Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

By Guest Film Critic Lance Lawrence   

[Regular readers of this blog (and of the on-line American Film Gazette) can be excused if they are a little perplexed about this posting or at least the title of this posting since it appeared her in its original form a month or so ago. The reason that the piece is getting what I would call an encore performance is that the writer, Lance Lawrence, who has placed occasional pieces here in the past, felt that he had short-changed Ruth Snyder by writing her off as just another frustrated middle-aged dame going through an inevitable mid-life crisis down in nowhere Texas and had latched onto the first male than gives her a passing glance.  Here the glance was by a younger guy, hell, she was robbing the cradle since he was still in high school, still wet behind the ears. Wrote her off too as just another backwoods Texas gal doing what generations of Texas women have done before her and instead let the youngster, Sonny, the inevitable Sonny or Bubba or Mac of the Texas panhandle, steal her thunder. Lance hopes that this revised edition reflects better on the virtues of this hardy Texas woman who might have come up the hard-scrabble way in the West Texas night but who has some virtues in the clutch maybe formed out of that hard-scrabble existence. Peter Markin]      

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns like Houston, Austin, Johnson City, and Galveston in the state).

Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was “burned over” in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before. (As to that “colored” prejudice Ruth had played with Ella Speed the daughter of a black woman who took in washing in the small Negro-town section which her mother resorted to when she was too sick to do it herself but that ended well before puberty when such race-mixing was frowned upon. She never in public or private expressed hostility to the black race although she stuck to the “code” like everybody else in town. There had in any case been few Negros in town since the days in the late 1920s when the KKK strung up a couple of Negro men allegedly for touching white women.)          

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting of some woe begotten up against it farmer and his drag on the household unmarried daughter with no prospects, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind, the women of easy virtue, the whorehouse kind in oil fields male Texas as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. (She was a good-housekeeper and cook little good it did her in the end.) But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would soon after their marriage come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was to just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or two.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse between Tom and her as time went by and especially after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  (Although she did not lack for female friends around the neighborhood something inside her made her keep her distance, keep things to herself which she committed only to her diary or expressed in her finely wrought poetry which kept her afloat on those lonely long weeks alone.)  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system. Got his ass hauled to frozen Korea when hot war was afoot there to freeze his brain over to forget her. (As Duane told Sonny in one of his few, very few, candid and reflective moments before he shipped out for the unknown future he would never totally short of the grave get Jackie out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-cat oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town who had the dope on everything happening in town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye on Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Tom, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting strictly in that manner. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, any teenage kid. Nothing happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would met at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy and reportedly “played the flute” with him the universal high expression for giving a blow job) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with yes without hesitation. And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. Tom either never found out about it or didn’t care if he did know which hurt Ruth at first blush when she had been half doing that affair to make him jealous. That open secret though would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair, was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller, Rufus Wright, employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.        

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Third Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Third Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life     

By Frank Jackman

Over the first year of the Trump regime as this massive control freak regime has plundered right after right, made old Hobbes’ “life is short, brutish and nasty” idea seem all too true for a vast swath  of people residing in America (and not just America either) I have startled many of my friends, radical and liberal alike. Reason? For almost all of my long adult life I have been as likely to call, one way or another, for the overthrow of the government as not. This Republic if you like for a much more equitable society than provided under it aegis. This year I have been as they say in media-speak “walking that notion back a bit.” Obviously even if you only get your news from social media or twitter feeds there have been gigantic attempts by Trump, his cronies and his allies in Congress to radically limit and cut back many of the things we have come to see as our rights in ordinary course of the business of daily life. This year I have expressed deep concerns about the fate of the Republic and what those in charge these days are hell-bend of trying to put over our eyes.

Hey, I like the idea, an idea that was not really challenged even by the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in their respective times that I did not have to watch my back every time I made a political move. Now maybe just every move. This assault, this conscious assault on the lives and prospects of immigrants, DACAs, TPSers. Trans-genders, blacks, anti-fascists, Medicaid recipients, the poor, the outspoken media, uppity liberals, rash leftist radicals and many others has me wondering what protections we can count on, use to try to protect ourselves from the onslaught.

I, unlike some others, have not Cassandra-cried about the incipient fascist regime in Washington. If we were at that jackboot stage I would not be writing, and the reader would not be reading, this screed. Make no mistake about that. However there is no longer a question in my mind that the “cold” civil war that has been brewing beneath the surface of American society for the past decade or more has been ratchetted up many notches. Aside from preparing politically for that clash we should also be aware, much more aware than in the past, about our rights as we are confronted more and more by a hostile government, its hangers-on and the agents who carry out its mandates.

I have been brushing up on my own rights and had come across a small pamphlet put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a good source for such information in these times. I have placed that information below.

As the ACLU disclaimer states this information is basic, should be checked periodically for updating especially the way the federal courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme  Court have staked the deck against us of late. In any case these days if you are in legal difficulties you best have a good lawyer. The other side, the government has infinite resources, so you better get your best legal help available even if it cost some serious dough which tends to be the case these days with the way the judicial system works.

