A Short History of...

 Last spring semester, I taught my Civil Rights/Black Power course.  It is always rewarding, but I had a group of students that made this version of the course particularly rewarding.  They were curious, engaged, and always willing to veer off in surprising new directions.  I like to begin certain class sessions with a song.  I use music to ease the class into what are often difficult topics.  They usually seem to enjoy it, and one student liked to quiz me on the choices I was making.  I joked with her that I was going to write an alternative history of America based on ten songs.  As the semester progressed, I thought a lot about that exchange.  Why not craft a narrative that employs music as a framework of analysis?  Or perhaps, a more feasible prospect in the short term is to construct a course that way?

In the fall of 2021, I am rolling out an old course called "Music, Memory, and Diaspora."  The semester theme is:  "A Short History of the Atlantic World in 12 Songs."  We begin with the transatlantic slave trade, and the African diaspora into the Caribbean, and American South, and the transmission and evolution of music as a repository for historical memory, and crafting of identity.  We'll cover the blues, the period of the Harlem Renaissance, the birth and evolution of jazz, the Negritude movement; segue back into the Caribbean for reggae and dub, the impact of the diaspora in the UK, and then finish with the emergence of Hip Hop.  Sprawling, freewheeling, chaotic--just the way I like it.

The trick is choosing the playlist.  What songs best tell the history that I want to tell?  I'll work through the process here.  Suggestions are welcome.  

Hill and Gully Rider

 1.  The Tarriers were one of those commercial folk music groups so brilliantly mocked in Christopher Guess's 2003 film, A Mighty Wind.  They had a few hits in the late 50s; most notably their version of the "Banana Boat Song," the same tune that a year later put Harry Belafonte on the map.  What I didn't know was that for years they were given credit for writing the calypso-tinged classic.  Not only that, but one of the members of the group was the actor, Alan Arkin, whose name appears on the 1957 Glory Records 45.  I collect 45s and this thing popped up in a batch of records I got on Ebay.  (Ebay has made life during quarantine worth living.)  I don't have a lot of patience for the commercial folk music of the Revival years, but this thing is is truly weird.  It is, in fact, two songs.  On the one hand you have familiar verses from Belafonte's "Day-O" version, but it also borrows lyrics from the Caribbean folk song, "Hill and Gully Rider."  The only reason I know that song is my elementary school music teacher used to make us sing along with Kingston Trio records.  A little digging showed that even though they're given song-writing credit, the Tarriers tune wasn't particularly original, but borrowed from a number of Jamaican folk songs.  So these four white dudes from NYC managed to cobble together a Top 10 hit AND touch off the thankfully short-lived calypso craze of the period.  And yeah...Alan Arkin.  I'm still trying to get my head around that one.

2.  Music and the Great Betrayal:  My time during the pandemic has been marked by a retreat into sound.  My early quarantine playlists were rife with free jazz and noise, but that quickly morphed into a prolonged descent into the worlds of rockabilly, postwar country, New Orleans r&b, and the punk rock of my youth.  The trashy, the soulful, the funky--the sublime.  The more obscure, the better.  I used to wonder why I couldn't just find one genre to call my own, but now I surf the waves of obscure musicians and bands that too few people care about or have even heard of, and I don't worry about where it is all going to take me.  

I figure my pandemic playlists will someday show me where I was at the time of America's fall. Maybe then the flight to the margins of listening culture will mean something.  I think what I'm listening to somehow correlates to the profound sense of betrayal I'm feeling.  We are back in school and, despite the science of the virus and good old common sense, I am back in front of a classroom.  Trust me, it is one thing to have some sense that your employer could care less about your well-being; it is an entirely different thing to know for sure they don't.  My college canceled graduation last May for safety reasons.  At that time there had been approximately 61,000 COVID deaths.  Now we're back in the classroom--nearly 7000 students are back on campus.  Nationwide there have been more than 180,000 deaths and projections are nearly 450,000 will die before this thing is under control.  What changed?  Is it, maybe, the chance to vacuum up a semester of student tuition and housing dollars and student fees?  I can't say for sure because we faculty plebes were excluded from the decision-making process, as usual.  Hell, we had to fight for a mask mandate!  "March or die!"  And the communications now emanating from the administration conjure up an alternative reality where it is always sunny,and an elixir of milk and honey rains from the sky.  Kremlin scribes at the height of the Cold War would be proud.  When did it become so easy to refuse to see what is right in front of your face?  When did our lives become a line on the balance sheet of the corporate university. Maybe its been that way for a long time, but this disease has flipped on the light switch and its right there for the world to see.  

