I write a letter to my daughter, Kristen Carr, every year on the anniversary of her death. This is this year’s version.
Dear Kristen,
The Kristen Ann Carr Fund
All year long I think about writing this letter. I don’t jot down a single note, though. I don’t want to talk about what the last 24 vears have meant. I want to get to what’s going on right now, today, in the minutes between when I rise and whenever this letter gets finished.
Just this minute I’m scared, if not blank. Scared and horrified.
So on the morning of January 3, 2017, I stand exactly where I stood on January 3, 1993. This cruel and narrow precipice looks into the nastiest chasm in the universe, so I’m prepared (if anyone can be even with a quarter century rehearsal) to experience
nothing but bad news and misery. Two dozen years late, Sisyphus got nothing on me. And I’ve got nothing on him.
Well, maybe one thing. Sisyphus was, literally, doing time for offenses against the gods. Kristen Carr didn’t develop a lethal cancer as a punishment from any god nor was I sentenced to observe its consequences, let alone figure out what the meaning of them might be.
The very worst part of your cancer,
for me anyhow, is that it was absolutely random. Nothing was calling you home, you hadn’t done anything wrong and neither had anyone else, and you didn’t live in a war zone. Just….zap, the world turned upside down, reason erased, emotional chaos.
am not proclaiming your complete innocence, Kristen, I am simply reporting it.
It’s just the way biology works sometimes: A process begins which the body has succeeded in defeating, tens (or hundreds or thousands) of times every day
for almost 22 years.
It just does. If cancer is evil, then its evil is the initial betrayal of the life process that is the body’s original sin against itself.
Nothing intentional needs to happen.
There’s really not any ”if” about the evil. But what does that mean? That drawing breath is lethal? That life is one long cheat and we’d have been better off without it?
I saw you with your boyfriend. I saw you with your puppy. I saw you with your mother and your sister, and with me, and with the nurses who wept at your bedside. And I saw the 1200 people at your funeral, and I will see two or three dozen people tonight, who remember you
as niece or neighbor, childhood friend or college roommate. All of whom, if they let themselves travel to the best of it, or even the worst, are
shaken or shattered by the death of this child who had grown up so beautifully and so beautiful, and if I look at that picture of you holding somebody’s baby but not your own one more time, my heart may not fail but, it’ll sure seem like it ought to.
Somebody once asked me why I thought that no one had ever died of a broken heart and I told him, “Because my wife is still alive.” I could have said my daughter. I could have said her boyfriend.
Nevertheless the purpose of this letter, or of any of the others I’ve written you annually, is not to chafe against the reality of your death but to celebrate the spirit with which you lived. “Darkness cannot put out darkness, only light can do that,” said Dr. Martin Luther King. And then he said, “And I also say to ya, I’ve also decided to stick with love.”
You carried the light so gracefully, Kristen, you carried it like its champion, and on a really good day, you were indeed just that. And on a really bad one….well, you lost your hair not to the disease but to the medicine. You were beautiful then, and all those who saw you (and there were quite many) saw your love and the reflection of the love you received shine out. This is not a metaphor. I was there.
Is this banal? I don’t think so. Today—right now, this minute–people are scared, really scared, more scared than I have ever seen people in this country and scared not only of a maniac in the White House –we’ve had those before. People are scared of each other, in numbers and on a scale I have never seen before.
write you each year out of my sense that you and Sasha were the greatest gifts that ever could have been given to me. People still act like my greatest feat was making the best seller list, or having my name in the paper or my voice on the radio. But I know, with no shadow of a doubt, that the best thing I ever did in my life was participate with your mother in seeing you and Sasha into adulthood.
The gift you
gave was love.
So I am sticking with love, too. A clumsy tool, sometimes, but it’s about the best one any of us have.
Thankfully, it is enduring, way past anyone’s lifetime if we let it be.
are always there for me and I don’t have a clue about how to express the comfort
that gives. Well, there’s one…
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The Kristen Ann Carr Fund
I write a letter to my daughter, Kristen Carr, every year on the anniversary of her death. This is this year’s version.
Dear Kristen,
In a book I’ve been reading, it is said of a father whose daughter has died at about the same age you did, “Theo was the world’s greatest worrier, but the one thing he didn’t worry about anymore was whether or not his daughter was safe.”
Preposterous.
Parents, or any parent worth the name, worry about their kids all the time. When you were in grade school, I worried every morning that you and Sasha wouldn’t make it to school safely—across one avenue, with a stop light and safety guards.
It’s what you worry about that changes. I don’t worry if you still have cancer. I don’t worry about how you fare in the afterlife. I don’t worry if you miss us as much as we miss you. I do not ever waste a second of my own precious time worrying whether you loved me. Those would be silly worries.
Worrying whether I love you would be just plain dumb. If I am wrong about the existence of an afterlife (speaking of ridiculous things to worry about), then you knew how I felt in the first second after you left us.
You gave, me, your Mom, Sasha and Michael all kind of reasons to know what you knew. Not because you were preparing for
because you were in the midst of it and that’s how we love one another.
But even though you loved me and I love you, there are still worries worth some time and energy. Those are there now as they were yesterday and they will be tomorrow. Does anyone else remember you? Are my own memories accurate? What have I forgotten? Was there anything we could have done, or done sooner, or done better? Why did I say no to you at times when I could have said yes?
thankfully do not have to worry “Why did I say yes?”)
This, it seems to me, is the kind of thing a parent
should worry about any daughter or son, living or dead.
In respect to worry, the difference between Kristen living and Kristen after her death is not a big thing.
All parents recriminate (or ought to).
How else could they face their grandchildren? Or a mirror?
You gave an impromptu lecture on this subject, with me as your only audience, one night. Just
the two of us, standing in the half-dark kitchen, as you explained to me Madame Bovary (which I have still never read, for fear I’d stop seeing it through your eyes) and how Emma Bovary’s story applied to your life and our family’s life, and particularly the tragedy of your grandmother’s life.
Emma Bovary was never done so proud, and this by someone who not many years before
frequently and adamantly claimed that the only two worthwhile books in the entire world were Jane Eyre and Blubber by Judy Bloom. (It was never “Blubber,” but always “Blubber by Judy Bloom.”)
I doubt this discourse upon Bovary (nary a word spared for F Emma was all of it) was one of the great nights of your life. It was unquestionably one of mine. Of course, Flaubert believed that the one indispensable requisite for happiness is stupidity. Not that night.
