“I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than To Be That Woman’s Man”-With Bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Josh Breslin, a guy from Olde Saco up in Maine I met through the late Pete Markin out in San Francisco when all the cross-currents of the 1960s gathered in the various summers of love, the 1967 one is the one I am talking about, has always been an eclectic kind of guy. Always has been, like the late Markin was, interested in all kinds of arcane facts just for the sake of knowing them. A virtue he says in the writing business that formed a great deal of his career. These facts, arcane or not, usually were the result of some enthusiasm of the moment and that entailed learning all those odd-ball things about a subject that could only be of interest to aficionados.

That was the way he approached, approaches the blues which he has held onto for more than a moment unlike other things like butterfly collecting (for real once he learned that Lolita-lover Nabakov was an ardent collector) was to learn lots of things about the early blues guys lives (after he identified a billion of them a lot of them hidden in obscurity and so hard to dig out but that is what makes Josh tick. He called me up one night, after I had not heard from him for a long time, because he had just “discovered” an old black blues singer, Skip James, who only recorded about thirty or forty songs in the early 1930s before he fell below the radar, partially due to the fact that his label, his “race record” label, Paramount, went belly up in the onslaught of the Great Depression, only to resurface at a Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s a few years before he died. He had just written a review of James’ work and of a famous, or infamous line of a lyric and he wanted my comment. So he read the draft over the cellphone:             

Once somebody, I think it was the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt who also hailed from Texas, asked the legendary bluesman Lightning Hopkins what the blues were. What they meant to him, what they meant in the great scheme of things. He answered quickly like he knew what was coming, what Townes was going to ask like he had been asked the question many times, or had thought about it a lot and had come up with this stock answer when asked the question-“the blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on your mind.”  Now the old reprobate, and he was from all the tales about his doings indicate, probably had other answers or thoughts about the blues like a woman getting you down, about Captain down on the Mister James Crow plantation always on your ass, about some hard luck story of money ill-spent and about the morning after Jimmy Joe’s corn liquor hang-over but that answer brought a number of other phrases from blues songs to my mind. Brought to mind to try to define what the blues is, why it has “spoken” to lots of people over time, including old time blues aficionados like me. 

You name it, name your malady, and old time blues guys have coined phrases to fit the bill. Not to neglect the female blues singers who in the 1920s and 1930s actually were more in demand that the old plantation-bound male blues singers, but they might like Bessie Smith tell you that the blues are “good man is hard to find” or that it is “hard to love someone when that someone don’t love you” or maybe that she is looking for her nowhere around daddy to “put a little sugar in her bowl” if she was feeling that way, feeling a little salacious. But the best phrase from a female blues singer was to my mind done by Sippy Wallace -“don’t advertise your man” meaning do not tell your woman friends about your man’s virtues, physical or otherwise, or you will be singing the blues and singing them very shortly thereafter.

All of the previous thoughts were brought to mind recently when I was thinking about how important the blues were in my own life whenever I was feeling downhearted. How they got me through a few rough spots. I had along the way been thinking about my response back in the 1980s when I lived in a studio apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston after my divorce (number two) and the young guy downstairs from me, a good guy named Otty Venise, told me over drinks one night at Charlie’s Den on Charles Street that Bessie Smith actually helped him get over his blues. (He was having women troubles just then since his flame had just ditched him for another man, an old boyfriend.) And I had to agree that a heavy dose of Miss Smith would chase some blues away. Chase some woman blues away.             

It is funny though that not all my blues memories revolve around woman relationship troubles, hang-overs, no dough (due to the settlements from those two divorces if nothing else), some sweat-filled dead end job, or the troubles in the world just getting the best of me. Once the blues, or my use of a phrase from a blues song got me into political hot water.

Now my politics are pretty far left, and pretty narrow. Mainly around the fight to end the endless wars this country had immersed itself in for the last decade or more and the fight for some kind of social justice be it opposition to the death penalty, an increase in the minimum wage or to free political prisoners here and abroad. Stuff like that. Like I say narrowly focused but important to me, a way to keep the old blood stirring. As part of what I do, which has a lot to do with writing stuff for various publications, especially lately in the age of the Internet and social media, is make commentary on various issues via things like blogs (and now Twitter). Back in the early part of the presidential campaign of 2008 when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were going at each other tooth and nail for the Democratic Party presidential nomination I was making plenty of commentary about each one. Not that I favored either, like I said my politics are to the left of that party even in the best of times. Usually I will look at the Green Party candidate, which I did that year voting for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney who gave us that voted for her the trifecta; black and proud, a woman and proud, and very serious anti-war and progressive politics.  