Most importantly when confronted by any governmental agents from the locals to the F.B.I. be cool, be very cool.  

The Intellectuals Next Time-With Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ Film Adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936)In Mind

The Intellectuals Next Time-With Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ Film Adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936)In Mind               

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Petrified Forest, starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood, 1936

The 1930s were a tough time all around. Tough for hungry mouths and wandering nomads during the Great Depression that sucked all the everyday air out of society. Made a lot of crazy things happen like the rise of right wing populism, you know, the Nazi, fascist, nationalist, ethnic cleansing crowd who wreaked havoc on an unsuspecting world then and their grandchildren and great grandchildren are prepping up for a revival here in the early part of the 21^st century. It was a time of retreats, mostly, certainly a time of retreat for the intellectuals, at least those intellectuals who believed that something close to human perfection with the rise of the machine age to create greater leisure and time for thoughtfulness could happen before the millennium. They got those hopes battered first by the deeply disturbing  horrors of World War I which decimated the flower of that generation and then by the popular reversions to blood and soil, allegiance solely to the tribe and the struggle of the survival of the fittest (this time not with clubs but with guns and death-wielding high tech destruction capacities). The film under review, the adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play The Petrified Forest set in, well, the ancient Petrified Forest out in Arizona when only the hearty (or weary) survive takes a candid look at the defeat of the intellectuals and the disturbing reemergence of the survival of the fittest doctrine writ large and writ in a way that old Charles Darwin would have been horrified by back in the 1930s.           

The plotline is simplicity itself when you think about it. Alan, a disillusioned vagabond intellectual, a writer, played by Leslie Howard, kind of drifting along in a world that he no longer recognizes as his home finds himself in a diner on the edge of the forest where a bright young writer-painter, Gabby, played by Bette Davis, is wasting away as a waitress in her father’s business and daydreaming about heading to France to be reunited with her cultivated mother. Problem: she has no dough or nobody give her the dough and so she stagnates out on the edge of the world.  He, and she, immediately sense they are kindred spirits but there in those times nothing that could be done about it. Additionally Alan has had all his dreams punctured and he is just playing out his string.           

Enter Duke Mantee, played by rising new start Humphrey Bogart, a deadeye gangster who is on the run from every police agency in the area for having created every possible act of murder and mayhem in his time. He holds the denizens of the diner captive awaiting some frill to meet him there before they head south of the border. While he is waiting Alan hits upon the bright idea that the best way that he can help the smitten Gabby is to have Duke kill him so that Gabby can claim his insurance policy and start a new life. After some off-hand negotiations Duke agrees to do the job. No sweat off his brow, all in a day’s work. When the coppers come to get him Duke does his dastardly deed while using some customer-hostages as human shields to get away. Alan symbolically dies in Gabby’s arms knowing that his act, his gesture, will insure her future. Insure maybe, just maybe that the next time the world turns in on itself in a fit of hubris that the intellectuals will not retreat like he did. Yes, the intellectuals next time.        

From The Marxist Archives On The 100th Anniversary Year Of Their Deaths-For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg

From The Marxist Archives On The 100th Anniversary Year Of Their Deaths-For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg

Workers Vanguard No. 1147 18 January 2019 TROTSKY LENIN For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg (Quote of the Week) One hundred years ago, on 15 January 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered in Germany at the behest of the capitalist government run by the Social Democrats, which unleashed the fascistic Freikorps to crush a workers uprising. After receiving news of the assassinations, V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, heaped further scathing condemnation on the social-democratic betrayers of the proletariat, including the wing led by Karl Kautsky, in the letter excerpted below. Upholding the revolutionary tradition of the early Communist International, this month we commemorate the “Three L’s”—Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Lenin himself, who died in January 1924. The foundation of a genuinely proletarian, genuinely internationalist, genuinely revolutionary Third International, the Communist International, became a fact when the German Spartacus League, with such world-known and world-famous leaders, with such staunch working-class champions as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, made a clean break with socialists like Scheidemann and Südekum, social-chauvinists (socialists in words, but chauvinists in deeds) who have earned eternal shame by their alliance with the predatory, imperialist German bourgeoisie and Wilhelm II. It became a fact when the Spartacus League changed its name to the Communist Party of Germany. Though it has not yet been officially inaugurated, the Third International actually exists.... Against Liebknecht are the Scheidemanns, the Südekums and the whole gang of despicable lackeys of the Kaiser and the bourgeoisie. They are just as much traitors to socialism as the Gomperses and Victor Bergers, the Hendersons and Webbs, the Renaudels and Vanderveldes. They represent that top section of workers who have been bribed by the bourgeoisie, those whom we Bolsheviks called (applying the name to the Russian Südekums, the Mensheviks) “agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement,” and to whom the best socialists in America gave the magnificently expressive and very fitting title: “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class.”... The foregoing lines were written before the brutal and dastardly murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the Ebert and Scheidemann government. Those butchers, in their servility to the bourgeoisie, allowed the German whiteguards, the watchdogs of sacred capitalist property, to lynch Rosa Luxemburg, to murder Karl Liebknecht by shooting him in the back on the patently false plea that he “attempted to escape” (Russian tsarism often used that excuse to murder prisoners during its bloody suppression of the 1905 Revolution). At the same time those butchers protected the whiteguards with the authority of the government, which claims to be quite innocent and to stand above classes! No words can describe the foul and abominable character of the butchery perpetrated by alleged socialists. Evidently, history has chosen a path on which the role of “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class” must be played to the “last degree” of brutality, baseness and meanness. Let those simpletons, the Kautskyites, talk in their newspaper Freiheit about a “court” of representatives of “all” “socialist” parties (those servile souls insist that the Scheidemann executioners are socialists)! Those heroes of philistine stupidity and petty-bourgeois cowardice even fail to understand that the courts are organs of state power, and that the issue in the struggle and civil war now being waged in Germany is precisely one of who is to hold this power—the bourgeoisie, “served” by the Scheidemanns as executioners and instigators of pogroms, and by the Kautskys as glorifiers of “pure democracy,” or the proletariat, which will overthrow the capitalist exploiters and crush their resistance. The blood of the best representatives of the world proletarian International, of the unforgettable leaders of the world socialist revolution, will steel ever new masses of workers for the life-and-death struggle. And this struggle will lead to victory. —V.I. Lenin, “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America” (21 January 1919)

*Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History-The Eight Hour Day Leagues In 21st (Oops) 19th Century America

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For The Eight Hour Day Leagues.

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

Slumming Through The Arts-Take Your Pick-With The 350th Anniversary Of Rembrandt’s Birth-The Infamous Elizabeth Stewart Gardner Heist And The Theft Of Cellini’s “Venus” In Mind

Slumming Through The Arts-Take Your Pick-With The 350^th Anniversary Of Rembrandt’s Birth-The Infamous Elizabeth Stewart Gardner Heist And The Theft Of Cellini’s “Venus” In Mind

By Sam Lowell

As long as I have been in the journalism racket, and like all professions to its denizens it is a racket or some other unsavvy designation to denote that you belong to the “club” as weary and wary as you are, I will never get over how one assignment begets another. Begets right here is exactly the right word since the genesis of this piece will be a short recent piece I did to give a nod to the 350^th anniversary of the birth one Rembrandt, last name van Rijn or something like that although nobody bothers with last names for guys like him just like with Elvis or Morgana. Moreover, that nod to the great painter was driven by the not so strange circumstance, to me anyway, that fellow writer here and budding amateur art critic Laura Perkins refused the assignment.

Refused, no, better held her nose up to say a few kind, hell, even unkind words, about a guy who knew how stir those dark-hued paints even if he couldn’t make his sitters less ugly as a rule. Refused, get this coming from a Tonio’s corner boy who had to learn the value of arts and culture the very hardest way,  based on some “principle” that these Dutch painters  (and Flemish, you know people from the Netherlands, Belgium, some who were held in thrall by various Spanish dukes and magicians, the low countries I think they call them collectively) were stuff shirts filled with dark palettes and darker motives who glad rag painted the rising bourgeoisie, the prosperous merchant and burghers who ran the big towns for filthy lucre. Laura showing deep roots as a child of the 1960s genteel. Worse, worst of all, and here I reluctantly have to agree with her, these “photoshop” artists, her term, not only painted those badass burghers swilling booze or doing penance, their ugly, warts and all wives and children, their earthly possession and their larders but some of the ugliest and frightening paintings of fish and fowl she had ever seen.

Since I have in the past done some articles on the arts, and in the interest of transparency have been something of an advisor to Ms. Perkins as she has delved through the art world our editor picked me to do the Rembrandt chore. Which was fair enough and no bitterness since as I pointed out in that prior article my take on the Dutch and Flemish masters is that after the holy goof stuff put out by guys who should have known better like Fra Angelina and Kid De Leo, from the Middles Ages totally dedicated to the hot off the shelves cult of the Virgin Mary, Christ’s birth and endless baby pictures, his late in life crucifixion, sex life (including the long rumored affair with the street whore Mary Magdalene which paved her way to quick sainthood and plenty of lurid painted pornography showing plenty of skin from her so-called past, every freaking martyred saint and sinner they could patronize including some bum named Sebastian who took plenty of arrows for his Lord and later when some of the citizenry had money rich bastards they were a breath of fresh air (minus the foul fowl and fish, and I might add maybe a few of those over-the-top fruit bowls and fake flower bouquets). So, I was all in. Did my little tribute to master artist Rembrandt and then done. Not a bad piece.

