*****Damn It- Free Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Jail!

*****Damn It- Free Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Jail!

Leonard Peltier in 1972

I am passing this along which was passed to me so check it out. (November 2015) 

Anonymous7:57 PM

 

The correct contact information for Peltier's defense committee (and ACCURATE information regarding Leonard Peltier, his case, and the campaign for freedom) is ILPDC, PO Box 24, Hillsboro, OR 97123. Web: www.whoisleonardpeltier.info.

Click to a Leonard Peltier Defense Committee site.

http://www.leonardpeltier.net/ 

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Commentary

This entry is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. I need add little except to say that this man, a natural leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), should never have spent a day in jail. Free him now.

"We, along with millions of others, do not believe that Leonard Peltier should have been incarcerated at all. We demand his unconditional release from prison."

************
Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on February 6, 1976, along with Frank Blackhorse, a.k.a. Frank Deluca. The United States presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who said she was Mr. Peltier’s girlfriend and allegedly saw him shoot the agents. In fact, Ms. Poor Bear had never met Mr. Peltier and was not present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements and said the FBI threatened her and coerced her into signing the affidavits.

• Mr. Peltier was extradited to the United States where he was tried in 1977. The trial was held in North Dakota before United States District Judge Paul Benson, a conservative jurist appointed to the federal bench by Richard M. Nixon. Key witnesses like Myrtle Poor Bear were not allowed to testify and unlike the Robideau/Butler trial in Iowa, evidence regarding violence on Pine Ridge was severely restricted.
• An FBI agent who had previously testified that the agents followed a pick-up truck onto the scene, a vehicle that could not be tied to Mr. Peltier, changed his account, stating that the agents had followed a red and white van onto the scene, a vehicle which Mr. Peltier drove occasionally.
• Three teenaged Native witnesses testified against Mr. Peltier, they all later admitted that the FBI forced them to testify. Still, not one witness identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter.
• The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case claimed that the government had provided the defense with all FBI documents concerning the case. To the contrary, more than 140,000 pages had been withheld in their entirety.
• An FBI ballistics expert testified that a casing found near the agents’ bodies matched the gun tied to Mr. Peltier. However, a ballistic test proving that the casing did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.
• The jury, unaware of the aforementioned facts, found Mr. Peltier guilty. Judge Benson, in turn, sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.
• Following the discovery of new evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Mr. Peltier sought a new trial. The Eighth Circuit ruled, “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case." Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial.
• During oral argument, the government attorney conceded that the government does not know who shot the agents, stating that Mr. Peltier is equally guilty whether he shot the agents at point-blank range, or participated in the shoot-out from a distance. Mr. Peltier’s co-defendants participated in the shoot-out from a distance, but were acquitted.
• Judge Heaney, who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced firm support for Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict Mr. Peltier, the FBI was equally responsible for the shoot-out, and that Mr. Peltier's release would promote healing with Native Americans.
• Mr. Peltier has served over 29 years in prison and is long overdue for parole. He has received several human rights awards for his good deeds from behind bars which include annual gift drives for the children of Pine Ridge, fund raisers for battered women’s shelters, and donations of his paintings to Native American recovery programs.
• Mr. Peltier suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. Time for justice is short.
• Currently, Mr. Peltier’s attorneys have filed a new round of Freedom of Information Act requests with FBI Headquarters and all FBI field offices in an attempt to secure the release of all files relating to Mr. Peltier and the RESMURS investigation. To date, the FBI has engaged in a number of dilatory tactics in order to avoid the processing of these requests.

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THIS ARTICLE FROM PARTISAN DEFENSE NOTES WAS PASSED ON TO THE WRITER BY THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTTEE, P.O. BOX 99 CANAL STREET STATION, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10013. 

THERE IS NOTHING THAT I NEED TO ADD EXCEPT THAT HISTORIANS OVER THE LAST GENERATION HAVE STEPPED OVER ALL OVER THEMSELVES TO CORRECT THE PREVIOUS FALSE ROLE ASSIGNED TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. THAT IS TO THE GOOD. BUT THE WRITER HAS ONE QUESTION –WHY IS THIS NATIVE AMERICAN LEADER STILL IN JAIL? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

Thirty years ago, on 6 February 1976, American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier was seized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in western Canada. Peltier had fled there after a massive U.S. government attack the previous June—by FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents, SWAT cops and white vigilantes—on South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation during which two FBI agents were killed. After Canadian authorities held Peltier for ten months in solitary confinement in Oakalla Prison, he was extradited to the U.S. on the basis of fabricated FBI testimony. In 1977, Peltier, a member of the Anishinabe and Lakota Nations, was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences on frame-up murder charges stemming from the shooting of the two FBI agents.

While Peltier had sought refuge in Canada, two others charged in the agents' killings were acquitted in a federal court in Iowa. Jurors stated that they did not believe the government witnesses and that it seemed "pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense" against the FBI invasion. In Peltier's trial the prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that his gun could not have been used in the shooting, while the trial judge ruled out any chance of another acquittal on self-defense grounds by barring any evidence of government terror against the Pine Ridge activists. At a 1985 appeal hearing, a government attorney admitted, "We can't prove who shot those agents."