What did have me incensed (along with plenty of others who wound up in the Obama camp, at least for a while) was Hillary’s vote in 2003 for the Iraq War and her basic refusal to recant since she had egg all over her face from supporting what turned out to be a bogus war, which she knew, or should have known was bogus if she had done any independent investigation (or used husband Bill’s contacts who had their footprints all over the build-up to the war although it was Bush’s presidency). Somebody, actually more than one person, more than one feminist friend was all over me to support her as the first serious woman presidential candidate (although in a face-off against the first serious black presidential candidate that argument lost some of its steam). Despite my known indifference to party politics, capitalist party politics.

Between that pressure and a book review of a fawning political biography of Hillary I got my dander up and took up a line from the old bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman-“I’d rather be with the devil that to be that woman’s man.” Jesus did I take heat over that one not only from my feminist friends who I expected it from in a sense but from the “don’t like” comments on the book review despite the fact that I had given beside the glossing over of the Iraq vote plenty of other reasons to not like the book, and not like the candidate including a big dose of Clinton fatigue. As now in 2016 we will be subject to plenty of both Clinton and Republican fatigue.

But leave it to the blues, to a blues woman, to bail me out of my troubles. Once I was on the ropes and had to figure out some way to cut across the sting on Hillary I had to check out some other blues lyrics to “get right.” And I didn’t have to look far. One Rory Block, she of the younger generation of blues aficionados who have taken to covering the old blues standards, actually did her own female-etched version of the Skip James song except she sang-“I’d rather be with the devil than to be that man’s woman.” Thanks Rory, thanks a million.     

Now ask me just ask me about my opinion, about supporting one Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016. You know the answer already. Sanctified too. As to the more generic question-What is the blues? The blues is…

And I agree

Gee But It’s Hard To Love Some One When That Someone Don’t Love You

“Hey, turn that record over and play Empty Bed Blues will you,” yelled Stanley Peters to his sweetheart of a couple of years now Josie Davis. Of course if any records were being turned over that day, by "pretty please" request or not, any long-playing records that meant that this pair, Stan and Josie, was in the midst of their periodic all stops out listening to the four album double records Columbia version of Bessie Smith, the Empress of the blues.

That periodic part bears some further explanation. See a couple of years before, a little before they had met Josie had heard a blues singer, a woman blues singer on WCAS the low watt radio station over in Cambridge that she listened to at night while working like crazy on her Master’s degree in social psychology. Josie was just then attempting to finish up at Boston University on her way to a doctorate since in the crowded field of fiery liberal arts students who had honed in on that discipline after being frozen, totally frozen out of the English Lit market by the endless line of applicants, as a place to make their mark a Master’s degree could only be a stepping stone. Otherwise all that blood and sweat provided was a chance to wait on tables at some swanky bistro for tips and some leers. The radio, that station, and Jim Miller’s American Folk Show was her way of staying focused pouring over the endless statistics that she had culled over the previous two years in order to fill out her thesis about the close correlation in 1968 between those kids who drop out of high school and their ability to spent a lot of time tied up in the justice system. (According to Stan later, later when things had gone awry he had to agree that she did a very good job of proving her point and her research would not look shabby even later when tracing the fates of lumpen kids, projects kids really, went out of fashion, along with the liberals who had previous championed their cause.) 

About ten o’clock in the evening on Wednesday nights Jim Miller would have an hour of blues, usually featuring a single performer or group, although Josie no fan of blues despite her love of folk music ever since high school, Hunter College High, in Manhattan back in 1962 when she got caught up with the folk minute craze running through the campuses and urban oases and hung around Washington Square Park and the Village seeing what was what. Usually tired, having to get up early the next morning she would pass on the show, couldn’t see what the big deal now was all about with old black guys from Mississippi or hot shot black or white guys pushing their electric guitars to some netherworld. But as she was beginning to head to the radio on the shelf above her refrigerator she caught the beginning Bessie Smith’s Down-hearted Blues and decided to listen until the end of the song since the words “spoke” to her, the words about some two-timing man who spent all her hard-earned money on whiskey and dope, ran off with her best friend and left her sad and blue.