The music I'm obsessing over is angry and despairing; its full of joy and danger and the life spirit.  It isn't appropriate for work.  It is my work.  Charlie Feathers has come back to Earth an angel and Benny Spellman is still scheming on his fortune-teller.  Surf bands from Buffalo, New York, are showing their classmates how to boogie, and Syl Johnson's tears stream down the face of America.  An angry beauty is still beautiful and if its all the same to you, I'll just sit right here with the headphones on and wonder if the sun will ever rise for us again?

**I started this post more than 9 months ago.  There have been occasions when I opened this blog and stared at it for awhile, but I guess I hit the lockdown wall and no words would come.  Instead of "finishing" the post, which, honestly, isn't going to happen now, I figure I'll just hit "publish" and move on.  Here's to the hope that a simple act will jump start a little writing.  Or not.**

Knowing the Path and Walking the Path

 1.  Thinking about David Graeber.  Last semester a student came by my office to interview me for a class.  It was pro forma right up until the point she said, "I took your survey class.  If I were to guess I'd say you are an anarchist."  Cue spit-take.  But the question opened up a wonderful conversation as I tried my best to explain my ever-evolving, often contradictory personal politics.  I've never been much of a joiner, and I've always held a healthy contempt for authority.  The way I figure it, respect is earned.  While I can fool people into thinking I'm friendly and engaging, I mostly feel panic and dread when I am dealing with others.  I like the world on the margins.  I feel comfortable there.  That sense of marginality translates in myriad ways--but when it comes to politics, I distrust centralized institutions, and the established dogmas of both right and left make me want to wretch.  Point being, I prefer my politics to be local, and I like attaching myself to groups, organizations, and individuals that do more than hector people on Facebook.  For 25 years I've worked with Food Not Bombs, the Black Cross, and Athens Mutual Aid.  I've visited and made common cause with an array of anarchist collectives from New Orleans, to Haverhill, Mass. to Athens, Georgia.  Never in all that time has anyone tried to impose their particular dogma on me; on the contrary, whatever the differences of opinion, it has always been about the work.  I don't call myself an anarchist because I don't believe I deserve to--but I love and respect the hard work of the people who do.  

David Graeber came into my consciousness during the Occupy Movement of 2011.  I had been in the Middle East in February of that year at the beginning of Arab Spring and I wanted desperately to believe that our time had come as well.  Graeber's work in Zuccotti Park inspired me.  His model of organizing reminded me of the best civil rights era organizing, especially the work of Robert Moses in Mississippi--leadership through the empowerment of others.  Of course I had to go and find his books.  His work on the history of debt and on "bullshit jobs" burned down so many of the fictive narratives that dominate and shape the discourse of our time.  I even wrote him a fan letter when he was at the University of London.  His kind reply reminded me of the importance of humility, especially in the academy.  David died on September 2nd at the age of 59.  I am 59.  The whole thing weirds me out, and while rationally it seems a little silly, I feel a sense of profound loss.  I've needed people like him my whole life; the kinds of people who say, "OK, but look at it this way," and change the way I engage the world.  There is a terrible shortage of those kinds of people.  Rest in Power, David.

Mutation and Transcendence

1.  Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Upsetters, "Revolution Dub:" Cut it up and start again.  Temporal and sonic disruptions in an Age of Crisis.  Isolation and quarantine of have exposed the roots of my dischronia.  In 1975, Michael Manley's socialist government was beset inside and out by the "dark forces."A year later, there was an assassination attempt on Bob Marley and the country swam in bloody political violence.  Dubby Conquerors like Scratch were there to bear witness and to tear up all of our sonic chronologies.  The past speaks in ghostly tones; the future is now.  Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of ghosts these days.

2.  James Brown, "Take Some...Leave Some" from The Payback (Polydor 1973):  The sounds of urban decay in the 1970s sounds really freakin' good right about now.

3.  Zora Neale Hurston at the Crossroads; or, The Devil and Zora Neale:  Thinking about African American folklore, the diaspora, and crossroads mythology.  Today I ran across a citation referring to The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a grimoire first published in 18th Century Europe, but found a home in the syncretic religious traditions of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South and was then carried northward during the Great Migration.  It was embraced by black hoodoo practitioners.  It was a key early text in the history of Rastafarianism.  References to the text are found in the songs of bands like Toots and the Maytals.  It is an example of how so-called folk traditions aren't stale artifacts from the past, but parts of living, breathing spiritual systems, always changing, always with us.  As a professional folklorist, Hurston had a different agenda than peers like Melville Herskovits who excavated black American culture in search of African "remnants."  Of course the echoes of old Africa were there.  Hurston wanted to document the ways in which these tradition were alive and well today--an argument for the validity and value of black spirituality.  To study conjuration, magic, hoodoo, and voodoo, she became a novitiate studying African American esoteric wisdom from the inside as practitioner.  According to much of the scholarship on Hurston, her frustration with the mediocre sales of these studies of the folk prompted an increasing focus on fiction-writing.  There is a logic to that narrative.  And yet, when you consider a work like Moses, Man of the Mountain, the dichotomy between Hurston's scholarship and her art grows unstable.  Hurston's Moses is an amalgam of the Moses of black theology and folk traditions. He's the Biblical figure who led his people to the Promised Land; he's a conjure man and magician, a hoodoo priest, and trickster who with the turn of a phrase can fool old pharaoh and point his people in the direction of home.  What if Hurston's Moses is more than the fictional character in the novel, but also Hurston's contribution to the folk traditions documented in the tales she collected?  As a trained hoodoo priest, and student of and participant in the voodoo beliefs of Jamaica and Haiti, she was unique in that she had a foot in two worlds.  She was a scholar who deployed a scientific methodology in the study of black folklore, and she was a believer and practitioner who mastered the doctrine and ceremony of black Atlantic esotericism.  She didn't just document; she shaped and contributed as well.  Zora Neale Hurston at the crossroads.