For me, James Baldwin came closer to the truth than Flaubert. He said that “happiness…is not a real state and does not really exist.” I take it my own way, as one must, and think that he meant happiness as some sort of permanent condition. And
he’s right except that sometimes happy arrives, mostly fleeting by but it can also last a pretty long time (by which I mean hours or days).
So was the life of Kristen Carr a happy one? No, because you really existed. But did you know how to create the happy moment? Absolutely. You also extended some of them, as long as anyone can. This is why we could think of you as very adult for your age (at almost any age) and at the same time, as having an absolutely brilliant ability to be child-like.
There are not very many who can do that and of course, it is one of the things I miss most since you left us. Fortunately my recollection of times like your Emma Bovary
performance, which was delivered with joy despite its dour topic,
remains vivid—it happened 25 or maybe 30 years ago, and also, it seems, approximately yesterday.
Though to tell you the truth, which is the hardest part of writing this letter, I grab at every fragment of you I can see or feel. Because to talk about someone who’s died, you can easily say all you want to about their presence (and yours was immense). Still, January 3 1993 was 23 years ago and some nights I still wake up with the knowledge that Kristen Carr is dead preoccupying me, and remember that
is truth, not a dream. I know it’s
not for the first time but something that should have been absorbed long ago.
And I know it never can be.
In some ways, maybe that’s the good part: Why would I want to be separated from you, Kristen? You certainly never wanted to part from us. So if we all live as long as Billy Joe Shaver says, which is forever, the grief of losing everything that your life promised, or being without the smile on your face or the look in your eyes, will remain.
Carrie Rodriguez says it all in a line: “Absence is the hardest truth.”
But surely,
your absence isn’t as large as your presence, someone will say. I have no reply. But what in the world do they imagine we’re crying about?
I love you, Kristen. I always will. It’s actually my great pleasure. I only wish you weren’t so far out of sight.
Hugs and kisses from your pop,
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The essay that follows is the chapter I wrote for the very fine anthology Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence edited by Kevin Alexander Gray (this site’s administrator), Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of Counterpunch, and journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. Its appearance could not possibly be more timely with the news dominated by the cold-blooded murder of Michael Brown in the middle of a street in broad daylight by a cop. As Kevin and I predicted (on Live from the Land of Hope and Dreams) when Obama was elected, the most certain result was that many black males would die. How many more will there be?
Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence
The question for you and me right now is whether we grasp the facts and allow the uniformed felon who shot Michael Brown get away with it, judicially and otherwise. The attempt to smear Michael Brown as a petty criminal based on his theft of some cigars is exactly what we’re likely to see more of unless there is activity against it–and not just by poor black people. Not just by black people, period.
So let’s get the important stuff straight: Stealing cigars is not a felony, let alone a capital crime. Jaywalking is not a capital crime. Delaying moving when a police office tells you to do so is not a capital crime. Lifting your hands is not a capital crime. Stepping towards a police officer in a confrontational situation is not a capital crime. Lifting your arms is not a capital crime. Turning to flee is not a capital crime. Being black and male and young — none of these are capital crimes.
That none of these is, for that matter, a crime of any kind–or even that we all “know” it– is beside the point. The defenders of the cops, the apologists for the system, the creeps who want to make the “looters” in Ferguson, MO equally culpable along with the cops. The public is ready, much of it even eager, to falsely balance the equation, with the usual bullshit about “wrong on both sides.”
Right now the media and the politicians, from the President on down, are acting as if none of what I just said is true.
The fact that someone has to say these things–that everybody isn’t saying them–is exactly why I had to write this essay, why Kevin, Jeff and JoAnn had to prepare their book.
When will it end? When you–and you, and you, and me–decide to make it stop. And what that means in essence, no matter who is in the White House, is this: It’s not up to black people. It’s up to white people.
Really the Invisible Man Blues
By Dave Marsh
“…all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”
~ Chester Himes
In his autobiography, Really the Blues, Mezz Mezzrow, locked up in a New York City jail on a drug charge, convinces the warden that he has a black mother and therefore must be placed in the Negro section of the prison – his life depends on it.
Mezz Mezzrow, a pot proselytizer and dealer as well as a pretty good trumpet player, was white, or at least he came from an all-white family. His is one of the few real-life stories in American history in which a white man passes for black and gets away with it. Whether John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me, in which a middle-class white writer blackens his skin in order to research what the too-much-melanin blues are like, got away with it is open to debate. He did not die, as has been widely reported, from cancer caused by Oxsoralen, the chemical he used to darken his skin, but the fact that the idea persists thirty years after his death suggests what grim desires his project may have inspired. Griffin is not by any means the only mortal casualty of the American obsession with melanin.
Give or take Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, a reasonably fine novel, and Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” which is a complete crock, that’s about the end of the literary aspect of passing for black. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist, unquestionably a black citizen, has retreated to a clandestine life in a cellar in a whites-only building somewhere in New York. This man is invisible because other people refuse to see him. And throughout the story, whenever he is seen, disaster of one degree of another ensues.
Somewhere among these fantasies lies a truth about George Zimmerman, who, by his own account, accidentally on purpose murdered Trayvon Martin. Somewhere in there is an authentic human being, like Mezzrow, who imagined himself a superhero. Mezz sold Louis Armstrong was his best customer. George Zimmerman stalked the streets of a podunk Florida condo community with a gun by his side, a Batman vigilante.
What fascinates me is that George Zimmerman imagined himself a white superhero. Well, really, it’s not that so much. Name a black superhero, why don’t you? Richard Pryor dressed up as one for one of his album jackets, and that just about covers the point.
Whether George Zimmerman, by the bizarre and often contradictory codes of the United States, is ‘white’ isn’t the issue. It can’t be, because the matter is not so much in the eye of the beholder as in the beholder’s mind, or wherever each of our prejudices resides. There neither is nor ever will be a test of who’s black and who’s white based
thank you, Gregor Mendel. Americans appear in something more than 50,000 shades of gray and brown. Weeding us all out, separating the “Caucasian” sheep from the “Negro” goats (as Mitt Romney’s tutors might have put it) is a fool’s errand, a worthless quest and the core of a national argument that hasn’t changed much since the Tidewater tobacco growers invented the “white race” around 1680. Whiteness as a concept – a mass illusion that really means not-blackness – guarantees a genuine enthusiasm for servile status among white working people to this day. Because, with agreed-upon whiteness comes power, including the power of life and death. It’s amazing every neighborhood in the US doesn’t have a yearly ritual in which people fill out their brackets for who might or might not possess the coveted lack of melanin in their neighborhood.