Josie didn’t know about the whiskey and dope part but she certainly knew about her guy running off with her best friend. Well actually she did know about the whiskey and dope part. Or at least the dope part because she did not like whiskey the one time an Irish boyfriend, a real Irish boyfriend from Ireland, from Cork, a IRA guy on the run one way or another she had picked up in a bar one night when dating Irish rebels was the flavor of the month for liberal/radical Jewish girls like her, gave her some even when it was watered down. Her liquor desires centered more on generous glasses of wine, mainly reds, when she needed to relax a bit but her dope flavor of the month, especially at Wisconsin where she had been an undergraduate was almost anything anybody had in their stash, bennies, and diet pills a specialty. Guys were always asking her to buy "product" as they called it, would get the stuff, maybe give her a few joints or pills and then split-sometimes to "find themselves, sometimes to just split because that was the kind of age the 1960s was. She had been willing to take her lumps on that score. She had left a few guys flat-footed herself so she was not crying, feeling blue about that. It was the running off with best friend that enraged her, make her more than sad and blue.

Before she had come to Boston her best friend from way back in high school, Hunter High which was a well-known elite school for girls then in the city filled with Jewish-American Princesses (JAPs) looking to have that school on their resumes when husband hunting , Frida Hoffman, who was a grind like her, although she could travel with the JAPs when they wanted something from her, had taken her boyfriend, blue-eyed, blonde hair, Midwestern “aw shucks” Todd Morgan from Wisconsin right from under her nose. After graduating from Wisconsin and before heading to Boston, dreading to have to live at home with her parents over in Stuyvesant Town, she had lived with Frida in her Soho apartment for the summer.  She had brought Todd along, after Frida insisted that she could put him in touch with some music people she knew in the Village who might help a budding folk rock singer like Todd. Josie had introduced Todd when they first met and Josie half-saw the "look" in Frida's eyes then but Frida was Frida and checked out  half the guys in the world. This time though Frida landed a low blow and one night had run off to summer of love San Francisco with Todd with whom she was having an affair on the side when Josie had to travel to Boston to find an apartment and to checkout her internship through Boston University.

So the song hit home and as she reached to finally turn the damn thing off on came Empty Bed Blues and she was hooked, listened to the whole hour and heard that soulful melancholy voice all night in her sleep. Here is the funny part, the part that ties everything together as she listened she found that she got more and more into the music, that it kind of grew on her, she didn’t want it to end. She was haunted by the whole experience and the next day she ran over to Central Square in Cambridge, got off at that stop on the Red Line anyway and walked up to Sandy’s Record Shop heading toward Harvard Square to see if he, a connoisseur, the guru of all things folk unto the famous Brahmin Brattle Street Child collected ballads if not before, which if you thing about it really encompassed the blues for lyrics, just not the beat, and asked him, since in those days he ran the store himself mostly, if he had any Bessie Smith records available for purchase. Sandy gave her a big smile and said-“I’ve got a not bad condition, not too scratchy used complete four album eight record Columbia vintage set of her stuff that you won’t want to turn off.” Sold. Sold after Josie explained that effect that her feature on Jim Miller’s show had on her. Sandy gave a sly nod. Needless to say that weekend she perhaps drove her fellow tenants on Commonwealth Avenue batting, or murderous, playing the compete set while drinking wine, red, to drown her sorrows. Drinking her blues away and it was six, two and even which of the two drugs was chasing her blues away.                        

Bessie safely in her grasp Josie got more interested in other women blues singers available for sale at Sandy’s like the newly “discovered” Sippy Wallace who told one and all in her time not to “advertise your man,” good advice if the man was anything worth keeping like Stan who had helped her get through the male fright Todd blues,  Big Mama Thornton who did the original version of Hound Dog which she had heard Elvis do when she was young and was crazy see him do with that swagger and snarled look on his face and whose version pull Elvis to shame and a whole bunch of women named Smith, or so it seemed beside Bessie. Got into those little old guys from hot-house Delta Mississippi too although she was still stand-offish toward those bad ass Chicago blues guys with the wicked bad lyrics of lust, dope and booze.

One afternoon at Sandy’s while she was looking for a Skip James recording she saw a sign that Big Tommy Johnson who was reputed to be the latest reincarnation of blues legend Robert Johnson, a singer who she could take or leave, was playing at a club in Inman Square a few blocks up from Sandy’s  called Joe’s Place. She asked Sandy about Johnson and about the place, including about whether she was going to get hassled if she went alone and sat at the bar. Sandy told her he was not that familiar with Johnson (but don’t ask, please don’t’ ask about Skip James because you will get harangued for an hour or more with every arcane fact known to man about that bluesman) but that she would have to take her chances, as always, when guys see a single pretty young women after they have had a few drinks.    