Well not quite done since during that piece I mentioned that I still longed for the day when those stolen Rembrandts (and other paintings and sketches, thirteen in all) from the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston come back home and fill in those now long-standing empty spaces that startle even the most sophisticated patron when you go to the piazza. After I had already submitted that little piece with that sullen attachment I got to thinking how easy that heist had been, a couple of rummies posing as public coppers show up late one night, tie up some rent-a-cop making minimum wage and then start working the rooms and how baffling the selection process since there were plenty of other items that I would have taken for my “wish list.”

Sorry but the Rembrandts, event at big seascape and certainly not some cheapjack sketch of the artist as a young man would not have been in the top twenty although Botticelli, Reubens, Holbein the Younger too, would have been, no question. It seems obvious that if the whole prank was not an inside job, that the rent-a-cop had not gotten his, then the thieves were working off a list for some art specialist, maybe somebody like Rudy Deval out of the New Wave Gallery in New York City who fell down soon after the heist but was known to have deep pockets and a tight ass secure room in his house to fondle the items in complete privacy. Rudy was let off the hook though when he was found face down in a few feet of water in the Hudson around Ardsley having about three dollars to his name that he could call his own. That made me think of Wall Street guys, not the cold call bother you stockbrokers but what today are called hedge fund managers, guys who would have the dough to pay out for the job and have no concern about the public losing some very valuable art objects to look at and could be closed mouth enough about their new toys to keep them for as long as necessary. This is all speculation on my part  although plenty of people have made a livelihood and some prizes out of less than I have spun in any case which is basically what is left of the scandalous Isabella story, that and those still haunting empty frames.

Moving on. The Gardner theft, although far and away the biggest art heist of them all except maybe when Francois Villon and his toughs looted half of France’s art collection got me thinking about another infamous, if not as well known, art theft in Paris back in the 1960s at the old Lafayette Museum when a thief, or thieves, grabbed the old sculptor Cellini’s “Venus” without any heavy lifting. (Let’s be clear here for those with short memories or who are too young to remember the outcry after that caper this is not that cheapjack “saltcellar” which I say good riddance to piece grabbed by thieves in Vienna, that was in 2003). Probably now you could not even come close to grabbing this good stuff, even a dinky thing like “saltcellar” from free-for-all Vienna which in the old days you could have taken and put in your back pocket and walked away without a minimum wage guard bothering you on your journey. Not today with all the modern technology in museums to guard against craziness and keep insurance premiums down although maybe some young scalawag would attempt such a daring deed just to see if it was doable. Test the waters. Maybe see that Gardner caper as a sideshow.                      

                  

But back to the Cellini theft. That was a piece of work (and not a bad piece of sculpture although that broken nose detracted from those nice long lines of her torso, a textbook example of how to grab art without getting a few slugs to the head for your troubles. Naturally it was an inside job it is almost impossible to see these big jobs carried out with a little inside info at least. The beauty of this one was that the mastermind thief, Harry, but don’t get hung up on names because they all used aliases, actually had been hired as an art theft specialist employed by the museum’s curator to make security tight when the Venus was to be put on public display after the director had persuaded a private party to lend it for the show. There would be some outside help as usual and necessary for such endeavors if for no other reason than a smooth getaway but let me map this one out.

Harry and his accomplice, Maisy, a bright young thing he was trying to get under the silky sheets with and whom he was also trying to impress with his prowess as a master thief since she was not the type to have been impressed by art coppers pulled this one off one rainy night. One of Harry’s brightest moves was to bring Maisy in, to get her deep inside the conspiracy and the really clever part was that her final job on the caper for which she was eminently qualified would be to act as one of the scrubwomen who keep museums and other places clean for the clientele. Nice move, very nice. One fine day, well rainy day that is important, the pair just wait for the museum to close and then hide in the men’s bathroom after the minimum wage guards do their perfunctory check of the stalls. No sweat.

After an inside check of the guard routines around the building Harry and Maisy go to work first opening up the room where all the security, state of the art for the day such as it was, all bells and whistles nothing else, alarms were located. With a wire-cutter and baling wire Harry disarmed the alarms in about thirty seconds. Next and critical to the plan Harry had to disarm the sensor ray fields that were protecting the statue itself. Here is the magic part. Harry had been the guy who wrote the code, had set the whole light show operation around the statue up himself so he just disarmed that unit in another thirty seconds, maybe. Needless to say Harry snatched the Venus and put it in a lunch bucket in the guards’ rec room. Not just any lunch bucket but Maisy’s now on her knees scrubbing floors like a pro. When the guards came around and find the damn thing missing from its pedestal they went crazy as Maisy in the confusion headed back to the guards’ room and a waiting Harry who has figured out a way through the basement. Nice work, right.                   