AIM had been in the Feds' gun sights because of its efforts to fight the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands by the government and energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium deposits under Sioux land in South Dakota. The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee stated in 2004: "Virtually every known AIM leader in the United States was incarcerated in either state or federal prisons since (or even before) the organization's formal emergence in 1968, some repeatedly." Between 1973 and 1976, thugs of the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON), armed and trained by the hated BIA and FBI, carried out more than 300 attacks in and around Pine Ridge, killing at least 69 people.
As we wrote during the fight against Peltier's threatened deportation, "The U.S. case against Peltier is political persecution, part of a broader attempt by the FBI to smash AIM through piling up criminal charges against its leaders, just as was done against the Black Panthers" (PTFNo. 112, 4 June 1976). AIM and Peltier were targeted by the FBI's deadly Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of disruption, frame-up and murder of the left, black militants and others. Under COINTELPRO, 38 Black Panthers were killed by the FBI and local cops. Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years in prison for a crime the FBI knew he could not have committed before finally winning release in 1997. Mumia Abu-Jamal—also an innocent man— remains on Pennsylvania's death row today.

In November 2003, a federal appeals court ruled, "Much of the government's behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed." But the court still refused to open the prison doors for Peltier. Last year, U.S. District Court judge William Skretny turned down Peltier's request for documents suppressed by the government, even while acknowledging that he could have been acquitted had the government not improperly withheld them. Peltier attorney Michael Kuzma stated that the evidence withheld by the government amounts to a staggering 142,579 pages!

On February 24, Skretny again ruled that the FBI can keep part of its records secret in the name of "national security." Peltier noted in a message to the March 18 protests against the Iraq occupation, "Our government uses the words 'national security' and fighting the war on transnational terrorism as a smoke screen to cover up further crimes and misconduct by the FBI." Also this February, defense attorney Barry Bachrach argued in St. Louis federal court that the federal government had no jurisdiction in Peltier's case, since the shootings occurred on a reservation.

Millions of people have signed petitions for Peltier over the years, including by 1986 some 17 million people in the former Soviet Union. His frame-up, like that of Geronimo ji Jaga and Mumia Abu-Jamal, demonstrates that there is no justice in the capitalist courts of America. While supporting all possible legal proceedings on behalf of the class-war prisoners, we place no faith whatever in the "justice" of the courts and rely solely on the power of mass protest centered on the integrated labor movement.

After Peltier's third appeal for a new trial was denied in 1993, thousands of prominent liberals, celebrities and others—ranging from Willie Nelson to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa—called for a presidential pardon. In a recent column titled "Free Leonard Peltier!" (5 February), Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote: "Many Peltier supporters put their trust in a politician named Bill Clinton, who told them that when he got elected he 'wouldn't forget' about the popular Native American leader. Their trust (like that of so many others) was betrayed once Clinton gained his office, and the FBI protested. In the waning days of his presidency, he issued pardons to folks like Marc Rich, and other wealthy campaign contributors. Leonard Peltier was left in his chains!"

Peltier is one of 16 class-war prisoners to whom the Partisan Defense Committee sends monthly stipends. For more information on his case, or to contribute to Peltier's legal defense, write to: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, 2626 North Mesa #132, El Paso, TX 79902. Free Leonard Peltier and all class-war prisoners! 

*****From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars-Revelations

*****From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars-Revelations

What VFP Stands For - 

 

 

 

 

 

Revelations-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Ralph Morris had always considered himself a straight-up guy. Straight up when he dealt with customers in his high-precision electrical shop in Troy, New York inherited from his father after he retired before he himself recently retired and turned it over to his youngest son, James, who would bring the operation into the 21^st century with the high tech equipment precision electrical work needs nowadays. Straight up when he confronted the trials and tribulations of parenthood and told the kids that due to his political obligations (of which more in a minute) he would be away and perhaps seem somewhat pre-occupied at times he would answer any questions they had about anything as best he could (and the kids in turn when characterizing their father to me, told me that he was hard-working, distant but had been straight up with them although those sentiments said in a wistful, wondering, wishing more manner like there was something missing in the whole exchange and Ralph agreed when I mentioned that feeling to him that I was probably right but that he did the best he could). Straight up after sowing his wild oats along with Sam Eaton, Pete Markin, Frankie Riley and a bunch of other guys from the working class corners who dived into that 1960s counter-cultural moment and hit the roads, for a short time after the stress of eighteen months in the bush in Vietnam. Meaning sleeping with any young woman who would have him in those care-free days when we were all experimenting with new ways to deal with that fretting sexual issue and getting only slightly less confused that when we got all that god-awful and usually wrong information in the streets where most of us, for good or evil learned to separate our Ps and Qs. After which he promised his high school sweetheart, Lara Peters, who had waited for him to settle down to be her forever man. And straight up with what concerns us here his attitude toward his military service in the Army during the height of the Vietnam War where he did his time, did not cause waves while in the service but raised, and is still raising seven kinds of holy hell, once he became totally disillusioned with the war, with the military brass and with the American government (no “our government” his way of saying it not mine) who did nothing but make thoughtless animals out of him and his buddies.             