So that Saturday night feeling a little blue about her progress on developing a theme for her thesis, a little fearful about going alone but also a little man hungry if she was honest with herself especially if a guy knew something about the blues and wasn’t just sitting there at Joe’s leering at his next “conquest” she went into Joe’s and sat unmolested at the bar while Johnson was playing. As it turned out he wasn’t what she was interested in for blues music but she wasn’t hassled, half damn it, either. She would go there a few more times until the night she met Stanley who had walked to her and told her he had seen her in the place before, did she like the blues, did she know the blues and about six thousand bits of other information. And not once did he “hit” on her, didn’t ask her what she was doing after the show. What did get him somewhere, get him two years of loving as it turned out, although not that night when he left, half damn it, her at the door of the club with a “hope to see you here again” was a date after he mentioned about three thousand stray facts about Bessie Smith. Including this observation-“You know when you start listening to Bessie, especially if you start at Volume One of the Columbia record set, you half want to shut the thing off but as you listen more you don’t want it to end, want to play the thing all day and night.”  Yes, Josie thoughts, a kindred. A kindred who she was getting ready to go to her record player and turn over the vinyl so Stan could hear Empty Bed Blues.             

When Girls Doo-Wopped In The Be-Bop 1960s Night

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Jack Callahan never knew what his old time from high school friend Bart Webber was going to be into at any particular moment. He had been like that back in the early 1960s when he was the class cut-up at Carver High where he started the trend among students there of trying to fit themselves, as many as possible, in respectively, telephones booths (that cultural attachment connected to thoughts from waiting by the midnight phone for somebody to call to getting up the nerve to call a girl asking for a simple date and getting the frost colder that the Cold War for an answer, now long gone in the days of ubiquitous cellphones and other high-tech devices as ways of communicating), Volkswagens (the bug model also a relic of the past not the min-van which would later be ubiquitous on the highways and by-ways of 1960s counter-cultural seeking the hitchhike road), and his own personal touch to show how off the wall he could be when left to his own devices, a stall in the boys’ lavatory.           

Later, after high school and a few years on the hitchhike road going out West, he settled back down in Carver with his high school sweetheart, Betsy Binstock, who had waited for him to finish up sowing his wild oats and run a printing shop when his old employer, Len Murphy, turned it over to him after he retired. But that same sense of what will he be into next followed Bart through the years and those years with Betsy, who had merely rolled her eyes when he did holy goof stuff in high school, had mellowed him out so that what might interest him at any moment tended to be more civilized pursuits. Civilized pursuits like doing an end around (he had after all been a decent football player, good enough to catch the eyes of head cheerleader Betsy) on the films, books and music that animated his, our youth.         

He had started several years ago, maybe 2011, 2012, as he prepared to retire himself and turn the day to day running of the print shop to his son Ned, to grab some old time compilations of music, in CD form these days, from our youth at the library and then later when he had run the rack at the library on Amazon, put out by demographically savvy record companies who saw that the generation of ’68, those of us who ran riot through the 1960s had as we calmed down as much sense of nostalgia as previous generations had for the music of their youth. One night around that time at the Beachcomber in Hull, where Jack and his wife lived in a condo now that that they were “empty nesters,” over a few whiskeys, Bart had started a conversation with Jack about a compilation that he had just purchased on Amazon which featured all girl doo-wop material.     

Both Jack and Bart had imbibed as much as anybody the various gradations of music, the music of their coming of age, as rock and roll came crashing through the gates and formed the ethos from which they did not stray too much from being present at the creation in the mid-1950s (although really too young to fully appreciate what the developing ethos around rock was to be), through the doldrums of the late 1950s and early 1960s epitomized by the likes of Bobby Vee and Sandra Dee, through the British invasion and then when they traveled west to the acid-etched rock of the Airplane, Dead, Doors, that would define their counter-cultural days. Bart confessed to Jack that although he was happy with the purchase of that all girl doo-wop compilation he figured that this subgenre was probably the area that he was least interested in, or better that, he understood.