Zimmerman’s mother has been described as Afro-Peruvian, and pictures alleged to be of his great-grandfather show a dark-skinned man who might well be black or brown (the photos are black and white, in a way that race in America is thought to, but never can, be). His father resembles David Brinkley, only more pallid. Zimmerman himself looks as if his ancestry might be Sicilian, or Native American, or Hispanic, or simply a polyglot genotype commonly known as American. Zimmerman’s voter registration card lists him as “Hispanic.”
Trayvon Martin, on the other hand, was unmistakably a black manchild, African- or Afro-American, or any of two- or three-dozen hideous epithets. That Zimmerman shot Martin because he was black may legitimately be doubted. That Zimmerman stalked Martin and put himself in the position of murdering him because Trayvon was black is beyond dispute. It’s how Zimmerman’s version of the events goes. Broken down between perception and reality, what the shooter tells us is as follows.
I saw a colored kid walking around where he shouldn’t have been (according to Zimmerman), dressed as a criminal (that is to say, as one common variety of adolescent boys, many of them black), and when I attempted to stop and frisk him (Zimmerman doesn’t cop to the frisk, but that’s the general idea) he ran, a clear (to Zimmerman, though in reality doubtful beyond anything reasonable) admission of guilt (of being black where he didn’t belong), so I proceeded to accost him (because that’s what superheroes do to bad guys), and then he tried to hurt me, so I shot him.
It’s that cold and that confused. Chester Himes couldn’t have satirized it. Richard Pryor himself would have been hard-pressed to say anything sufficiently biting about it. Martin’s murder was everything but a metaphor.
I nevertheless submit that George Zimmerman may be the Lee Harvey Oswald of this historical period. His biography is just as sordid and pathetic. In 1997, aged 14, he joined ROTC, with the stated ambition of joining the US Marine Corps. (His father, Robert, is described as “ex-military,” but I’ve yet to find out which service.) George’s post-high school jobs fulfilled no heroic fantasies: he worked for an insurance agency and a car dealership. He went back to school, to get his real estate agent’s license, then to study criminal justice. He may have been in a ride-along program with the Sanford police: he claimed he witnessed “disgusting behavior” by the officers, but the local cops say they have no record of him in the program. That last role (it wasn’t a job or a hobby) came to light in the context of a town meeting, which Zimmerman attended, protesting the beating of a black homeless man by white Sanford cops. He shoved a cop who was busting one of his friends for drunken behavior and was sent into an anger management program. A girlfriend accused him
he requested a reciprocal restraining order. He applied for a job with the local sheriff’s office, and didn’t get it. He took part in the Seminole College graduation program even though he was a credit shy of his degree. At his pretrial hearing in the Trayvon murder case, the prosecutors brought up all of this. The judge described George’s record as “run of the mill.” His father was allowed to sit in on his initial interrogations by the police about Trayvon’s killing.
On the basis of all that, you’d have to say that George Zimmerman has been treated as a white man by the system, or at least a part of it. How he has been treated by classmates, teachers, administrators, recruiting sergeants and, for that matter, junk food-dispensing 7-Eleven clerks is a whole other set of issues. And we’ll never know.
Maybe George Zimmerman wasn’t out there stalking innocent black teenagers in pursuit of certification as an authentic European-American. You’re entitled to doubt it. I don’t. Maybe he had no crisis of racial identity that he was trying to work out by becoming a superhero.
On the other hand, there is that designation on his voter registration card.
So we might, if we are pondering whether George Zimmerman received anything resembling justice (let alone whether Trayvon Martin did), spare a thought for the myriad ways in which the issue of racial identity makes so many Americans crazy – the crazier, it seems, the murkier, the more borderline, their status.
The strange thing is, at trial it was the defense lawyers who kept bringing up Zimmerman’s racial status (albeit outside the courtroom, but trials aren’t really held in court anymore, if they ever were). It was they who allegedly provided the pictures of his mother’s grandfather. It wasn’ it was stated outright that if George had black blood there was no way he stalked Trayvon Martin and killed him with a pretext so thin even a blind Klansman could see through it.
And now George Zimmerman is a free man, or anyway as free as someone with an Afro-Peruvian mother can be in an America that only in its most privileged sanctuaries understands itself as “post-racial.” Here is the white supremacist dilemma spelled out with remarkable clarity, by a proudly anonymous correspondent to the “conservative” blog Draw and Strike, March 29, 2012, apropos the report that Zimmerman’s photograph had been craftily skin-lightened by the media (no mention of which ones, or of whether Fox had once again held the color line):
right or wrong it’s always a meme about how evil the white man is
and how he be profiling everybody. But if the half jewish half peruvian
Zimmerman is a white hispanic, doesn’t it follow that our muti racial
preznit is indeed not black but white-black-arabic, in fact?
Why do people who essentially have no quarrel with Zimmerman’s vigilantism, who treat Zimmerman as if he has achieved a goal from their personal bucket lists (as indeed he has, especially the hard part, getting away with it), want him not to be white? Why has this question been ignored, even though it is a glaring part of the filthy residue of these crimes (the murder one, and the trial another)?
I think it’s basically because George Zimmerman has a brand new double standard available to him: he is white enough to get away with the shooting and dark enough to suggest to the bigots that there is something deeply wrong. But what’s wrong is not the shooting of Trayvon Martin, which was justified in the way that every vigilante execution has been justified since the Civil War. What we hear from the Draw and Strike crowd is a modern rendition of that tune they’ve danced to since Obama was elected and the chimera of post-racial society began to waver in front of blighted eyes.
In front of the cataracts of liberalism wobbles another image altogether: if this biracial society is such a swell thing, how and why did this acquittal occur? Liberals have no coherent answer, because formulating one would leave them no course except to understand the country in a way that the flag-bearers of post-racialism exist to occlude. Trayvon was shot in a mixed-race (“integrated,” we would once have said) neighborhood, by a vigilante who at least part of the time identified as a member of another ethnic minority. I don’t suppose this sounds like Crown Heights to you, does it?
The travesty of the trial does not stem entirely from the fact that everyone involved in the judicial system – judge, jury, prosecutors, defense counsel, cops – was non-black. Which raises another question: If we can talk about ‘non-white’ as a category, why not the more useful, because more accurate, non-black?
There’s nobody raised or even living long term in the United States of America who can’t answer that question accurately. There are just several hundred million Bartlebys who’d prefer not to.
Which is to say, the mystery of George Zimmerman is that there is no mystery. He did it, he got away with it without even having to deny it, and his kind will come again and again and again until we at least gain as much courage as Ishmael and crawl into bed with the truth.
“What started it?”
“A blind man with a pistol.”
“What’s that?”