4.  Myth and Robert Johnson:  I love the blues.  Although I'm generally inclined to read voluminously about musical genres I'm passionate about, the eternal bickering among the "bluesologists" bugs me to no end.  The literature on Robert Johnson is especially off-putting.  Every few years someone vomits up the "definitive" book on the subject--the "real" Robert Johnson.  And then let the skirmishing commence!  But does it matter?  OK, I suppose it does, but to me the compulsive will to "completism" obscures the power of the Johnson mythology in the popular psyche.  The "whens" and "wheres" of Johnson's wanderings are irrelevant to the ways in which his story captured the public imagination, and his sound burrowed into the consciousness.  One text I found particularly interesting in this regard is Zeke Schein and Poppy Bright's Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson's Lost Photograph.  By trying to track the origins of a photo alleged to be Johnson, Schein butted up against the blues professionals who were more interested in rebutting someone they considered an upstart and lawyers for Johnson's estate who wanedt to scrap over every possible penny to be earned. The joy expressed in Schein's book is in the hunt, as well as the immersive experience of listening deeply to and reveling in Johnson's music.  What Schein teaches those of us still willing to learn is that in this here America, myth and spirit transcend the selfish nit-picking blather passing for "fact," especially when all too often it isn't.

Sound & Vision

1.  Jill Freedmen's Resurrection City, 1968:  There are no photographs of civil rights leaders, or Hollywood celebrities; there are only a few pictures of marches and street demonstrations.  Instead there are people. Poor people. The people who waded through the mud and piss and built the shanties that gave Resurrection City its shape,who were its community.  They were the forgotten; Freedmen makes us remember them.  The were supposedly invisible; she forces us to look into their eyes. This is what photography is supposed to do.

2.  Coltrane's A Love Supreme:  I've been thinking a lot about McCoy Tyner.  His Inner Voices was the first jazz record I ever bought with my own money.  I still have that now-crusty old piece of vinyl.   A Love Supreme has been in my car stereo for days.  It is "Pursuance," the third movement that obsesses me.  I've listened to it over and over again.  Beginning with Elvin Jones's drum solo, and then a short phrase from Trane, Tyner's long run kicks in around the two minute mark.  He's like a bulldozer plowing the path that Coltrane then follows in his journey towards the ecstatic.  Of course it's a prayer; it's an expression of gratitude.  Something we can all use in our time of isolation and uncertainty.

3.  DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid's Dubtometry (Thirsty Ear, 2003):  Fractured fairy tales from the Year Zero.  I've realized I have a personal collection of crisis management music that reemerges during times of trouble.  Mad Professor and Lee Perry may be the brightest lights on these remixes but the standouts are at the fringes of the record--J Live, DJ Goo, Twilight Circus Dub Sound System.  Perhaps dub is my way of making sense of chaos?  Deep bass, ghostly apparitions bleeding into the sonic stew and then disappearing, hollowed out histories where all the linear narratives of the original songs are chopped up and made new in ways that tell different stories about the now.  The ghosts are always there for us.

4.  John Prine, "Sam Stone" from his S/T lp (Atlantic 1971):  I've been rereading Michael Herr's Dispatches for an online discussion with one of my classes.  When I'm building the syllabus, I tend to agonize over the Vietnam-era readings, sometimes skipping them altogether. More often I return to Herr's classic memoir.  I do so for the most selfish of reasons; every time I read it I think, "I really wish I could write like this."  And now we hear that the great John Prine has the dreaded virus.  I'm betting he pulls through.  But for the semesters I choose not to assign a long read for the Vietnam era, I have students listen to and discuss Prine's song, "Sam Stone."  Like the Herr book, I always think to myself, I really wish I could write like this. 