To make his point he gave Jack several reasons why that was so. Jack, in turn, suggested that he write down his sentiments and post them as a review on Amazon which gladly solicits such reviews, good or bad, as part of their selling strategy. Bart balked at first since while he may have been many things in his life he did not consider himself a writer, thought, if you can believe this that such people were holy goofs (as expression Bart, Jack and all the other guys from their corner boy days grabbed from Jack Kerouac after reading after his classic On The Road featuring the greatest holy goof of them all, Dean Moriarty, nee Neal Cassady). Jack told him to try and he would help with the editing, although he had to confess that in his long career of selling cars for Toyota (and several times being top dog, being Mister Toyota of New England) his own writing skills had atrophied since he worked on the school newspaper, The Magnet. Here is a look at what they were able to produce, although at the last minute Bart again balked and said he did not want to post the damn thing (his term) on Amazon:  

When Girls Doo-Wopped The Night Away    

I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, an anachronism, a battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and just fine, agreed), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. I have explained that moniker put onus elsewhere to my friends so I will only say here that the ‘68 part represented a very big turning point, a kind of point of no return for the generation filled with political intrigues, assassinations, treachery and a couple of serious attempts, unsuccessful as it turned out as Frankie Jackman would say, to “turn the world upside down” to our benefit.

Naturally, dealing with the musical end of those efforts (and I will not like I did one time with Josh Breslin, a guy met out in Frisco town form up in Olde Saco, Maine and who has remained a lifelong friend, although I don’t see him as much as I like, get into our midnight quarrels about music and the revolution since that one has been laid to rest long ago) one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters (and his big ass electric mannish-child guitar sound), Big Mama Thornton (bouncing along on Hound Dog to make Elvis blush), and Big Joe Turner (who at one time with his Shake, Rattle, and Roll had been in contention, at least by me, for the first serious rock tune until I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and became a convert). And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis (who did fine work on Smiley Lewis’ Good Rocking Tonight and so can stop blushing), Carl Perkins (yeah, it was a funny twist of fate that he lost out on the big, big time when Elvis crashed out with his Blue Suede Shoes, Wanda Jackson (much underrated as a fast track female rocker before they could figure out where to put her), and Jerry Lee Lewis (is there any better song that spoke of our alienation from the old ways when he came busting into town on the back of a flatbed truck doing High School Confidential in a bust of a film of the same name.  Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love (a good, a very good question, right). I note that I have not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I make some amends for that omission here.

One problem with the girl groups for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, as you can tell from my comments above is that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy can a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks up with her boyfriend on her parents’ demand because of his lower class upbringing, a motorcycle guy from the same wrong side of the tracks as me, a sensitive motorcycle guy who is misunderstood by a society that only sees that he is deeply alienated and could be a problem if he and his boys, the Devil’s Disciplines or whatever name they used, in their very exclusive club of hard-bitten lumpen youth decided to do what Marlon Brando’s Johnny in The Wild One did when they wound up in some Podunk California town and wasted the place, as the lyrics in the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack attest to. Except that she, despite the goddam parents and those snickering girlfriends who just wanted to see what power the lad had behind that motorcycle if you know what I mean, wanted to be riding free in back of that bike, and you do, if you came up the way I did, should have stuck with her guy through thick and thin, and maybe, just maybe, he would not have skidded off that rainy road and gone to Harley heaven so young. (Yeah, heaven despite the long list of sins he never atoned for including off-hand armed robberies to keep his bike, his bike man, up to sniff). And, maybe, just maybe, like my Betsy and me, they could be in that little white house with the picket fence hosting the grandkids today.

Try this one too for no-go for Bart, the lyrics about some guy, some sensitive, shy, good-looking guy with the wavy hair who all the girls are going crazy over but who the singer is going make her very own in boy and girl love battle in the Cliftons’ He’s So Fine when this writer was nothing but a girl reject around that time, mainly. I was even on the outs with Betsy then since she was dating some guy who father worked for Honeywell in the up and coming computer industry and had no time for a son of a “bogger,” son of a guy who worked in the cranberry bogs which then made the town famous. Partially because, as Jack Callahan who is helping me write this thing has felt the need to tell the whole world, again, I was something of a goof then and partially because my acne had not cleared up but when it did I did do okay with the girls (although if my long time wife Betsy sees this I am only making it up, only using a little literary license as Jack would say, okay)

Or how about this one, the one where the love bugs are going to be married and really get that white house picket fence thing in the Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love for a guy who, again, more often than not didn’t even have steady girlfriend. I, kiss-less youth, won’t even get into the part of the anatomy that Betty Everett harps on in It’s In His Kiss. Or, finally, how could I possibly relate to the teen girl angst problem posed in the Shirelles Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Yeah, how would I know if it was the real thing, or just a moment’s pleasure, you know the sex thing she let her guy do, which she liked just fine, while she way letting him at her, but who afterward was having second thoughts, maybe had not resisted those teenage hormonal urges enough, and what that dreaded tomorrow they sing about will bring.