“You heard me, boss.”
“That don’t make any sense.”
“Sure don’t.”
– Chester Himes
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The Winter Blues
Johnny Winter | February 23, 1944 – July 16, 2014
The whitest man of them all could not only play the blues, he could play the hell out of them. For the past 45 years, that’s exactly what he did, night after night, whether he had the ear of the whole music scene or only of those devotees and passers-by who happened to be around on any particular evening. Johnny Winter was absolutely the real thing and, although Chuck Berry, Little Richard and even Bob Dylan played their part in his pantheon, the core of it always came back to the blues.
I first saw him under duress. An albino blues guitarist laying them flat in south Texas and brought north in a whirlwind of press releases threatened worse than tedium. My girlfriend said he was exactly the kind of blues player I loved best. It took about 15 seconds to convince me that he wasn’t good, he was great. It wasn’t just that razor sharp guitar or the gravel edge of his singing. Johnny Winter onstage, bathed in blue spotlights (because white ones burned his skin) was the blues stripped to an essence, confident and raging, nervous and excitable, heart-broken and drowned in not just his own but a world of tears, including your own.
I knew Johnny a little bit in those early days, mainly because I was friends with his manager, Steve Paul, the New York City impresario who flew to Texas the minute he finished reading the first Rolling Stone article about this weird cat in 1968 . Steve had long run a club called Steve Paul’s The Scene, which was the greatest all-night jam club in the history of New York City rock. Jimi Hendrix spent a lot of time there, as did whoever else was in town, from Johnny and his friends Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper to that other left-handed strummer, Tiny Tim. None of these was necessarily the unlikeliest person in the room on any given night.
We saw a lot of Johnny and Steve in those years in Detroit, at the offices of Creem Magazine. I can remember them turning up one day with a copy of Second Winter, the second Columbia album. Two discs, three sides, eleven songs. Fourth side blank. Why? After those, the level of material dropped off, they said. Hype? Well, anyway, a dubious rationale, albeit Columbia only turned up two outtakes when they reissued it on CD ten years ago.
But the real story was the battle they fought with CBS Records over its insistence that all albums made for the label be made at a company-owned studio using company hired and trained engineers. One of the most instructive lessons I ever had about record production came from that conversation, Johnny raving mad about the refusal of those engineers to recognize that to make this music, you needed the needle to rock into the red. Yeah, the sound got distorted. That was what the songs needed. Johnny was righteously indignant. Steve was perfectly happy to have a good story for the papers, capped by his revelation that he had negotiated an agreement—in writing, he said—that Johnny could henceforth record wherever the fuck he wanted to, with whomever he chose.
Once, long after midnight at Creem, Johnny played us his brother Edgar’s first album, which struck me as all too arty. Johnny patiently explained, to universal incredulity, that Edgar had always been the more accomplished musician. I thought this was nothing more than touching brotherly loyalty until Edgar put together White Trash with Dan Hartman and Ronnie Montrose and sold more records in two years than Johnny probably did in his lifetime.
Johnny seemed unthreatened and, looking back on it, you have to think that he understood very well where his life’s work lay, although he did give straight-up rock’n’roll (of the day) a try, with the 1970 album, Johnny Winter And, which was a band concept, Rick Derringer on the other guitar and about half the vocals, with bass and drums by the other members of Rick’s pop group, The McCoys. It gave Johnny the closest thing he ever had to a pop hit, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” Rick’s song sung by Johnny. It also gave him the only chance to croon that I can remember, on the semi-show-tune “Let the Music Play”: “I don’t know what brought you here / But I know what to do.”
Drugs, yeah, he took drugs, including all the wrong ones. He was a pretty bad mess, with a drug habit he did not discard for a very, very long time. He never tried to hide it much. One afternoon at Creem, which was living quarters as well as office space, he borrowed a bedroom for a nap. I went down to wake him up a few hours later and there he lay, sprawled out with his works neatly arranged beside him. Still breathing, but I sure the hell wasn’t gonna be the one to try to wake him up.
Yet the music continued to be fine through all of it or almost all. It was his anchor to life, maybe the only place where Johnny did know what to do. I’m guessing but how else do you explain it?
I once saw Johnny try to make sense of it. It was the early ‘80s and we were taping the David Susskind show for a “discussion” on the rock scene. Johnny wa he liked people but he knew how many different ways he struck them as odd. So he kind of addressed himself to me, not a very good idea within the bounds of that particular exercise in megalomania. It was, for a while very much as if Susskind and the other guest, John Rockwell, were having one discussion while Johnny and I had another. What Johnny was trying to explain was the why of the drugs, how for him and for Janis Joplin, his friend from their youth in Port Arthur, and for others, the endless attention and… It was as hopeless as any other mass media attempt to explain the lure and necessity of dope. But I’d pay money to have a transcript of what Johnny said, and more to have had Susskind pay attention to it, so that Johnny could’ve finished. It was probably the most sensible thing I ever heard anybody ever say about being an addict, though I remember none of his exact words. (Irish whisky + Lester Bangs the night before.) Finally, I intemperately exploded: “Johnny’s trying to tell you why.” Susskind treated it like who was I to tell him not to kick his dog, which in this case was Johnny. I thought Johnny just trying to tell a philistine like that about such existential woes was in a certain sense more heroic than pathetic, though it was certainly both.
For me, the most heroic thing Johnny Winter ever did was make those Muddy Waters records for Steve’s Blue Sky label (distributed by CBS) in the late 1970s. I edited Rolling Stone ‘s record reviews then and so everything came to me early. I remember opening the first one, in 1977, not expecting much: Muddy’s last few tries for Chess had been dismally mediocre. Hard Again jumped out of the speakers, from Muddy’s first “Ohhhhhh yeah!” on “Mannish Boy.” It’s the perfect opening, not only because it summons musical thunder but because the words are all about the transformative magic Muddy not so much put into his songs but conjured from their structure. He’s boasting, but not idly, because this momentum is sustained throughout the ten songs.
Johnny’s insight came from treating Muddy, to his mind and mine the greatest of all bluesmen, as a singer and a galvanizing bandleader, not as a mere guitarist. (Muddy played no guitar on the record.) Thus, he could be surrounded, as he was on his greatest records, with superb players, mostly a bit younger than himself, and he could both record new songs and rework old ones. The version of “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” one of his defining songs, on Hard Again is a revelation—almost conversational, its cadences relaxed, nothing to prove because he is the proof. The four albums they made for Blue Sky are certainly not Muddy’s greatest recordings, but they are unquestionably his best albums, utterly traditional in the material and arrangements but recorded and organized as a modern rock artist—and I mean, artist—would.
