worst of it, and finding sanctuary in that brotherhood monastery where he got his new moniker. Fritz could understand where Willie and Flo would have trouble with figuring out Johnny’s new thing it was so off base. See too it is hard to get inside a guy’s mind and see what he is up to, especially when he is on the lam and he stumbles into some guys, good guys who fix him up without question, feed and shelter him, but are naïve to the ways of the world is what Johnny probably thought for a long time until they showed him a different way of looking at life. It was not like Johnny went looking for something, he was just hiding out at the beginning, planning his Jack revenge and getting back on top. Well, he did get his Jack revenge in a funny way, funny since he got help from Flo’s rancher friend whom she wound up marrying and wound up on easy street as a result. Jack’s is now doing from one to ninety-nine at Sing Sing a few cellblocks away from Fritz, Flo is married to her Big Sky rancher and raking in whatever she wants, Willie is doing the best he can. And Johnny, oops, Brother Orchid is up there in the woods working for nada, or maybe his soul. Poor sap. Fritz just hoped that his luck would change and that the ten to one odds Sky King had given him on his C-note would pan out when Johnny crashed out of that old monastery out in freaking Buffalo and everybody would get well again.         

Sounds Of The City-With Washington Square Circa 1962 In Mind

Sounds Of The City-With Washington Square In Mind 

 

 

 

 

 

Josie Davis was afraid of New York City, had been made mother-afraid as she was growing up. You know the usual “don’t talk to, much less take candy from, strangers, (and maybe not from known parties either)” “don’t go into darkened areas at night, in fact don’t go out at night,” “avoid the subways at all costs and always have taxi money available in your well-guarded pocketbook.” In addition to that Josie had always been afraid, been made Josie-afraid of the tall buildings in Manhattan which dwarfed her 5’ 3” height, made her even afraid of looking down in the Stuyvesant Town building where she and her family lived in an eighth floor apartment. Afraid of the usual eternal car honk noises of the bustling city that never slept, afraid to cross the zooming streets and afraid to take that early morning subway trip to Hunter College High School and would as often as not take a cab if her mother had given her enough money for the fare. So Josie as soon as she finished high school fled, there is no other way to put the matter, to bucolic (bucolic by New York City standards anyway) Madison, Wisconsin to attend the well-regarded university there (along with many other New York City and Long Island college age ex-patriates who has the same hectic feelings about the pace and scale of life in the big city). After college she had moved to Boston, another lesser scale city, to pursue her advanced degree programs (eventually Master’s and Doctor’s degrees so we could properly call her Doctor Josie but she did not stand on such ceremony so just Josie here) and decided after that to stake her career prospects on that city.                  

 

And so she remained in Boston but would every once in a while have a hankering to go back to New York, to get the feel of the pulse of the city, to see what was happening (that hankering very distinct from the necessity of going home to family for certain holidays, Jewish high holy days, Thanksgiving and the like obligatory since as a poor student and budding professional she depended on their monetary subsidies as she called them to keep her head above water financially). That feeling would come back to her especially when something would remind her of Washington Square, Washington Square in the early 1960s when she learned to hold her fears in abeyance for the time she spent there. This time, the time we are talking about, the tripping point had been her reading Henry James’ novel Washington Square which while it spoke of a much earlier time in the 19^th century and centered on the ill-fated romance of a proper New York woman and a cad, made her think of the first time she had gone to the Square and taken in the life there.

 

Josie had had as much teenage angst and alienation as any member of her generation which had been feeling squeezed in by the cautious, keep your head down life of the post-World War II Cold War night. Until she was about sixteen she handled those hurts by internalizing them, by working like a dog at her studies and keeping indoors and safe most of the time which satisfied her mother’s dictates as well as her own predilections. But sixteen is a funny age, a funny age in teen world and in teen sexual desire world and Josie was not immune to those thoughts. Thoughts egged on by the talk in the girls’ lav at school and by her best friend the precocious Frida Hoffman. Frida had her tales of sexual exploration and of getting around town that filled Josie’s ear with a certain wonder. She was especially enthralled by Frida’s talk of the doings in Washington Square, the folk scene that was just budding, or rather breaking out of the confines of some clubs in Greenwich Village.                  

 

So one Saturday afternoon, Josie did not want to venture out at night even after Frida told her that the place was lit up like daylight at night, Frida and Josie took a cab from Josie’s apartment building to the Square. After being let off Frida noticed a crowd around a guy singing with a guitar and told Josie they should head over there since that was where the action was for the moment. As they reached the edge of the crowd they, Josie, heard the guy (who later she found out was Guy Vander, one of the lesser lights of the New York folk revival) singing this mournful tune, The Cukoo Bird, followed by another East Virginia and as they settled in she told Frida that while she had heard something about folk music she thought it was all Yiddish stuff from the old country that her parents’ were trying like hell to get away from. This she liked.      

 

What got to Josie was the simple message of the music, the simple melodies that evoked an early time and while the themes could range from the gruesome murder in Tom Dooley to forlorn love in Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies to the foolery of the Banana Boat Song and the feeling that the music spoke to her. She along with Frida were along the cutting edge of the folk revival minute of the 1960s when the old stuff on the rock radio stations was not enough to satisfy that craving for roots, for something different.

 

Oh yeah it didn’t hurt that a guy, a guy in a short beard and beret, shod in sandals, a sophomore at nearby New York University,  came up to her and asked if she was a folksinger, if she planned to sing that afternoon. Whatever the value of that line in the history male introduction lines, and it was not bad if you think about it, it got him two, no three things. Got him to spout forth for the entire afternoon about the this and that of the New York folk scene, more than she ever needed to know about some guy in Kentucky named Hobart Smith who played the fiddler, got him to escort Frida and Josie back to Josie’s home, and got him a real live date for the next Saturday night, night if you can believe this, to go to hear this guy Dave Von Ronk playing at the Gaslight in the Village.