So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Yeah, but also get this while I have your ear you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop bopped into that good night voice out and listen to, and sing along with, the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was about our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth traumas and now, a distant now, this stuff sounds great.

Lafayette, Louisiana Bound-With The Good Old Swamp Boys The Hackenberry Ramblers In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Jack Callahan

Sam Eaton was nothing but a swamp Yankee, never claimed to be anything but that, would have at various younger points in his now long life make any aspersion that he was not or that there was something wrong with that identity a cause for back alley  barroom fists and general mayhem. He, at six feet three inches and two hundred and forty pounds of mainly sinewy muscle, then could enforce that belief. Yeah, Sam had been born the son of a swamp Yankee down Carver in Southeastern Massachusetts way where there are fewer but still plenty of the breed hanging around the small cabins and cottages that partial identify kindred. His forbears going back as far as Sam was able to trace the genealogy were of that same condition, lived life close and survived to tell the tale.

A swamp Yankee for those not in the know, for those whose sense of history about the genus Yankees only extends to what you read in the bloody high school history books and goes only to knowledge of the high tone rarified Boston Brahmins is one of that breed who didn’t get his or her fair shake in the fortune, brains, good luck department and so wound up as farm hands or small hard-working scrabble farmers, fisherman if by the sea or woodmen. Those Brahmins, far removed from these brethren even in the old struggles to survive not matter how they made their ill-gotten fortunes mostly connected someway with the slave trade, now being slowly driven to distinction if not power in their secluded protected enclaves, the progeny of the Beacon Hill city on a hill crowd that John Winthrop and his Puritan crew that guys like Perry Miller a professor out of Harvard who made a big study of the breed in its entirety not always kindly brought forth on the Northeast corner of this continent were the tip of the iceberg. 

The swamp Yankees, not being the godly sort or at least not pretending to some elect, were people who came over in the later Pilgrim, vagabond, derelict criminal indentured servant migrations and got stuck or just fell into the human sink. A writer once to fill out his story of one branch of the breed devoted the first forty or so pages of his novel to a very vivid description of the set ways, the closed-ness, and the wariness of these folk in their edge of New England small town enclaves. Told about their origins back in the British Isles old country where they were loose cannons, on the run or ready to go on the run, coming in or going out of the jails and as one historian of early America, the post-Puritan period, these were master-less men. The kind that either fell into the sink holes of their towns or they drifted, and drifted is the right work, working a little especially the land until it bled out and then moved on, moved on until they ran smack into the Pacific Ocean running to the Japan sea. There at land’s end they then fell back into the human sink and developed their loves for fast cars, motorcycles and midnight hell-raising, but at least it was not cold.

You know though that these damn swampers, Sam’s kin, not under some city on the hill dream but to escape the poor house, the debtors prison or the hangman and wound up doing some indentured servitude did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged there way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought them and theirs  every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought them down in places like Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where they tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as “boggers,” as men who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner.

Sam’s people stayed in place, kept to the edges of Carver. Sam the first of his breed to finish high school (and later some college), the first to not work the broken down bogs (more recently being sold to developers for condos), and most importantly the first to go away to that far Pacific running to the Japan seas ocean and breath in some fresh air. His people didn’t like it, some still surviving cousins still don’t, still give him an evil eye at family reunions but he broke out with his generation in the hell-bend 1960s. Learned a lot about other kinds of people but for our story he learned that the swamp Yankees formed out of the British migration to the new continent were not the only ones who developed the swamp way of thinking, entertaining themselves   and just being content with existing.

On Sam’s second trip out to San Francisco via the hitchhike highway that every other footloose young man (and some young women although they usually were travelling with a man) was using to get west, to find out what was “happening” and those quotation marks no mistake for that was the feeling of the times, he met a guy who was also from Massachusetts. From North Adamsville a town about thirty miles from Carver, a guy named Markin, Pete Markin, who had come out about a year before on the same kind of search and had wound up living in one of the then very common converted yellow brick road school buses that were running up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, searching, hell, just searching. He had met Markin in Golden Gate Park one day and Markin had invited him to come to a party that the denizens of Captain Crunch’s yellow brick bus were throwing. (Crunch the owner of the bus although he was usually not around and did not press the issue of his ownership very hard since as some of the denizens suspected on the basis of some urban legend rumor that he had exchanged a big bag of primo dope for the vehicle.)