Johnny Winter carried on, accumulating tattoos like blues merit badges. And he couldn’t entirely be ignored—the music simply wouldn’t let him fade away. Rolling Stone squeezed him in at 63 on its list of however-many greatest guitarists (he maybe wasn’t a whole lot better than more than 60% of those ranked higher). Johnny made albums once in a while—the last one was Roots, a beautiful set of classics featuring mostly well-chosen current guitar heroes (Warren Haynes, Sonny Landreth, Vince Gill, Susan Tedeschi, Sonny Landreth). On it, Johnny’s singing, always scabrous and sassy, has taken on some of the tone of Dylan’s late work. But this is not a master engaged in mystification, making the listener struggle to divine a meaning that may or may not even be present. This is a bluesman, pained and driven, reaching for lucidity. “I don’t know what brought you here, but I know what to do.” And he did it.
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Pete Seeger ~May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014
I met Pete Seeger about 40 years ago on the Clearwater, a refurbished 19th century sloop which had begun its then seemingly hopeless task of cleaning up the shores and waters of the Hudson River. Like a lot of the things that Pete got involved in, it was a hopeless task until it turned out to be common sense.
That day, we cruised Long Island Sound, if I remember right, from Port Jefferson to Oyster Bay, which is not very far, and back, which is still not very far. It was worth every minute, and would have been if only for the chance to spend time aboard the 106 foot, single-masted Clearwater, a gorgeous vessel, stable even in Long Island Sound’s considerable chop and carrying as cargo volumes of lore and lessons about the costs of environmental neglect.
You could say that those early Clearwater voyages were the precursors of the present-day celebrity cruise, but with fewer celebrities. No more were needed. Pete Seeger was not only the enduring star of American folk music, he was its leading evangelist and one of the greatest singer/musicians this part of the planet has produced. I remember Pete singing though not what songs, and some lectures about the important work of the ship and the ecology of the Sound and the Hudson River region, though not their specific content. The presentation did its best to be as folkie as a much-darned pair of wool socks, and unmistakably also an event with a star and a crew and an audience, never exactly commingled. It was also a strong, healthy political event, by which I mean that each of us left with a sense of mission and some ideas about how to execute it.
I wasn’t there to clean up the Sound, though I was glad to be part of the movement, or to hear Pete perform, though I knew the importance of his music. I was there to write a story for Newsday, the Long Island daily. I did what you do in those situations, where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you, which mostly means I watched and listened and took mostly the kind of sensory notes that you don’t write down on the spot.
When we docked everyone headed for the parking lot. Pete and his wife Toshi had several bags. I introduced myself, not only because we were meant to talk for a few minutes, but as a prelude to asking if I could help carry their stuff.
I got no further than, “Hi, I’m Dave Marsh from Newsday,” before Pete turned to me and snapped—and I mean snapped, like he was already booking me for malingering—“Grab a couple of those bags. It’s good for white collar workers to do physical labor.” Thus spoke the Harvard gentleman to the brakeman’s son who’d never owned a necktie. And no, I didn’t come up with my usual smartass retort. He was Pete Seeger, who had changed not only my life but the world, and the alternative to silence was insulting him as much as he’d just insulted me, and…well, for once it was not in me.
That incident was one of the best lessons I ever had several times over. I learned lessons I’d chew on for, apparently, the rest of my life: The relation between stardom and shyness, between changing the world and retaining your self, and between trusting your perceptions and remembering not to suppose anything until you’ve made sure the person about whom you’ve just supposed it is not a cartoon. And I mean it, I’ve always been grateful because that dressing down has saved me all manner of grief, and not only in things about celebrity. The most important lesson, you see, was about recognizing a difference between loving something and liking something, even when that something is someone. A great teacher may or may not inspire great affection, and he or she may not even teach the best lessons deliberately. So it turned out that Pete and I were in many social and professional situations over the next 40 years without ever getting to know one another much and that isn’t surprising. Mainly because I didn’t learn my lesson all at once. Though I think I did learn, finally. I’ll tell you about it later.
I respected Pete Seeger so much that my teenage self forgave him writing “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” which to my ears was sheer bathos, and for deriding Bob Dylan’s beautiful electric music, which to my ears was the absolute poetry of a world in chaos.
One side of what he did was somewhat foreign to me. Years later my friend Jon Landau and I were talking about folk music one day, which inevitably came around to talking about Pete. Jon told me a story about Pete appearing at his left-wing summer camp or maybe it was Earl Robinson’s music school. I said something I thought was appreciative and Jon stopped me cold. “You don’t understand,” he said. “He was Elvis.”
To me, he was more like a father figure or anyhow that’s the way I made sense of him after I understood that he had many metaphoric children and was glad of it, though not always of the way that they behaved, musically or socially. (Hmmm, that is like Elvis, isn’t it?) He could be amazingly contradictory—a sign of humanity not deity. In his 1972 anthology, The Compleat Folksinger, which collects among other things many of his columns for Sing Out!, Pete wrote about a tour of Czechoslovakia he made in 1964. He was especially thrilled to go to a particular club and hear the groups playing guitars, which happened to be electric.
Back home, Pete was not only immune to Beatlemania but hostile to folk-rock. Maybe it was because, as Pete said, he couldn’t hear the words due to the high volume but he should have known more about music than to use that to justify attacks on the songs themselves. I’m more inclined to think that he didn’t like “Maggie’s Farm” with the Butterfield Blues Band because of the loud absence of explicit social commentary and Pete’s acknowledged absence of feeling for post-war blues.
I am trying to reckon with the complexity of Pete Seeger as man and artist. It is not an easy road to travel, especially not today. But it never has been.
Ten years ago, more or less, there was a panel discussion at a Folk Alliance conference that wound up in a tangle when Nora Guthrie said that Pete had refused to allow Madonna to issue a recording of “If I Had a Hammer” because she’d changed the lyric to “If I had a hammer / I’d smash your fucking head in.” (I don’t know if that’s funny. Depends on how she sang it, doesn’t it?)
Another complex folk music elder, Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, also on the panel, thought that Nora was responsible for the rejection and scolded her for not asking Pete to make the decision, since he would surely have supported free speech. I was the moderator and tried to help out by asking Nora if what she meant was that she had communicated a decision made by Pete himself. She said yes. Chris began to sputter, well past the point of coherence for few seconds, and finally a single sentence burst out: “WELL…well…well…then Pete’s not God anymore!”