Giving this “straight up” character business is important here because Ralph several years ago along with Sam Eaton, a non-Vietnam veteran having been exempted from military duty due to being the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his ne’er-do-well father died of a massive heart attack in 1965, joined a peace organization, Veterans For Peace (VFP), in order to work with others doing the same kind of work (Ralph as a  full member, Sam an associate member in the way membership works in that organization although both have full right to participate and discuss the aims and projects going forward) once they decided to push hard against the endless wars of the American government (both Ralph and Sam’s way of putting the matter). Without going into great detail Sam and Ralph had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when they with their respective groups (Sam with a radical collective from Cambridge and Ralph with Vietnam Veterans Against the War) attempted to as the slogan went-“shut down the government if it did not shut down the war.” Unfortunately they failed but the several days they spent together in detention in RFK Stadium then being used as the main detention area cemented a life-time friendship, and a life-time commitment to work for peace. (Sam’s impetus the loss of his best corner boy high school friend, Jeff Mullins, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968 who begged him to tell everybody what was really going on with war if he did not make it back to tell them himself.)        

That brings us to the Ralph straight up part. He and Sam had worked closely with or been member of for several years in the 1970s VVAW and other organizations to promote peace. But as the decade ended and the energy of the 1960s faded and ebbed they like many others went on with their lives, build up their businesses, had their families to consider and generally prospered. Oh sure, when warm bodies were needed for this or that good old cause they were there but until the fall of 2002 their actions were helter-skelter and of an ad hoc nature. Patch work they called it. Of course the hell-broth of the senseless, futile and about six other negative descriptions of that 2003 Iraq war disaster, disaster not so much for the American government (Sam and Ralph’s now familiar term) as for the Iraqi people and others under the cross-fires of the American military juggernaut (my term). So they, having fewer family and work responsibilities were getting the old time anti-war “religion” fires stoked in their brains once again to give one more big push against the machine before they passed on. They started working with VFP in various marches, vigils, civil disobedience actions and whatever other projects the organization was about (more recently the case of getting a presidential pardon and freedom for the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle –blower soldier Chelsea Manning sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence at Fort Leavenworth for telling the truth about American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan). Did that for a couple of years before they joined. And here is really where that straight up business comes into play. See they both had been around peace organizations enough to know that membership means certain obligation beyond paying dues and reading whatever materials an organization puts out-they did not want to be, had never been mere “paper members” So after that couple of years of working with VFP in about 2008 they joined up, joined up and have been active members ever since.        

Now that would be neither here nor there but Ralph had recently been thinking about stepping up his commitment even further by running for the Executive Committee of his local Mohawk Valley  chapter, the Kenny Johnson Chapter. (Sam as an associate member of his local chapter, the James Jencks Brigade is precluded as a non-veterans from holding such offices the only distinction between the two types of membership.) He ran and won a seat on the committee. But straight up again since he was committed to helping lead the organization locally and perhaps take another step up at some point he decided this year to go to the National Convention in San Diego (the geographic location of that site a definitive draw) and learn more about the overall workings of the organization and those most dedicated to its success.

So Ralph went and immersed himself in the details of what is going on with the organization. More importantly he got to hear the details of how guys (and it is mostly guys reflecting the origins of the organization in 1985 a time when women were not encouraged to go into the service), mostly guys from his Vietnam War generation as the older World War II and Korea vets pass on and the Iraq and Afghan war vets are still finding their “voice” came to join the organization. What amazed him was how many of the stories centered on various objections that his fellow members had developed while in whatever branch of the military they were in. See Ralph had kept his “nose clean” despite his growing disenchantment with the war while serving his eighteen months in country. He had been by no means a gung-ho soldier although he had imbibed all the social and political attitudes of his working class background that he had been exposed to concerning doing service, fighting evil commies and crushing anything that got in the way of the American government. He certainly was not a model soldier either but he went along, got along by getting along. These other guys didn’t.

One story stood out not because it was all that unusual in the organization but because Ralph had never run up against anything like it during his time of service from 1967-1970. Not in basic training AIT, not in Vietnam although he had heard stuff about disaffected soldiers toward the end of his enlistment. This guy, Frank Jefferson, he had met at one of the workshops on military resisters had told Ralph when he asked that he had served a year in an Army stockade for refusing to wear the uniform, refusing to do Army work of any kind. At least voluntarily. The rough details of Frank’s story went like this. He had been drafted in late 1968 and was inducted into the Army in early 1969 having had no particular reason not to go in since while he was vaguely anti-war like most college students he was not a conscientious objector (and still doesn’t since he believes wars of national liberation and the like are just and supportable, especially those who are facing down the barrel of American imperialism, was not interested in going to jail like some guys, some draft resisters, from his generation who refused to be inducted an did not even think about the option of Canada or some such exile. Moreover the ethos of his town, his family, his whole social circle was not one that would have welcomed resistance, would not have been understood as a sincere if different way of looking at the world. Add to that two guys had been killed in Vietnam from his neighborhood and the social pressure to conform was too great to buck even if he had had stronger convictions then. 