Harry, retired to some unknown island in the Pacific, minus Maisy when he decided one share was better than tow shares and dumped her body in a garbage bin outside the museum wound up writing about it for the general public to learn who the great art thief of the period was. Here’s the real beauty of the scam as the story unfolded. That displayed Venus that Harry had spent so much time setting up with high-end security was bogus, was the work of that so-called private collector who loaned the piece to the museum, a master art forger. Slick Harry obviously knew this. Get this he had some American financier (who else in the post-World War II “American Century” days) lined up to buy the fake, no questions asked on his authority as an art specialist once he knew it was on the market.  He had another big pay day when some hedge fund private collector doubled his pay-off and through that same party Harry was able to sell the real deal to one of those hedge fund managers with closed mouths and plenty of cash for two million, not much now for art but not inconsiderable back then. Four million, not bad. Beat that.       

Labor Day In Cambridge -September 2011

Click on the headline to link to a BostonIndyMedia post for the Labor Day 2011 celebration in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Markin comment:

We need many, many more demonsrations of labor solidarity, and many, many more labor militants on the streets. Pronto.

*The Boston Labor Day Rally/March- Labor Must Rule- Fight For A Workers Party

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indy Media entry for the 2010 Boston Labor Day March and Rally.

*Labor's Untold Story-Vachel Lindsey's Tribute To Governor Altgeld And The Pardoner Of The Surviving Haymarket Martyrs

Click on title to link to Vachel Lindsay's poetic tribute to ex-Illinois Governor John Altgeld, the man who pardoned the surviving Haymarket martyrs.

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

What Is In A Name-Plenty When You Are Taking An Ill-Advised Trip Down Memory Lane With No Direction Home, Alone And Some Damn Headlights Gather You In

What Is In A Name-Plenty When You Are Taking An Ill-Advised Trip Down Memory Lane With No Direction Home, Alone And Some Damn Headlights Gather You In

By Allan Jackson

Sometimes a nostalgia piece gets out of hand, goes way beyond the original intent. Often brought on by some side issue that had been buried so long you had forgotten that way back when that thing counted for plenty. Of course when you apply the getting out of hand theory to the work of any of the older writers here who literally came out of the same school then the frame of reference can only be about the various corner boy gradation experiences from about fourth grade on to maybe our early twenties. Thus I was able to forthrightly state in a recent article on what essentially amounted to a tough drill in the class dynamics of American society, North Adamsville section that one of the standard reasons given for many of the articles produced in this publication is that they relate to a certain demographic that many of the writers here are still standing members of-what is loosely called the Generation of ’68. The Generation of ’68 as reflected in 1960s life in the Acre section of North Adamsville where I, we, grew up as much as the great upheaval some of us were part of later that decade  known various as the counter-culture, the descend into hell and a resulting cultural war without end, and without reason. Some aspects looked at from the old days in the neighborhood, as here, frankly have no rhyme or reason except as they pertain to the life of the Acre, and its environs. Today we are about unpleasant memories of being stiffed by forces we had no control over. About the class issue that would later haunt a number of us, but which went by the name-as always back then-girl trouble.  

Seth Garth, Sam Lowell, maybe Bart Webber, don’t quote me or him on this one, have gone endlessly over the nuts and bolts of what our corner boy existences were in the old Acre section. That desperate poverty which affected every aspect of life in the town and which we became painfully aware of as we grew older and the beast could not be contained any longer. But the Acre which actually protected us for a while from the harsh realities of what “our betters,” my mother’s ragged term for non-Acre people, those who were dead ass aimed at the fruits such as they were of the 1950s golden age that missed us, not kissed us, as only one section of the town, representing one segment of the high school life although the most desperately poor section and therefore with its own challenges. There was as the case usually is a “better” section, the Hills, where the up and coming families lived in the new ranch houses which were all the craze back then among the upwardly mobile.

The Hills were actually set on a peninsula across from Adamsville Beach and separated from the immediate Atlantic section, slightly better than the adjacent Acre by a long causeway that practically speaking might as well have served as a Berlin Wall, a Mexican Border Wall, a free fire zone to keep the ruffian hordes out. Thus unless you were very inquisitive about the place you had no real reason in early youth to go there, or to know anybody there. They had their own Seal Rock Elementary School which I would not actually see until sometime in high school. The flow of kids, the mixing of school-age populations to reflect a broader social fabric (nice, right) did not begin in earnest until junior high school. If anybody has paid attention Bart Webber spent a fair amount of ink describing how the post-World War II baby boom created the need to break down the previously six grade high school into a four- year school by the addition of a separate junior high school for seventh and eighth grades. This is the real melting pot if you will of the Hills, Atlantic, and Acre Rock student populations. My oldest brother Rex who played sports and other activities and who went through the former six-year regime at North Adamsville High told me that he had zero friends from the Hills during his time there. Had exactly one date, or maybe it was one girlfriend from the Hills and he was a very handsome looking guy.

After running through all that chatter I got to the heart of the matter. Small town, yes, but certain social norms were not generally broken prior to the creation of that junior high school and even then it was a close thing. We in the Acre, we who were defined by our being corner boys, had no particular set of expectations except nobody snitched to nobody for no reason-or else. The social whirl in the Hills was something else. Maybe it was parents, maybe ministers, maybe who knows misbegotten teachers but those in the Acre were cursed with a stigmata, with the sign. See the Hills were something like the last stronghold in town for the devotees of the Protestant Reformation who originally landed in the town held the reins for at least a couple of centuries before the “bloody” Irish Roman Catholic and Italian dittos came crashing in to fill up the working class jobs at the granite quarries or the shipyards.