He never was. He never needed to be. Like everybody else, Pete Seeger set examples good and bad. We might pause here to take notice that, though his feet were of clay, he had a remarkable ability to keep them shod. By which I mean, his transgressions may have been personal but they were very rarely public and he knew how to back down. In 1967 or so, he made a record using electric guitar—not played by him–and somewhat heavier beats. And then returned to doing what he did, as he should have.
Pete Seeger was such a prodigious talent, so young, that the godlike was expected of him. Born in 1919, the son of the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, he grew up in a left-wing household. It was the mandarin left wing: Like his father before him, Pete went to Harvard. He began his prominent performing career in 1940 on CBS Radio, alongside Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives and Josh White (the show was heard only in New York because the cast was integrated) and a year later was a founder of the first important left-wing folk group, The Almanac Singers, which defined protest singing. Pete Bowers, he called himself then—he had to, as his father was currently a government employee who had been blacklisted during World War I for espousing pacifism.
The Weavers
After the war, Pete formed the Weavers with Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert. Their songs were not always topical, because McCarthyism had begun, but the political songs were always there and they had big hits. Thus “Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” though the Weavers also rearranged Lead Belly’s “Good Night Irene” into one of the most important hits of 1950. Seeger and Hayes were a formidable songwriting team. Because of them, the Weavers also produced some of the most enduring post-war protest songs, notably “If I Had a Hammer.” By 1953, they were blacklisted by broadcasters. “If you had seen us coming down the street,” Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, told me once, “you’d have crossed over to the other side of the block.” I looked dubious. “That’s exactly what people did,” she said.
Toshi, at least as formidable and complicated as her husband, allowed herself the bitterness Pete never expressed. They had a lot to be bitter about. After being smeared as a Red, Pete became an unusually uncooperative witness before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1955. HUAC had caused the Hollywood Ten to be imprisoned for contempt of Congress in1950. The Ten lost for standing on the First Amendment as the basis for their refusal to testify. Since then, it had become the practice to stand on the Fifth—the non-incrimination clause–rather than freedom of speech and association. Pete returned to the fundamental issue: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”
This was not god-like. It was human– stubborn, flouting all sound advice, courageous. It was also not quite as futile as it immediately seemed. In 1957, he was charged with contempt of Congress. In 1961, Pete was tried, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. In 1962, he won his appeal, a landmark case in ending the blacklist. But the consequences rolled on: The Weavers reformed in 1955, but mainly as a live act. They recorded for small labels but their music could not be broadcast. Nevertheless, they played the major role in popularizing “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight),” “Sixteen Tons” and “Kumbaya.”
Pete was never idle. In the Fifties, he wrote How to Play the 5 String Banjo, invented the Longneck Banjo (three additional frets made it longer than a bass guitar), popularized the 12 string guitar (he’d learned from Lead Belly), and created the brilliant “Goofing-Off Suite,” using classical themes by Bach, Beethoven, Stockhausen and Grieg alongside Berlin’s “Blue Skies” and a batch of folk tunes. When John Hammond at Columbia finally got him a major label record deal, one of the first results was “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” probably the most beautiful antiwar melody ever composed. Pete championed the burgeoning topical song movement in the best possible way: He crammed the songs into his albums and concerts. He also took up world music, not as a stylistic synthesis, but as a collection of pieces that taken on their own terms resonated with one another, from Africa (“Wimoweh”) to Cuba (“Guantanamera”), even Europe. It was Pete who suggested that SNCC needed a singing group, and it was Toshi and Pete who befriended and cared for Bernice Johnson Reagon when the SNCC Freedom Singers broke up. He made children’s albums and live albums and thematic albums and mere collections of songs. He was instrumental in starting the Newport Folk Festival. He was on the editorial committee of Sing Out!, the Rolling Stone of the folk revival. And he played a major role (if not the central one—that credit he always gave to Guy Carawan and rightly so) in adapting and popularizing the most important song of the twentieth century, “We Shall Overcome.”
Martin Luther King, Peter Seeger, Charis Horton, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy at Highlander’s 25th anniversary celebration, Monteagle, TN, 1957.
Pete made a live album called We Shall Overcome, recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1963. It was extremely well-edited, I don’t know by whom. The running order of the album–13 songs of the 40 performed–has absolutely nothing to do with the order of the concert, but it’s more focused, gets to the point more directly and clearly than the show did. Alas, the digital version is the whole thing. ( (It’s easy to make a playlist of the original running order—the original track listing is at the Wikipedia entry for the album.)
I heard the We Shall Overcome album at age 14, when I was the son of budding George Wallace supporters, living in an Up South town full of Ku Klux Klansmen and packs of freelance racists, and going to quietly but adamantly all-white schools. The headlines had been filled every day for the past year with Freedom Riders, pre-teens slaughtered by bombs placed in churches, nonviolent demonstrators attacked by dogs and high pressure hoses. And that was just in the South. Racial turmoil was a constant presence in southeastern Michigan, not just Detroit. The one true thing I was being told about this was that it meant the world, or a world, was coming to an end. The one set of contrary facts I held in my head was almost entirely musical, not the early songs of Bob Dylan but Motown and early soul music that insisted, obliquely but powerfully, that freedom meant everybody or it didn’t mean anything.
Buying We Shall Overcome was more the product of exploration than rebellion. What it inspired was rebellion’s necessary partner, conviction. Most important, the conviction that there really must be a better world, somewhere, and that it was open to the likes of myself. Pete Seeger’s version of a protest album offered a vision, and the core of that vision was not so much any particular songs but the gentle persuasiveness with which he introduced them, the passion with which he laid out their origin or history or contemporary relevance and the power with which he encouraged all present to sing them. What transformed We Shall Overcome from a powerful collection to something with deep historical significance was the presence of the SNCC Freedom Singers. They lent not so much authenticity as boldness and authority to “Oh Freedom,” “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus,” and particularly “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” They made struggling for equal rights seem like something even a blossoming but isolated teenager could do.
As Daniel Wolff pointed out to me the afternoon that we learned of Pete’s passing, he did this kind of teaching all the time. Seeger believed in singing, he believed it was good for you in all sorts of ways. He was, I recall, fond of reciting his father’s dictum that a country’s cultural health could best be ascertained by how many of its citizens sang and made music. I was just one among who knows how many—a number surely in the hundreds of thousands, maybe the tens of millions, over the sixty years or so that Pete performed—who had their lives turned if not upside down at least askew by the power of his conviction, by the contagion of his vision.