Three days, maybe less after Frank was deposited at Fort Jackson in South Carolina in January, 1969 for basic training he knew he had made a great mistake, had had stronger anti-war feelings, maybe better anti-military feelings than he suspected and was heading for a fall. This was a period when draftees, those fewer and fewer men who were allowing themselves to be drafted, were being channeled toward the infantry, the “grunts,” the cannon-fodder (words he learned later but not known as he came in) and that was his fate. He was trained as an 11 Bravo, killer soldier. Eventually he got orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transport to Vietnam. On a short leave before he was requested to report Frank went back to Cambridge where he grew up and checked in with the Quakers which somebody had told him to do if he was going to challenge his fate in any way. The counsellor there advised him to put in a CO application at Fort Devens nearby. He did so, was turned down because as a Catholic objector he did not qualify under the doctrine of that church. (And he still held to his “just war” position mentioned above). He tried to appeal that decision through military then civilian channels with help from a lawyer provided by the Quakers (really their American Friends Service Committee) although that was dicey at best. Then, despite some counsel against such actions Frank had an epiphany, a day of reckoning, a day when he decided that enough was enough and showed up at parade field for the Monday morning report in civilian clothes carrying a “Bring The Troops Home” sign. Pandemonium ensued, he was man-handled by two beefy lifer-sergeants and was thrown in the stockade. Eventually he was tried and sentenced to six month under a special court-martial for disobeying orders which he served. He got out after during that stretch and continued to refuse to wear the uniform or do work. So back to the stockade and re-trial getting another six months, again for disobeying lawful orders. Fortunately that civilian lawyer had brought the CO denial case to the Federal Court in Boston on a writ of habeas corpus and the judge ruled that the Army had acted wrongly in denying the application. A few weeks later he was released. Frank said otherwise he still might forty plus years later be doing yet another six month sentence. So that was his story and there were probably others like that during that turbulent time when the Army was near mutiny.

Ralph said to himself after hearing the Jefferson story, yeah, these are the brethren I can work with, guys like Jefferson really won’t fold under pressure. Yeah, that’s right.           

5th Maine Peace Walk-Stop the War$ on Mother Earth-Indian Island (Penobscot Nation) to Kittery October 11-26

Stop the War$ on Mother Earth

 

Indian Island (Penobscot Nation) to Kittery

October 11-26

 

 

 

For immediate Release

 

Contact:  Bruce Gagnon (207) 443-9502

 

 

Peace and environmental activists from Maine and beyond will walk through large portions of our state from October 11-26 in order to bring the issues of endless war, environmental degradation, and climate change to the public’s attention.  The walk will begin on Indian Island (with a supper and ceremony hosted by the Penobscot Nation) and end in Kittery.

 

“We come together out of our deep concern about the many different wars being waged on Mother Earth, ranging from over-fishing, deforestation, and human-caused extinctions, to climate disruption and endless war,” said Russell Wray of Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST) in Hancock.

 

According to walk co-organizer Connie Jenkins from Orono, “Close to home we support the Penobscot Nation’s struggle for Justice for the River, opposition to the East/West Corridor, and conversion of war production to alternative energy at Maine shipyards.  We know from past experience of walking through rural and urban Maine that many people will be reached with our messages. We hope this spiritual act of walking and sharing conversation and food will help people in our state feel less isolated and despairing about the future.”  

 

The peace walk begins on Indian Island October 11 and will pass through Dexter, Pittsfield, Unity, Waterville, Augusta, Norway, Lewiston, Brunswick, Bath, Freeport, Portland, Saco, Kennebunk, York Beach, and Kittery.  The walk will average about 12 walking miles per day. (Some driving will be necessary between some of these communities.) In the evenings walkers will be fed at local churches and will often stay in local homes.)

 

The walkers will hold a protest at Bath Iron Works on October 20 at 3:00 pm and conclude on October 26 with a protest at the naval submarine yard in Kittery.  Both protests will call for the conversion of the Maine shipyards to alternative energy production such as public rail systems, solar power, wind turbines and tidal power systems.  Studies at UMASS-Amherst Economics Department reveal that building needed alternative energy rather than military production would create more jobs.  See the study at http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf

 

Buddhist monks and nuns from the Nipponzan Myohoji order will lead the non-violent peace walk.  Their order does peace walks all over the world.

 

Maine Walk for Peace is sponsored by:  Penobscot Nation; Smedley D. Butler Brigade Veterans For Peace (Boston area); Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space; Maine Veterans For Peace; Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST); Veterans For Peace (National); Peninsula Peace and Justice; Maine Natural Guard; Greater Brunswick PeaceWorks; Maine War Tax Resistance Resource Center; Veterans For Peace, Jim Harney Chapter 003; Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine; Alliance for the Common Good; Grandmothers Against the East/West Corridor; Resources for Organizing and Social Change (ROSC); Pax Christi Maine; Friends of the Piscataquis Valley; Concord Massachusetts Peace Vigil; Peace Action Maine; ESTIA Maine; Stop the East-West Corridor (STEWC); Maine Green Independent Party; Mission Board of State Street Church (Portland); Reversing Falls Sanctuary; Peace to All Beings; Waldo County Peace & Justice

 

The daily schedule and entire walk route can be found at Maine Veterans For Peace   http://vfpmaine.org/

 

- END -

The Killer Once Again-Jerry Lee's Back

CD REVIEWS

The Killer At The Top Of His Form

Jerry Lee Lewis-18 Original Greatest Hits, Jerry Lee Lewis, Rhino Records, 1984

The last time we heard the name Jerry Lee Lewis in this space was in connection with a rave review of his star-studded concert on DVD and in a CD in New York City in 2006 entitled The Last Man Standing. A couple of paragraphs below are taken from the concert and CD review because they certainly apply to this album which also gets a rave review from these quarters. The last paragraph details some of the highlights of this CD. If you need to go back to the Fifties there are plenty of his compilations to choice from but this one is a good primer. Here goes.