It is hard today having been through eight million relationships with all kinds of different people from all kinds of backgrounds to have heard that we of the Acre were some kind of cretins, some social refuse. This was not some fiat from above but, I hope the reader was being attentive, those very girls with whom we had the everlasting “girl trouble.” As we corner boys budded into young hormonally charged teenagers we had had our fill of those Irish Catholic girls from the neighborhood who had as we called it-rosary beads in their hands and a Bible between their knees. Mixing, or so we thought, with the Hills girls whom we knew were not Catholics since there were many Protestant churches in the Hills but no Catholic church although I am not sure what we thought they were would give us more opportunities or so we thought.           

After that mouthful I aimed my arrows at one Jill Hoffman (see the dreaded rollcall list below taken from the membership roll of the Protestant youth group over in the Hills with her name listed right along with the others). Jill was this delicate flower who I (and plenty of other Acre, Atlantic and Hills guys too) dreamed dreams about. She and I would actually talk in class and afterward too since we both loved literature. One day I decided to make my big move and ask her to the school dance that next weekend, that next Friday I think is when they held them. Now this is eighth grade not grad school or something like that so I was innocent enough to ask. Here is her reply-Girls from the Hills don’t go anyplace, anytime or under any conditions with heathen (her word gotten from who knows where) boys from the Acre. In short we Hill girls stick with our Protestant boys.

End of story. A tough way to grow up but that is the facts. Well not quite the end and this has caused some rancor among the old corner boys who think that while I had Jill’s ass nailed correctly to the cross I had conveniently forgotten about another girl from the Hills who while as rabidly connected to some Protestant ethic (she told me once that her minister would go fire and brimstone over the “Catholic” problem in the town, warning, forewarning really all the young Luthers to steer clear). This girl, Ginny Garland, (see that same rollcall for her name) would actually talk to us, would talk to me and be friendly in the way almost any civilized girl was friendly back then. Ginny was a big rangy girl, for the times, not beautiful in any conventional sense but her bright eyes and sweet smile were worth fighting over. Here’s the big break-through Ginny, when asked, accepted corner boy Donald White’s invitation to the senior prom. Said sure. So some ice was broken in the mid-20^th century. From what I hear they had a good time. So there. (Well not “so there” since I would be very remiss if I didn’t say that Donald White would later lay down his beautiful head in some hellhole battlefield in Vietnam and whose name is now enshrined in granite on town hall memorial and down in black granite in Washington. Somebody told me once that Ginny would occasionally go to that town memorial but I don’t know that for a fact. 

               

The President Of Rock And Roll- Chuck Berry’s “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll” (1987)-A Music Film Review

The President Of Rock And Roll- Chuck Berry’s “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll” (1987)-A Music Film Review 

DVD Review

By Associate Music Critic Lance Lawrence 

Hail, Hail Rock and Roll, starring Chuck Berry with a big part for The Rolling Stone’s Keith Richard and appearances by a number of rock and roll legends like Linda Ronstadt, Eric Clapton, Etta James, directed by Taylor Hackford, 1987 

Earlier this year (2017) when the legendary “first wave” rock and roller Chuck Berry passed away I startled a number of my colleagues by declaring Chuck Berry the first black president here in America.  (That “first wave” meaning present at the creation 1950s times not the later 1960s revival with the British Invasion led by the Beatles and The Rolling Stones which also lifted Mr. Berry and others back to the limelight from those who worshipped that earlier sound in Europe after it had faded almost from view in America except among a few aficionados.) Of course my frame of reference was not directly political since we all know that Bill Clinton was the first “black” president but rather that Chuck Berry was the first president of rock and roll, the thing that counted for the young back in the 1950s.   

At that time not only had I startled some colleagues with that little bombshell but I apparently nettled the regular music critic here (and at the on-line American Music Gazette) and my boss, Zack James, when I argued that while Elvis may have been the “king” back in the day Chuck was the Chief. Here is what I said there:

“I am one who, belatedly, has come to recognize that Elvis (I don’t think I need to mention a last name but if you need one just ask your parents or grandparents and you will get your answer in two seconds flat) was indeed the “king” of rock and roll. He took, as Sam Phillips the legendary founder of Sun Records and first finder of Elvis in old Memphis town who has been quoted many, many times as saying, the old black rhythm and blues songs and put a white, a white rockabilly, face on the genre and made the crossover in a big way. So I will not argue that point with Zack. Will not argue either that Elvis’ act, those swirling rotating off their axis hips make all the girls, hell, all the women sweat. Point Zack.                          