At that party, after the obligatory passing of the joint and jug among the brethren, including Sam, Markin introduced him to Josh Breslin, who despite the surname had grown up in the Quebecois quarter of mill town Olde Saco, Maine. Josh and Sam had almost instantly gotten along since Josh’s people were what they would later jokingly call swamp Cajuns although strictly speaking the Cajuns were located in southwest Louisiana in places like Lake Charles and Lafayette heading toward Texas. Longfellow the Brahmin poet did a long poem about the travails, Evangeline. The Cajuns had been run out of Nova Scotia way back when and driven down south in a big migration after the British defeated the French in a bunch of long running worldwide wars (then worldwide which was basically wherever the British and French had outposts) but when they settled in they exhibited many of the same characteristic as the swamp Yankees around New England.

 

After Sam and Josh (and Markin of course) had been on the bus searching for whatever they were searching for several months Josh’s cousin Rene Dubois joined them. (Sam some forty plus years later had lost the drift of what he had been looking for back then when asked by his grandchildren and so he stole Markin’s line about the “search for the blue-pink Great American West night” and that seemed to satisfy them.)

Rene had grown up with Josh in Olde Saco until sixth grade when the mills that made the town run were moving south and Rene’s father who had come from Lafayette and thus had bene a real swamp Cajun had decided to move his family back to his hometown. They had nevertheless stayed in touch and Josh had convinced him to come west and see what was what. One night Josh, Sam and Rene were stoned out of their gourds (Sam’s expression) when they started talking about music, not about the acid-etched rock and roll of the Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane and the Doors that they were crazy for those days but the music they grew up with.

Sam told the two others that his father would always be playing old time mountain music which he said had travelled from the old country to America and had stuck mostly with the swamp Yankees when they had their local dances or family reunions. You know plenty of fiddles, mandolins, mountain harps, hell, washboards even, whatever noise would take the miseries away for a minute. Rene had to laugh at what Sam said because his family had done the same thing except they would sing the songs in broken down French, patois they called it, he just called it Cajun and left it at that. Rene said one time his father had taken his mother, him, and his brothers over to Lake Charles to hear the Hackenberry Ramblers and just then Rene started singing a few songs in the patios. Sam smiled a knowing smile. Swamp brethren indeed. Jolie Blone. 

*****Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven 

 

 

A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject.

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale (reflecting the necessarily international brother and sisterhood of the downtrodden and oppressed to get out from under the thumb of the now globalized economic royalists who run the show to their small benefit), Union Maid (reflecting the deep-seeded need to organize the unorganized and reorganize the previously organized sections of the labor movement in America), Which Side Are You On (reflecting, well, that is easy enough to figure out without further explanation, which side are you when the deal goes down), Viva La Quince Brigada (reflecting that at certain times and certain places we must take up arms like in the 1930s Spanish Civil War against the night-takers before they get out of their shells and wreak havoc on the world), Universal Soldier (reflecting the short-fall in the ability of humankind to step forward without going off the deep end of killing each other for no known reason, good reason anyway), and such under the title Songs To While The Class Struggle By.

Those songs have provided our movement with that combination entertainment/political message that is an art form that we use to draw the interested around us. Even though today those interested in struggling may be counted rather than among the countless that we need to take on the beasts and the class struggle to be “whiled away” is rather one-sidedly going against us at present. The bosses are using every means from firing militants to targeting and setting union organizing drives up for failure by every means possible to employing their paid propagandists to complain when the masses are not happy with having their plight groveled in their faces like they should be and are ready to do something about it while the rich, well, while away in luxury and comfort.  

Not all life however is political, or rather not all music lends itself to some kind of explicit political meaning but yet speak to, let’s say, the poor sharecropper or planation worker on Mister’s land at the juke joint on Saturday listening to the country blues, unplugged, kids in the early 1950s at the jukebox listening to high be-bop swing heralding a new breeze to break out of the tired music of their parents, other kids listening, maybe at that same jukebox later in the decade now worn with play and coins listening to some guys from some Memphis record company rocking and rolling (okay, okay not just some record company but Sam Phillip’s Sun Records and not just some guys from the cornfields but Warren Smith, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis), or adults spending some dough to hear the latest from Tin Pan Alley (some Cole Porter, Irvin Berlin, Gershwin Brothers summertime and the living is easy tune)or some enchanted evening Broadway musical. And so they too while away to the various aspects of the American songbook and that rich tradition is which in honored here.   