“…Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley. Yes those are the men who created rock and roll, as we know it. However in that list do not forget one Jerry Lee Lewis. Fate dealt him an uneven hand due to the foibles of his personal life (the subject of a movie, Great Balls of Fire, with Dennis Quaid) but his form of rockabilly/boogie woogie piano-driven music and madman presentation must be placed in the mix of influences that drove the best of early rock.

If for no other reason that that he is one of the few `still standing' from that generation it is nice to see what the Killer can do in his 71st year in concert in New York City in 2006 with a host of guests some old, some young. Clearly off these performances he has lost a couple of steps. Hell the kind of energy that Jerry Lee produced in the 1950's definitely had a short shelf life. There are some nice clips from that period intertwined with the concert, by the way.”

Of the 18 original hits from the Fifties that are included here are about 16 are must haves in any Jerry Lee compilation. When the Saints Go Marching In and Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee one can pass on (although rapper Kid Rock did an incredible cover version on PBS’s American Masters- Sun Records Legacy tribute). Starting with Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On to the salacious Big Legged Woman you get Jerry Lee when he could pound it out all day and all night. Get it.


Jerry Lee Lewis and His Friends, Jerry Lee Lewis and other artist, Enterprise, 1989

I have attempted to make a case over the past several months for recognizing the musical talents of Jerry Lee Lewis. I have in essence argued that while, for a while, Elvis was clearly ‘king of the hill’ by the time Jerry Lee got rolling he was very well positioned to challenge that role. In the long haul he probably has ‘won’ that distinction but that is the subject for endless, sports-like, controversy. What matters is how he rates in his career against his early performances. I have argued that his 2006 Last Man Standing performances on CD and DVD are the standard by which to judge his later work. I continue to stand by that premise. By that standard this 1989 performance in England comes up short.

In one of the ironies of his very controversial and scandal-filled life Jerry Lee goes back to London in this concert film. The irony, of course, is that it is his obtracization by the British over his marriage to his young cousin that broke the back of a very promising career. A little vignette at the beginning of the concert asking fans and his fellow musicians why they were there puts paid to that long ago silliness. Notwithstanding all the good vibes produced by the show before devoted fans the technical production here of the film itself (the music comes across tinny) and of the meshing among the musicians does not work overall. High School Confidential, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Goodnight, Irene (with Van Morrison), yes. The rest no. If you want to buy one DVD that reflects Jerry Lee when he rocks, is technically well done and has some very nice duos get that above-mentioned Last Man Standing. This, take it or leave it.


Jerry Lee Lewis: I Am What I Am, Jerry Lee Lewis and other, Enterprise, 2001

Apparently, I cannot leave this Jerry Lee Lewis thing alone. I have reviewed several of his CDs and DVDs in this space over the past several months as I have attempted argue for his proper place in the among the founders of rock and roll. This documentary is more in the way of a musical biography interspersing archival musical segments with the story of his life. And what a life. If one rocker epitomized the slogan drug, sex and rock and roll before the 1960’s the profile of Jerry Lee Lewis could serve as the model. Many marriages, many drug problems, many setbacks, many run ins with the law many… well, you get the picture. The real reason to get this film though is that early footage, like the Steve Allen Show performance of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. Those performances tell the tale. They tell why he could have been ‘king of the hill’. Hell, he didn’t do so badly after all. And he would be the first to tell you that. If you only need Jerry Lee’s music there are many good compilations, including an eight CD set that gives everything from the Sun Record period. If you like a little background get this.

From The Guys And Gals Who Know The Face Of War-The Smedleys-Veterans For Peace

From The Guys And Gals Who Know The Face Of War-The Smedleys-Veterans For Peace    

The Harp Beneath The Crown-With The Irish “Acre” In Mind

The Harp Beneath The Crown-With The Irish “Acre” In Mind 

By Seth Garth 

 

A word. Bob Johnson didn’t know a shabeen from a shillelagh but he was as Irish, was as driven by Irish passions as anyone who had ever come out of the Shamrock-drenched Acre section, the working poor section, of Riverdale out about fifty miles west of Boston (the river part came a few hundred years ago from its proximity to the small branch of the Connecticut River that bordered the town). For a fact, for a blessed hard-earned fact, he was not subjected to like his best friend Tommy Riley, best friend since about third grade in Miss Jacobs’ class where they met on the first day of school, the whole nine yards of the Irish litany but he grabbed most of the aura as he learned later when it counted for something.