If nothing else, Pete Seeger made me understand how far behind enemy lines I was living—he showed me the road that had to be traveled, if I really wanted to live. He did this the same way that James Baldwin and Elvis Presley and John Coltrane did it: by example, and with the same generosity and the same sense that the world was packed with a load of insurmountable cruelty and that, nevertheless, the truth was that something better had managed to survive within it. Which meant, for each of us, a choice and a chance.
It may even be that Seeger, whose rectitude often communicated, at least to me, a whiff of the Puritanism he inherited, offered a more direct route to this not-at-all specious salvation of spirit and society than anybody else, and for the oddest reason: He thought smaller. He genuinely believed that one more singer, one more non-violent resister, one more example of gumption and love, one more song, one more guitar, was an important thing. And, this I am sure about, he genuinely believed that that was mainly what he, himself, was: One more.
That, and nothing more meek, was why Pete Seeger eschewed the celebrity path. (Ask yourself this: If Burl Ives could become a big star looking like that, what could the young Pete Seeger have become if he’d just given over a few names?) Pete could seem innocent but you’d be a fool to believe it. He paid the price and he had seen the bill coming, too.
If all you know about Pete Seeger is a protest singer, a rag-tag Red, a spinner of false hope, a doddering old man walking that hopeless line (but never by himself, you may have noticed), then you missed it. If all you know is the famous songs – most of which I haven’t even mentioned—you might even then not see it whole. Pete Seeger lived his life every day in the possession of what he envisioned.
Roger Johnson and Pete Seeger leading Freedom School students singing “We Shall Overcome” at Palmer’s Crossing Community Center, August 4, Freedom Summer.
There is one song that to me expresses this vision almost perfectly, maybe the greatest of all the lyrics he wrote and in the performance on his mini-box set, A Link in the Chain, possibly his greatest recorded vocal performance. It is called “O, Had I A Golden Thread.” It’s sweet in a way the hard boys, left and right, fear, as they ought to. “Far over the waters I’d reach my magic band / To every human being so they would understand.” He makes it true. He makes those who hear him want to make it truer.
Without such a vision, the folk process that we talk about (or used to, before the scene shifted to singer-songwriters meditating on their inner lives—alas, almost never about the banality of them—and the preening cultists they attracted) isn’t worth much. But there is another question, which is whether Pete’s vision of freedom carries forward, whether it stands, whether it can be nurtured and sustained.
I am sure it will be and my conviction came, perhaps predictably, on the last night of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s magnificent Woody Guthrie tribute in 1996. Pete already wasn’t singing very much—Arlo led the night’s final song, which you knew was going to be “This Land Is Your Land” before you ever saw a ticket. But you didn’t know that the whole cast, including many of the conference’s speakers, would be on stage leading the singing.
Springsteen and Pete Seeger on May 3, 2009, at Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday Celebration at Madison Square Garden.
It had been a night of triumphs: For Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls, for Dave Pirner and Jimmy LaFave, Billy Bragg and Jack Elliott, Bruce Springsteen and Pete too. But the most powerful triumph was that group sing—above all for the spirit still embedded in a potential national anthem yearning for a country to become worthy of it. It floored me and really, it seemed like the moment caught everyone. John Wesley Harding and I, old friends, walked into the communal dressing room afterward, arms around each other’s shoulders, tears in our eyes. And there was Pete, with tears in his eyes.
I think it was the first time I’d ever truly seen him. He was pleased, I understood, not so much that the night had carried Woody and what he represented forth in such grand fashion. What I remember seeing in Pete Seeger’s eyes was a sense of relief. He knew something that night—if I’m right—something important about not just Woody’s work, but his own. Which meant also the work of all the people he’d learned from, and all those who’d taught them, from the slaves who came up with “O Freedom” to Mother Bloor writing the labor history Woody made into music. He knew that folks would try to carry it on, in both spirit and substance.
That linkage is the golden thread and its purpose now is weaving the garment of human survival, which was the explicit theme of Pete Seeger’s last few decades on the planet. A rainbow design without which we cannot live. A design that shows us why and how to keep the most important thing that Pete Seeger represents alive.
We cannot experience the full measure of what it means to lose Pete Seeger until we realize that this burden is not his to carry, anymore. Now, it’s on you. And me.
Got any bags you need carried?
(Thanks to Craig Werner, Danny Alexander, Daniel Wolff and Lee Ballinger, without whom grief might have overwhelmed coherence.)
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Lou Reed ~ 1942 – 2013
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Chet Flippo (known to friends as Flippo) ~ Oct. 21, 1943 – June 19, 2013 ~ was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He was the son of Chet W. Flippo, a minister, and the former Johnnie Black.
When I first moved to Rolling Stone (from Newsday) in 1975, Chet Flippo was the NYC bureau chief–and the only other editorial person in Manhattan. Alas, this did not last long, but when we moved to 745 5th Avenue as new headquarters (the magazine then had three or maybe four floors in that beautiful art deco heap), we made sure to have offices next door to one another, though I eventually decided, in thrall to my acrophobia, that I wanted an office without a window.
Chet was one of my great co-conspirators. I’m trying to pare it down to just the highlights, because the thing was, every week was an adventure then, and Chet led his share of the way from helping build the rep of the Lone Star to serving as Austin’s ambassador to Manhattan. He hated bureaucracy as much as I did though he handled it much more quietly. So his subversion generally took other forms, though sometimes we collaborated. There was trying to get past the fact-checking department, in an album review, references to Ray “Wylie” Hubbard (a punctuation alteration which, would have changed his entire career, we believed or at least convinced ourselves–both of us loved Ray…and do.) There was having a meeting with Harry Chapin and Bill Ayres, of a very very nascent World Hunger Year, who informed us that they were about to get the United Nations to stage an anti-hunger concert in NYC, produced by Michael Viner, who they boasted had been the director of “youth events’ for the second Nixon inaugural (and later a guy who earned notoriety by publishing a book by O.J.’s wife’s BFF). We not very gently explained why they weren’t.
In the very early ’70s, Chet wrote a story for Creem that was a pretty perfect parody of Hunter S. Thompson’s early shit, though it unfortunately didn’t hold up very well when I reread it a few years ago. But he used it to hip readers (at least me) to a whole world of Texas music, starting with Sunny and the Sunglows, which is pretty much primordial Austin. He carried on at Rolling Stone–I got to see Waylon, I mean the person not the show, because of Chet, to know Marshall Chapman, a whole gaggle of people like that. When Waylon and Willie decided to make the Outlaw Country collection Chet was the only conceivable writer for the notes — I don’t know if he coined the phrase but he was pretty much the phenomenon’s offstage architect.