This series which could include some modern protest songs as well like Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone or Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind, is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up.

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And as if you needed more motivation to list up run through this sketch:

The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven  

From The Pen Of Bart Webber 

 Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out in such contrary fashion in this wicked old world, not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” reflecting since we are in a reflecting mood the swift passage of time and of times not coming back but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin, Markin, who seemingly was possessed by the demon fight in his brain against the night-takers whatever their guise and who will be more fully introduced in a moment. (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked him too as a result, and his first ill-advised wife, a scion of the Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully, to impress her leafy suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names inherited from the long ago Brahmin forbear stowaways on the good ship Mayflower.)

Neither of those expressions referred to above date back to their youth since neither Sam nor Markin back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to express their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business and they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Markin when they had reconnected a number of years previously after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the better angels of their nature on a more regular basis. Some might call this a nostalgic glancing back, especially by Markin since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.   

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culture-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “max daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “max daddy” another expression coined by Markin so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written up about his latest exploit and needed to play on Markin’s vanity, Markin with his finger-tip two thousand arcane facts stored in that brain ready to be fired at a moment’s notice for his leader. His leader who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza (don’t ask how that “coins flowing” got going since Fritz like most of the corner boys came “from hunger” but just take on faith that they got there. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and still is although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generation to some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That made it among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. (The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore far from beaches, daytime beaches although rumors had been of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks. Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason, a friend stopping to buy a soda on a hot summer day Fritz said, and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion. Moreover Phil’s provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or a stray “nice” girl passing by after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night in the summer of 1965 when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of “sports” who bet with him on Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he too, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy). See Johnny was pretty poor in those days even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from). Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty to some young thing (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as he would later try to claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”) or depending on whatever intelligent he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him so Johnny would be all sympathy, maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Markin who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest (everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys).

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an “item.” An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it was about old time corners boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old days, like he kept going back to he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1966” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to join the site to keep up with what was going on, keep up with developments there (he would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned to although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him because in the end he could not face going home, believed in the end after a painful episode, a feud with a female fellow classmate that left bitter ashes in his mouth (hers too from what he had heard later) what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After he had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to these past forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing, some seventy or so madding to his sad old world view) of who had joined and found the names of Peter Paul Markin and Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Sam had to laugh, listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought.) Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Markin, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s.

Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad, the time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Markin knew that, knew Fritz’s lying about his scorecard with under the satin sheets women, knew it better than anybody else but to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulation.

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston from the West Coast (read “hang out”: did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world now, and how the world had changed some much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling at him. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Paul Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Markin goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Markin as Sam already noted provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls, who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t his monthly quota of  college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a  term Jimmy constantly used so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner), who was “unapproachable,”  probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of that now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square name your term).

Strangely Markin had made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though he never after that Melinda Loring sting had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over to Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head, especially those French films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band and after practice you would hear Beethoven or somebody wafting through the halls after they had finished their sport’s practice)but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it). That was how Markin had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille.

Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac On The Road trail for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Markin, not so much later in the 1960s in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was seen as kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover and commie into the Markin home phone).  He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworths’ protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to Woolworth’s, or North Adamsville residents, were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War “we were fighting against the Russians” North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Markin was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his  Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested the incessantly aggressive American foreign policy dipped internally into wars and coups at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic had not gotten that much less hostile to what Markin had to say about this “wicked old world,” you already know the genesis of that term, right, was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice).

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale Grille, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (now able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he “took a dive” (Markin’s words).

Told Sam redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless).

Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the “gnaw,” probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Markin was on his soapbox. 

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Markin that although he had heard the word blog he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writers were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking to other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period. 

Sam was amazed at the various topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he had delved into the struggle to build his printing shop after high school and the marriage, first marriage, house, kids and dog bit.  He told Markin that as he scrolled through the site he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panther or guys like that who were on the news after they were killed or carted off to jail, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but that Sam could not remember the titles of. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event in Boston or the East Coast. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Markin had also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches (that is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots). Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below which was on a sidebar of the blog homepage:

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.