Learned the inevitable eight hundred years of John Bull’s tyranny to the poor Irish peasant forbears who took it on the chin, especially since Cromwell’s time when “they” with their foreign tongues and foreign ways came and upended the land, grabbed every blessed thing that was good and proper, later the famine ships that brought later forbears to Amerika, and the eternal struggle to be free not consummated until after the events of the glorious uprising of Easter 1916 of song and legend (that latter something of a misbegotten myth created after formal independence since the “shawlies” of  Dublin originally spit on the work of the boyos in 1916 worried more about their paid packets sent from sons enmeshed in the damn British Army then slogging in the trenches in France). The equally inevitable bowing down before the dictates (from the dictator Pope such a word if uttered then would have stirred cries of blasphemy and mortal sin) with the decree to multiply, to out-populate the bloody Protestant wherever an Irishman laid down his head. The decrees to keep holy the holies, the prayer book in hand and to avoid like the devil (remember Adam’s grievous sin, the sin that took humankind east of Eden, out of the Garden) tempting any young colleens who had their rosaries around their dainty hands and their Bibles between their knees. And naturally the covenant to not “air the family dirty linen, the why of why was sister sent away to see Aunt Bernice, the why of why was brother Jimmy doing a hard five for armed robbery, to name a few secrets, in public. In short all that distinguished the life of the shanty Irish from the shanty Protestants whose betters ran the town still and whose religion cast them to the gates of hell.             

Our Bob Johnson was “spared” all that, or so he thought later on when he did seek out his Irish heritage, did see in that seeking that he had been as branded by the verities of their existence as Tommy had been. See Bob was the product of a “mixed” marriage, the marriage of a daughter of Hibernia and one of those bloody Protestants. Worse not even a local bloody Protestant, a known quantity of Methodist or Episcopalian, but a bloody Primitive Baptist (the real name for that denomination to distinguish it from other branches of those heathen faiths) from down in Appalachia, down in coal country, down in Hazard, Kentucky a name to conjure with in story and song. The how of that liaison had been a simple accident, an accident called World War II to hear Grandmother Dolan tell the sordid details (her term). Prescott Johnson had been stationed at the Riverdale Naval Depot after having seen his fair share of battles with the Marines in the Pacific wars while waiting his discharge papers. One night he had met Delores Dolan at a USO dance in Worchester and the “shiek,” the name that his Marine buddies called him which had been culled from his attractive to the ladies from down in Appalachia all the way to Camp Pendleton enbarkment ports had attached himself to her (and she to him).

After Prescott’s discharge from the Marines he and Delores had been married in the rectory of the Sacred Heart Church, the Dolan family church and good girl Delores’ favorite spot growing up. That rectory business which caused no end of anguish to Grandmother Dolan among her Riverdale ‘shawlie” friends had been necessary since a “heathen” Protestant could not be married in the main church to a believer, no way, and maybe it was the same today although Bob now far from the religion of his birth had not kept up with the doing of the old bastard Church of late. The other stipulation was that any children of that woe begotten marriage would be raised in the faith. And so they were. And so also those Primitive Baptists proved to be as prolific at reproduction as the bloody Irishman and produced, begot is what Preston proudly called his actions in his old age like some Old Testament patriarch, five sons before giving up the game.                    

That five son brood was nothing but a mistake, a social mistake that would have consequences not only of making Bob, the youngest son, aware of his Irish heritage in some oddly moving ways, but that would cause more anguish and teeth-gnashing that would have seemed possible to those two love-birds who exchanged vows that day in that benighted rectory in front of the disbelieving priest. Prescott, as it turned out, something that he was proud of but which others in Riverdale put to laughter to, was the son of a coal miner, had been a coal miner himself before he jumped the pits when the “Nips” invaded Pearl Harbor and he ran double-time to the recruiting offices to sign up rather than take his chance in the mines. He had regretted many thing but not that decision to leave the worn-out mines around Hazard.  The laughter part was that there was not a blessed coal mine within three hundred miles of Riverdale.  

This “joke,” cruel as it turned out, was to cause more hellishness than that poor benighted man deserved. Whatever teenage desires and passions had stirred Delores Prescott’s way got tangled up with the hard fact that Prescott was an unskilled laborer and hence even in the “golden age” 1950s subject to the harsh last hired, first fired (or laid off meaning the same thing when you had five hungry close in age boys to feed) rule of the jungle. And so to shanty Irish the “Acre” did Delores and her brood descend from the lace curtain Irish of her young girlhood. It was not a pretty sight, not pretty at all and she never really adjusted to the downward swoop.        

But she did raise the boys in the faith of her maidenhood, did make sure that they went to church on Sunday and made their yearly obligations, did their repetitive confessions which only grew more frequent as they grew older. Did make sure they had their seemingly annual for a while first communions, got confirmed and a fistful of other non-pagan rituals which took each boy in turn a long time to break from, to do good or evil, mostly the latter among the older boys. Despite that, despite all her entreaties she could not keep the four older boys from the wrong road, could not keep them from the lure of the wise guys who hung around Sully’s Variety Store and later around Sully’s Tavern (owned by the variety store owner’s brother who was using the store as a front for his bookie operation which was out in plain sight and even the cops on the beat placed their bets with old Sully). Could not keep them from their in turn jail time for assorted misdemeanors and felonies.