5.  A couple of weeks ago, the Athens-Clarke County Commission debated the mayor's directive to limit the numbers of people meeting in public spaces and whether or not to "shelter in place."  Beth and I sat on our couch and watched the livestream on YouTube.  The deliberations were serious, and despite the wide variations in ideology, our commissioners worked in good faith.   But only one of the commissioners, Ovita Thornton, pointed out the obvious and most intractable problem posed by our invisible enemy.  What about the homeless?  Hundreds of our neighbors live without shelter.  We step over them as we do business downtown; they stand strategically at intersections around town asking for help.  There are homeless camps under the overpasses and in the groves of trees around town.  How do those individuals social distance?  Where do they seek healthcare when they begin to exhibit the symptoms of this virus?  How effective is a shelter in place directive if there is a large and growing constituency huddled in anonymity outside the boundaries of our community?  It's telling that no one on the commission took up Mrs. Thornton's challenge.  No one.  It was as if she hadn't asked the question at all.

Athens is a wonderful place to live.  We are lucky to be here.  But the whole "bustling college town" line comes up way short when you consider that nearly 36% of Athenians live in poverty.  We champion our music and art and the great contributions made by the university, and we should.  But not if we pay tribute to those things while turning a blind eye to those who are too easily thrown away.  We can see it now; it stares us in the face.  There is no healthcare infrastructure capable of dealing with these problems.  Mental health facilities are negligible, especially the for the populations that need them most.  Drug treatment?  Almost non-existent.  Insert "leaky boat" metaphor here.

So the virus has shined a light on the sickness.  The old myths are dead.  The time is now for a New Honesty.  We can talk about the limitations and weaknesses of the system, but isn't the truth that there is no system?  I'm done with the American Dream, and especially the American dreamers.  Your myths are lies and your lies bring death.  There are too many of us standing outside your system, invisible, disposable, and ignored.  It ain't about differences of opinion or partisanship or whatever.  Its that too many people just don't care.  Maybe we could create a substantive foundation for change by actually seeing one another.  Stop turning away.  Stop pretending you don't see what is in front of your face.

Confessions of a Pathological Procrastinator

My work gives me a lethal flexibility to procrastinate.  I can rationalize putting things off in the name of fulfilling some other "obligation."  My ever-present "To Do" list only grows longer.  Given my inability to set priorities, I convince myself that as long as something gets crossed off, I'm making some sort of "progress."  The marginalia that catch my eye, like bright shiny coins along a path, draw me away, and I convince myself that it is part of some process or maybe the raw material for some future project.  Sometimes I am even right.

For the past three years, I've been working on a monograph. I've made progress; a little bit here, a little bit there.  Chapters, murky at the outset, coalesce and take shape.  I've rolled out chunks for scholarly conferences and public lectures.  But there are long sections of the narrative, important to the story I'm telling, that sit out on the horizon mocking and unfinished.  I know they are important.  I resist the inevitable confrontation required to bring them to heel.  Their burden is in my head, but I can't lay them down.  Like Giles Corey of Salem, I stubbornly resist doing the work.  I demand of my internal universe, "more weight!" Of course this sounds more dramatic than it really is; I don't need the Puritan divines to bury me under rocks.  I put the pressure on myself. 

When I write, I keep certain books close at hand; writers whose work I admire, books on the art of writing.  Hemingway, Didion, Morrison, Orwell, and Baldwin.  I'm excited to see Amitava Kumar's Everyday I Write the Book coming out today.  The excerpt on writerly routines published on Lithub this morning struck a nerve--or was it a swift kick?  That's what I'm looking for, a routine.  Consistency is not my forte, and mine shift with the project.  Truth be told, these blog posts are meant to prod me from my lethargy.  My writing, like a flabby muscle, requires this sort of exercise.  Sometimes I worry about how many words I have left?  But that's just another excuse.  I won't find the answer to that question without stringing the words together in the first place. 

Lists for the Dying (or Mildly Discomfited)

1. Ohio with death and dignity
2. Walks with Iris
3. Jamaican literature and the ghosts of revolutions past
4. Japanese psych
5. Toni Morrison's Jazz

Keeping track of what is happening/not happening in the middle of a global pandemic isn't easy.  I could joke about how little our lifestyle has changed, the shut-ins basking in the time of "shelter in place" diktats, and the manufactured shortages of a tired, old capitalism.  But in spite of the fact that this should be "our time," the sense of unease and dread that hangs over this place, all places, makes the sweet pill bitter.

I know what I am supposed to be doing and maybe I'll get there.  In the meantime, the brain flits from one bit of esoterica to the next.  That's what the brain has always done.  The search for structure in this age of confused reckoning is both quixotic, and necessary.  Lists to remember me by; narratives to give shape to the incomprehensible noise of it all.  So what's the story, morning glory?

6. Marcia Douglas's The Marvelous Equations of the Dread
7. Grace Hale's Cool Town:  How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
8. Wifredo Lam
9. Bjork's "Virus"
10. The Saints' "(I'm) Stranded"