“But see I am a good republican (with a very purposeful small ‘r”) and as such I believe that the “divine right of kings,” the theory that Zack is apparently working under was discredited a few hundred years ago when Oliver Cromwell and his crowd took old Charles I’s head off his shoulders. And while I would have wished no such fate for the “king” his influence other than for purely sentimental reasons these days is pretty limited.

“A look at this CD selection will tell a more persuasive tale. Sure early Elvis, Good Rockin’ Tonight, Jailhouse Rock, It Alright, Mama spoke to 1950s teenage angst and alienation read: lovesickness, but beyond that he kind of missed the boat of what teenagers, teenagers around my way and around Zack’s older brother’s way, wanted to hear about. Guys wanted to hear about anyway. Cars, getting girls in cars, and hanging out at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants looking for girls. In short thoughts of sex and sexual adventure. This may seem kind of strange today. Not the sex and sexual adventure part but the car and drive-ins part.

“Those were the days of the “golden age” of the automobile when every guy, girls too, wanted to learn how to drive and get a car, or at least use the family car for those Friday and Saturday night cruising expeditions for which we lived. (I hear anecdotally all the time about 20 somethings who don’t have their driver’s license and are not worried by that horrendous fact. Could care less about car ownership in the age of Uber and Lift. Madness, sheer madness).  Cars for running to the drive-in to check out who was at the refreshment stand, cars for hitting “lovers’ lane if you got lucky. For that kind of adventure you needed something more than safe Elvis, safe Elvis who made your own mother secretly sweat so you know where he was at. Say you found some sweet sixteen, found some sweet little rock and roller, say you found that your parents’ music that was driving you out of the house in search of, say you were in search of something and you really did want to tell Mister Beethoven to hit the road. Needed some help to figure out why that ever-loving gal was driving you crazy when all you really wanted to worry about was filling the gas tank and making sure that heap of your was running without major repairs to cramp your style.             

“Take a look at the lyrics in the selections in this CD: Maybelline, Sweet Little Sixteen, Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Nadine, Johnny B. Goode, Roll over Beethoven. Then try to tell me that the man with the duck walk, the man with the guitar from hell, the man who dared to mess with Mister’s women (hell we have all been beaten down on that one since Adam’s time, maybe before) one Chuck Berry didn’t speak to us from the depth of the 1950s. Hail to the Chief.”     

     

I made my case before I had watched or rather re-watched the music film under review the Keith Richards-inspired Hail, Hail Rock and Roll centered on the life and times of Chuck Berry (until 1986) and two concerts he gave in honor of his hometown Saint Louis from where he started out to change the music landscape of the young. This film I will force-feed if necessary to one Zack James, boss or no boss, to put paid to the “controversy” around who was who the “king” or the “president”

Naturally the film had to deal with the central question of the expansion of rock and roll from its rockabilly and rhythm and blues beginnings. So naturally as well the question of race in the beginning to heat up start of the black civil rights movement days came to the fore as it did in every aspect of social life in segregated America. As for music Sam Phillips thought he had one answer-get a white guy to swing and sway like a black guy and make all the women, white women now, sweat. And Sam was right. But as fully documented here one Chuck Berry had an idea that he could do the reverse slam-dunk cross-over with lyrics and a back beat that the sullen 1950s red scare Cold War benighted teens with discretionary money to spend would gravitate to. And Chuck was right. Right even as the black and white kids broke down the barriers between them in any given concert or dance hall. Once again hail to the Chief.

[That Saint Louis concert produced many great Chuck Berry performances of his greatest hits both by himself and by his guest artists. Beyond Chuck’s outstanding performances stand-out work was done by the guy who inspired the guy who thing Keith Richards being Keith Richards one of the greatest guitarists around and Etta James. But for my money Linda Ronstadt stole the show with her booming rendition of Chuck’s Back in the U.S.A.]  

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Phil Och's "Joe Hill"-In Honor Of The Old Wobblies (IWW)

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

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Markin comment:

This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Ochs who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest, for the most part, just turned on preference.

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Joe Hill Lyrics

F Fsus F C (open D string/then back on 2nd fret)
Joe Hill come over from Sweden shores
F Fsus F C
Looking for some work to do
F C Am
And the Statue of Liberty waved him by
C (Open D string/place finger on G st. 2nd fret/return)
As Joe come a sailing through, Joe Hill
C G7 C
As Joe come a sailing through.