But that was their stories and their mother’s too not Bob’s who as the youngest after the older four boys turned out “bad” got picked up as a favorite by Grandfather Dolan (and to a lesser extent Grandmother Dolan too although she was as swayed as any “shawlie” by the bad ends of the older boys who she practically disowned once they went on their thieving ways). And maybe that extra attention made a slight difference for the old man was an uncanny and unrepentant Irish nationalist of the old school, meaning he sided with likes of James Connolly, the Commandant of the Irish Citizens Army in Easter 1916 not so much for his socialist vision as for hip pluck in taking on the bloody occupying British Army while they were in the throes of a life and death struggle in the field of mud-strewn France (and hence the old saying once again proved true that Mother England’s misfortune was Ireland’s fortune). Had had a cousin, once removed, Seamus who had fought the good fight at the Post Office with the brave lads (and Bob was later to find out brave woman as well but Grandfather Dolan was old-fashioned in that way as well about the women) and had barely escaped the clutches of the British with his life. The old man would forever curse the British for burning down the town, burning down Dublin, until at a very old age he realized that it was not their town they were burning down so it might as well have been in deepest Africa for all they cared.    

 

Meant too that Bob whom he always called “Robert my boyo” had his ears filled from early on about the whole freaking eight hundred years of John Bull’s tyranny, spitting out of the bastard Cromwell’s name, and of the exploits of the Fenian Brotherhood and of course endless details about 1916 and the fights after independence.          

All of that did not sink in until “the troubles” began up in the North in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was necessary to move from off the dime-to support the fight against the Protestant heathen who were down-pressing the Irish Catholic minority something like the ghost of his grandfather’s bull sessions came up and seized him in a fit of shamrock patriotism. He would raise serious money for the boyos and later never regretted like some did that the money bought guns and ammo. Thought back every time some frightened Irish politician would call on the diaspora to not supply the bravos with such “toys” to his grandfather’s words about the boys of 1916 taking guns from the Germans in their fight-in war the rules don’t mean a damn thing winning does and losing means the hang them high gallows. Yeah, so Tommy Riley, now the late Tommy Riley of blessed memory, was not the only one who got the drill who lived to see his green side blossom for all the world to see. And, hell, to this day Bob Dolan still does not know a shabeen from a shillelagh.

*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin 

 

 

 

Listen above to a YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. A song-catcher is an old devise, a mythological devise for taking the sound of nature, the wind coming down the mountains, the rustle of the tree, the crack a twig bent in the river, the river follow itself and making an elixir for the ears, simple stuff if you are brave enough to try your luck.  According to my sources Cecil Sharpe, a British musicologist looking for roots in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads in the 1850s, Charles Seeger, and maybe his son Peter too, in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Lomaxes, father and son, in the 1930s and 1940s)"discovered" the song in 1916 in the deep back hills and hollows of rural Kentucky. (I refuse to buy into that “hollas” business that folk-singers back in the early 1960s, guys and gals some of who went to Harvard and other elite schools and who would be hard-pressed to pin-point say legendary Harlan County down in Appalachia, down in the raw coal mining country of Eastern Kentucky far away from Derby dreams, mint juleps and ladies' broad-brimmed hats, of story and song insisted on pronouncing and writing the word hollows to show their one-ness with the roots, the root music of the desperately poor and uneducated. So hollows.)     

Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, certainly with not the wistful or sorrowful end of the love spectrum about false true lovers taking in the poor lass who now seeks revenge if only through the lament implied in the lyrics, although  even then I had been through that experience, more than once I am sorry to say. Or so I though at the time. I had heard the song the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening on my transistor radio up in my room in Olde Saco where I grew up to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ from down in Boston that I could pick up at that hour hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene while at Harvard hustling around like mad trying to get a record produced to ride the folk minute wave just forming and who, by the way, was not a guy who said or wrote "hollas," okay ). That night I heard the gravelly-voiced late folksinger Dave Van Ronk singing his version of the old song like some latter-day Jehovah or Old Testament prophet something that I have mentioned elsewhere he probably secretly would have been proud to acknowledge. (Secretly since then he was some kind of high octane Marxist/Trotskyist/Socialist firebrand in his off-stage hours and hence a practicing atheist.) His version of the song quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.

All this as prelude to a question that had haunted me for a long time, the question of why I, a child of rock and roll, you know Bill Haley, La Verne Baker, Wanda Jackson, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like had been drawn to, and am still drawn to the music of the mountains, the music of the hills and hollows, mostly, of Appalachia. You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago.