He covered the entirety of John Lennon’s immigration struggle, a fine set of accounts that made plain the political animus without ever slipping out of objective voice. In the midst of that mess, Lennon needed an expert witness for the trial of his lawsuit against Morris Levy (who had taken an unmixed cassette of John’s “Rock’n’Roll” album and turned it into a “Lennon album” available only by mail order off late night TV ads). Chet recused himself, appropriately, then suggested that they really needed me anyway, as I was chock full of musical opinion.
And he really wasn’t full of it himself, other than that he loved the music he grew up on (thus his Hank Williams book, Your Cheatin’ Heart, which is sorely underrated to the point of being almost a lost classic), and hated the idea that he looked like John Denver, though he did–well at least they had the same cheekbones and sandy hair. Chet was a reporter before he was anything else, albeit a reporter in the fashion of someone like A.J. Liebling, only even more deadpan funny. He was who he was: Chet had been in Navy intelligence but nevertheless the Cuban government (which had refused me a visa a couple of years earlier, on grounds I don’t know but always suspected had something to do with Detroit radical politics, although maybe they just didn’t like music hippies) let him in to report on the tour that a bunch of CBS artists, lead by Billy Joel, made to Cuba around ’80 or so. Chet turned it into a spy piece, with meet-ups with dissidents on the beach being the main attraction, the music pretty much a sidebar. I hated the politics but that was the only part of what he wrote that was anything like a cliché.
One of the things that we had most in common was that thinking that whether or not the Stones were has-beens–I was a firmer yes than he–Mick Jagger was a dipstick in the oil pan of rock stardom, as wrinkled and shriveled in our minds then as he is in photographs today. The real feat of his nakedly anti-Stones story getting published in Rolling Stone was that Jann Wenner was a Stones fan to the point where he worshiped them even above the Kennedy family. And Peter Rudge, still my friend after all these decades, has never been described better than in that relatively brief story–I laughed out loud, in delight, when I tea that because it not only brought Chet back to life for me, but also captured Peter at his height, when he still managed both the Stones and the Who. (I hasten to add that I would love Peter even if he managed Bob Jovi, as Jim Carroll called him in the Irish Times the other day.)
One thing that has gotten lost, I suppose (though I know I have a copy–just not where the fuck it is) is Chet’s masters (if I remember right) dissertation for UT, It was allegedly a history of Rolling Stone but it was really the first expansive history of the rock music press ever written, and has a lot of really fundamental things in it. (I’m pretty sure that I first talked to Chet when he interviewed me about Creem for it.) It was a sturdy little story, like all of his, and took the topic as far as it could be taken in ’71 or ’73 or whenever it was. Popular Music and Society ran pretty much the whole of it over three consecutive issues–be about $25 per issue if you could find ’em, which you couldn’t. Turns out Chet continued writing for that little academic publication until the late ’70s, which had to be, as much about loyalty as opportunity to talk about things he couldn’t write for anyone else. (That is, he could have sold his “reappraisal” of Willie Nelson and Austin for actual money. Those were the days–you could pass up a payday once in a while, though that was in my view a pretty big expression of loyalty.)
His books were mostly collections of magazine articles, and they hold up better than you’d imagine, especially the Stones assemblage. I have spent about 30 years now wishing I’d had the insight, skill and discipline to write his plain, witty, deeply respectful and slightly salacious Dolly Parton feature in Rolling Stone. Call me a Flippo fan–it’s a fact and probably a boast, to boot. And I wish to hell his planned official biography of Roy Orbison had worked out. That was actually my idea–I had been offered the job, and while I would have loved to try, it was completely obvious that the book belonged in Chet’s hands. I don’t think I ever did that any other time–gave away the story of someone I truly loved. But then, it was passed on to someone I truly loved.
Chet and I never, ever talked or saw one another without my feeling I was in the company of a guy who totally got it. There aren’t so many people who can put me that completely at ease simply by showing up. His death has left me feeling disturbed for almost a month. It’s one thing to not talk to a friend very often, even when the intervals start becoming years not days. It’s another thing to realize a hole is left in the universe. So I listen to Waylon and Gary Stewart and a few of the other gifts he gave me, feeling like an old five and dimer myself.
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Bobby “Blue” Bland and the Perfection of Southern Soul
Bobby “Blue” BlandJanuary 27, 1930 – June 23, 2013
Bobby Bland was, in his prime, the most powerful blues shouter of all time, though capable as well of a caressing tenderness. “Turn On Your Lovelight” is what the rock world knows, I guess, but the man’s legacy is also in “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do,” “Farther Up the Road,” “I’ll Take Care of You,” “I Pity the Fool,” “Cry Cry Cry,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” to my ear the finest “St. James Infirmary” of them all, the entire
album (which is, without any doubt in my mind, the best Southern soul album, even including Otis’s; it has the impeccable and beautiful and scary “Lead Me On,” for many (including me) the greatest performance of his career. The list goes all the way up to his Malaco sides, particularly “Ain’t No Love In the Heart of the City.” It is not true that Bobby Bland nev it is true that his ratio of great to mediocre is as high as any other singer you can name, in any genre you care to cull.
Bobby “Blue” Bland
To call him Bobby “Blue” Bland always seems so redundant to me–like, as if he could be heard for so much as eight bars and you wouldn’t know that this was his core, his essence and, one way or another, a heap of your own.
But you can make too much of this essentialism–finally, you know Bobby Bland’s name and music less well because he was like his audience: He was a key voice of the black Southern working class from the ’50s onward. His role was to play the shouter from the anonymous ranks, the totally heart broken man among an all-but-totally heart broken folk. (And of course, once in a while, shouting with exuberance all the greater because of that every day heartbreak.)
He was completely non-intellectual about the whole enterprise, as far as I can tell. Told Peter Guralnick that his ambition was to be able to sing each song the exact same way, every time he sang it. A strange kind of perfectionism, I guess. But his command of tone and phrasing was so great that
for me, he held the place that Frank Sinatra held for a lot of other people. “Lead Me On” in particular has never not brought me to tears, not once, though I sometimes listened to it many, many, many times in a row–when I was by myself, the way that particular act of allegiance is best performed. And you know what? He sings it the same way every time.
Perfection is what he knew a lot about. And I, especially the I who found him on the radio and held him very close to the center of my being for the better part of half a century, will never be able to thank him enough. Or often enough. Or even express what I’m thanking him for altogether adequately.
I will tell you the real truth: He was, for me, probably the greatest blues singer of any kind, and the reason I can say this know instead of at the beginning is quite simple: I started listening to
“No matter what you do, I’m gonna keep on loving you and I’m not ashamed, oh no, I’m not ashamed.”
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