Oh his clothes were coarse and his hopes were high
As he headed for the promised land
And it took a few weeks on the out-of-work streets
Before he began to understand
Before he began to understand

And Joe got hired by a bowery bar
sweeping up the saloon
As his rag would sail over the baroom rail
Sounded like he whistled on a tune
You could almost hear him whistling on a tune

And Joe rolled on from job to job
From the docks to the railroad line
And no matter how hungry the hand that wrote
In his letters he was always doing fine
In his letters he was always doing fine

Oh, the years went by like the sun goin' down
slowly turn the page
And when Joe looked back at the sweat upon his tracks
He had nothing to show but his age
He had nothing to show but his age

So he headed out for the California shore
There things were just as bad
So he joined the industrial workers of the world
'Cause, The union was the only friend he had
'Cause, The union was the only friend he had

Now the strikes were bloody and the strikes were black
as hard as they were long
In the dark of night Joe would stay awake and write
In the morning he would raise them with a song
In the morning he would raise them with a song

And he wrote his words to the tunes of the day
To be passed along the union vine
And the strikes were led and the songs were spread
And Joe Hill was always on the line
Yes Joe Hill was always on the line

Now in Salt Lake City a murder was made
There was hardly a clue to find
Oh, the proof was poor, but the sheriff was sure
Joe was the killer of the crime
That Joe was the killer of the crime

Joe raised his hands but they shot him down
he had nothing but guilt to give
It's a doctor I need and they left him to bleed
He made it 'cause he had the will to live
Yes, He made it 'cause he had the will to live

Then the trial was held in a building of wood
And there the killer would be named
And the days weighed more than the cold copper ore
Cause he feared that he was being framed
Cause he found out that he was being framed

Oh, strange are the ways of western law
Strange are the ways of fate
For the government crawled to the mine owner's call
That the judge was appointed by the state
Yes, The judge was appointed by the state

Oh, Utah justice can be had
But not for a union man
And Joe was warned by summer early morn
That there'd be one less singer in the land
There'd be one less singer in the land

Now William Spry was Governor Spry
And a life was his to hold
On the last appeal, fell a governor's tear
May the lord have mercy on your soul
May the lord have mercy on your soul

Even President Wilson held up the day
But even he would fail
For nobody heard the soul searching words
Of the soul in the Salt Lake City jail
Of the soul in the Salt Lake City jail

For 36 years he lived out his days
And he more than played his part
For his songs that he made, he was carefully paid
With a rifle bullet buried in his heart
With a rifle bullet buried in his heart

Yes, they lined Joe Hill up against the wall
Blindfold over his eyes
It's the life of a rebel that he chose to live
It's the death of a rebel that he died
It's the death of a rebel that he died

Now some say Joe was guilty as charged
And some say he wasn't even there
And I guess nobody will ever know
'Cause the court records all disappeared
'Cause the court records all disappeared

Say wherever you go in this fair land
In every union hall
In the dusty dark these words are marked
In between all the cracks upon the wall
In between all the cracks upon the wall

It's the very last line that Joe Will wrote
When he knew that his days were through
"Boys, this is my last and final will
Good luck to all of you
Good luck to all of you"

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-A Working Class Anthem For Labor Day- " Solidarity Forever"

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-A Working Class Anthem For Labor Day- " Solidarity Forever"

A YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger, appropriately enough, performing old Wobblie songwriter Ralph Chaplin's labor anthem, Solidarity Forever. A good song to hear on our real labor holiday, the holiday of the international working class movement, May Day, but even today on this country's consciously competing holiday.

If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round At 83

By Music Critic Bart Webber

Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, Josh Breslin, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square with the big names, some small too which one time I made the subject of a series, or rather two series entitled respectively Not Bob Dylan and Not Joan Baez about those who for whatever reason did not make the show over the long haul, passing through the Club 47 Mecca and later the Café Nana and Club Blue, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. Those are the places where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Collins and a whole crew of younger folksingers, some who made it like Tom Rush and Joni Mitchell and others like Eric Saint Jean and Minnie Murphy who didn’t, like  who all sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger got their first taste of the fresh breeze of the folk minute, that expression courtesy of the late Markin, who was among the first around to sample the breeze.

(I should tell you here in parentheses so you will keep it to yourselves that the former three mentioned above never got over that folk minute since they will still tell a tale or two about the times, about how Dave Van Ronk came in all drunk one night at the Café Nana and still blew everybody away, about catching Paxton changing out of his Army uniform when he was stationed down at Fort Dix  right before a performance at the Gaslight, about walking down the street Cambridge with Tom Rush just after he put out No Regrets/Rockport Sunday, and about affairs with certain up and coming female folkies like the previously mentioned Minnie Murphy at the Club Nana when that was the spot of spots. Strictly aficionado stuff if you dare go anywhere within ten miles of the subject with any of them -I will take my chances here because this notice, this passing of legendary Rosalie Sorrels a decade after her dear friend Utah Phillips is important.)

Those urban locales were certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.

Yeah, came barreling like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than lost loves and longings.  

Rosalie Sorrels could write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me at those moments)

Rosalie Sorrels as one would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and thoughts of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels 

Solidarity Forever
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the union makes us strong

When the union's inspiration
through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater
anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker
than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.


They have taken untold millions
that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle
not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power;
gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.


In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies,
magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old
For the Union makes us strong.


This labor anthem was written in 1915 by IWW songwriter and union organizer Ralph Chaplin using the music of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. These song lyrics are those sung by Joe Glazer, Educational Director of the United Rubber Workers, from the recording Songs of Work and Freedom, (Washington Records WR460)