The Carter Family hard out of Clinch Mountain down in Virginia someplace famously arrived on the mountain stage via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when fledgling radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music, to fill the air and their catalogs. Fill in what amounted to niche music since the radio’s range back then was mostly local and if you wanted to sell soap, perfume, laundry detergent, coffee, flour on the air then you had to play what the audience would listen to and then go out and buy the advertiser’s products once they, the great unwashed mass audience, were filled into how wonderful they smelled, tasted, or felt after consuming the sponsors' products. The Seegers and Lomaxes and a host of others, mainly agents of the record companies looking to bring in new talent, went out into the sweated dusty fields sweaty handkerchiefs in hand to talk to some guy who they had heard played the Saturday night juke joints, went out to the Saturday night red barn dance with that lonesome fiddle player bringing on the mist before dawn sweeping down from the hills, went out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren to seek out that brother who jammed so well at that juke joint or red barn dance now repentant if not sober, went out to the juke joint themselves if they could stand Willie Jack’s freshly brewed liquor, un-bonded of course since about 1789, went down to the mountain general store to check with Mister Miller and grab whatever, or whoever was available who could rub two bones together or make the rosin fly, maybe sitting right there in front of the store. Some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.

But back to the answer to my haunting question. The thing was simplicity itself. See my father, Prescott, hailed (nice word, right) from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky, tucked down in the mountains near the Ohio River, long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there, get out of a short, nasty, brutish life as a coalminer, already having worked the coal from age thirteen, as had a few of his older brothers and his father and grandfather. During his tour of duty after having fought and bled a little in his share of the Pacific War against the Japanese before he was demobilized he had been stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base. During that stay he attended like a lot of lonely soldiers, sailors and Marines who had been overseas a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor in the late 1950s and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. (Ironically those moves south for cheaper labor were not that far from his growing up home although when asked by the bosses if he wanted move down there he gave them an emphatic “no,” and despite some very hard times later when there wasn't much work and hence much to eat he never regretted his decision at least in public to this wife and kids)

All during my childhood though along with that popular music, you know the big band sounds and the romantic and forlorn ballads that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player and the mother’s helper kitchen radio.

But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott, Junior was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain music and those sainted hills and hollows were in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.            

[Sometimes life floors you though, comes at you not straight like the book, the good book everybody keeps touting and fairness dictates but through a third party, through some messenger for good or ill, and you might not even be aware of how you got that sings-song in your head. Wondering how you got that sings-song in your head and why a certain song or set of songs “speaks” to you despite every fiber of your being clamoring for you to go the other way. Some things, some cloud puff things maybe going back to before you think you could remember like your awestruck father in way over his head with three small close together boys, no serious job prospects, little education, maybe, maybe not getting some advantage from the G.I. Bill that was supposed lift all veteran boats, all veterans of the bloody atolls and islands, hell, one time savagely fighting over a coral reef against the Japanese occupiers if you can believe that, who dutifully and honorably served the flag singing some misbegotten melody. A melody learned in his childhood down among the hills and hollows, down where the threads of the old country, old country being British Isles and places like that. The stuff collected in Child ballads back then in the 1850s that got bastardized by ten thousand local players who added their own touches and who no longer used the song for its original purpose red barn dance singers when guys like Buell or Hobart added their take on what they thought the words meant and passed that on to kindred and the gens. The norm of the oral tradition of the folk so don’t get nervous unless there had been some infringement of the copyright laws, not likely.  

Passed on too that sorrowful sense of life of people who stayed sedentary too long, too long on Clinch Mountain or Black Mountain or Missionary Mountain long after the land ran out and he, that benighted father of us all, in his turn sang it as a lullaby to his boys. And the boys’ ears perked up to that song, that song of mountain sadness about lost blue-eyed boys, about forsaken loves when the next best thing came along, about spurned brides resting fretfully under the great oak, about love that had no place to go because the parties were too proud to step back for a moment, about the hills of home, lost innocence, you name it, and although he/they could not name it that sadness stuck.

Stuck there not to bear fruit for decades and then one night somebody told one of the boys a story, told it true as far as he knew about that father’s song, about how his father had worked the Ohio River singing and cavorting with the women, how he bore the title of “the Sheik” in remembrance of those black locks and those fierce charcoal black eyes that pierced a woman’s heart. So, yes, Buell and Hobart, and the great god Jehovah come Sunday morning preaching time did their work, did it just fine and the sons finally knew that that long ago song had a deeper meaning than they could ever have imagined.]         

   

COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
(A.P. Carter)

The Carter Family - 1932

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning

They will first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

To make you think that they love you true

Straightway they'll go and court some other

Oh that's the love that they have for you

Do you remember our days of courting

When your head lay upon my breast

You could make me believe with the falling of your arm

That the sun rose in the West

I wish I were some little sparrow

And I had wings and I could fly

I would fly away to my false true lover

And while he'll talk I would sit and cry

But I am not some little sparrow

I have no wings nor can I fly

So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow

And try to pass my troubles by

I wish I had known before I courted

That love had been so hard to gain

I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden

And fastened it down with a silver chain

Young men never cast your eye on beauty

For beauty is a thing that will decay

For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden

How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away

******

ALTERNATE VERSION:

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a star on summer morning

They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

And make you think they love you so well

Then away they'll go and court some other

And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain

Where the ivy rocks are black as ink

I'd write a letter to my lost true lover

Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

For love is handsome, love is charming

And love is pretty while it's new

But love grows cold as love grows old

And fades away like the mornin' dew

And fades away like the mornin' dew