The post Time is like a jet plane: Bob Dylan turns 78 appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Shuffling through my iTunes library recently, I switched to searching Artist by alphabet mode to help me find a song whose name I couldn’t remember (Song For You – I know that now.) I knew the song I was looking for was by Rhye. Running down the alphabet list to get to R, I stopped short at B. I had no idea I had so many Bob Dylan songs in my library. I checked. I have more Dylan tracks on my computer than songs by anyone else: 57, as of right now. Of course, in terms of Dylan’s huge output over so many years, 57 is nothing.
I am far from being a Dylan fanatic.
Yes, one of the very first singles that I ever bought was Dylan’s I Want You in 1966 (it’s still in my iTunes library.) I was 16. Prior to that, I remember lying in bed one night and listening to a BBC interview with Dylan and hearing Like a Rolling Stone as it was played for the first time in Britain and Ireland. The song confused my mind state. Dylan was electric, a tempest in a teapot today. But at the time, I felt like I was hearing something that was both immediately defining and predictive all at once. Yes, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who and so many others were putting out new music at just about the same time. But Like a Rolling Stone was different. Like a Rolling Stone broke the mold; it was freewheeling lyrically and musically, completely in control of its own musical space and totally riveting, at least to this 13 year old. Something new was afoot.
But my initial impact with Dylan never turned me into a true Dylan fan. His path and mine diverged. Joni Mitchell arrived. Crosby, Stills and Nash came on the scene. I bought some Dylan albums and rarely played a track back twice other than Sara on the 1976 “Desire” described by Joseph O’Connor in the Irish Times in 2016 as “perhaps Dylan’s most emotionally naked song, as beautiful an expression of the preciousness and frailty of human love as has ever been put on a record.”
The Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, and we needed a break from the intensity of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Disco arrived, and before we knew where we were, we were somewhere else. Candi Staton, Gloria Gaynor, and Chic took over. We wanted to dance. 1978 brought us Rod Stewart’s If You Think I’m Sexy, and 1979 Cher’s Take Me Home. The tracks, like thousands of others, were vacuous, but they gave us a minute or two metaphorically speaking to catch our breath.
Dylan went on his own way. The 70’s came and went. The 80’s came and went. But Dylan, like the Eveready Bunny, just kept on going. The year 2000 came and went. Dylan kept on making his own kind of music, electric, eclectic, folk rock, rockabilly and blues. His output is remarkable. As of right now, he has released 38 studio albums, 13 live recordings, 19 compilation records, 13 box sets and 13 in the Bootleg series.
If you haven’t given Bob Dylan much attention in a while, take a listen to Sweetheart Like You from the 1983 album Infidels. Or listen to Tight Connection To My Heart from the 1985 Empire Burlesque. Things Have Changed won the Academy Award for Best Song from a Motion Picture in 2001. Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ from Dylan’s 2009 “Together Through Life” is devastating. The video is hard to watch. There is a non-violent version of the video available here. There are certain Dylan songs that I now seem to listen to almost daily; Hurricane (Desire Outtake 1975), with Emmy Lou Harris singing background vocals, is one of those. You’re A Big Girl Now (Take 2), recorded in 1975 but released just last year on The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks is another. The recording and the lyrics are heartbreaking.
Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last
… I’m going out of my mind, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart
I respond to Dylan’s Pretty Saro, an English folk song from the early 1700s on many levels; its folk heritage and historic reach. But most of all, I relate on Pretty Saro to Dylan’s singing; his voice is purely emotive, and his sincerity is unassailable. This is the Dylan track that has the most plays on my iTunes play list. The song was recorded in 1970, but not released until 2013 on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10, Another Self Portrait.
In 2015, Dylan shifted the bottom line, once again. He released Shadows in the Night, an album of pop standards from the 50’s and 60’s. It was Dylan’s 36th studio album. This is the album that brought me back to Dylan. I found Dylan’s arrangements tight and astute, and his assumption of the Sinatra canon somehow authentic and reassuring. And his voice on these songs is richly resonant. Take a listen to Stay With Me. In an interview with Bill Flanagan on Dylan’s official website, this is Dylan’s answer to the question, “If you can sing like that, why don’t you always sing like that?”
Depends what kind of song it is. “When the World Was Young,” “These Foolish Things,” are conversational songs. You don’t want to be spitting the words out in a crude way. That would be unthinkable. The emphasis is different and there is no reason to force the vernacular. “An airline ticket to romantic places” is a contrasting type of phraseology, than, say, “bury my body by the highway side.” The intonation is different, more circumspectual, more internal.”
He followed up Shadows in the Night with Fallen Angles in 2016, another grouping of pop standards that included Melancholy Mood and Polka Dots and Moonbeams.
Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year of 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Leonard Cohen said, “To me [the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” Dylan was 75 then. In response to the award, he released a statement announcing that he wouldn’t be attending the award ceremony: “He wishes he could receive the prize personally, but other commitments make it unfortunately impossible.” Dylan was touring.
But Dylan wasn’t done with the standards yet. I Could Have Told You and Stardust are just two of the tracks on the triple CD/ triple vinyl recording Triplicate released in 2017. Triplicate has 30 tracks in all. Take a listen to P.S. I Love You and hear a vulnerability and poignancy that you will rarely hear in Dylan’s own compositions or in any other interpretation of the song, and it’s been covered by many artists including Bette Midler, Billie Holliday and Frank Sinatra. Here’s what Dylan had to say to Bill Flanagan on whether these songs enabled him to go to a place where his own songs couldn’t:
Sure they do. I would never write “Where Is the One,” but it’s as if it was written for me, so I didn’t have to write it. It’s a tough place to get to, it’s vulnerable and protected. You’d have to be like the invisible man to get through, or you’d have to batter down walls, strip yourself naked, and then even if you did get in you’d have to wonder what’s the point. Someone else has been here and gone and took everything. Someone else had to write this song for me. Its nerves are too raw. You leave yourself too open. I’d rather not go there, especially to write songs.
These ultimate Dylan records force us, once again, to reevaluate Dylan, who he has been, what he has contributed and how essential he is in the definition of American musical continuity. Dylan has humanized the standards; he’s taken out the gloss, the stylized 50’s orchestration effects, and brought these songs back to their basics. Along the way, he’s also found a line to connect the music of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s to his own contribution to American musical history that began in the 60’s.
Dylan turned 78 on May 24, 2019
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]]>The post On hearing “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” in Montgomery, Alabama appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Visiting Montgomery, Alabama to see the civil rights sites, we walked over to the old train station along the riverfront. Inside what appears to have once been the baggage room, we learned that it is now the site of a guitar shop. As we entered, we encountered a group of about 10 men, sitting in a circle, pleasantly jamming together on an assortment of guitars, mandolins and banjos. Although we began to retreat, feeling that we were intruders, the string players motioned for us to come in and listen. So, we did.
They tuned up, and the leader suggested a song — the name of which we couldn’t hear — and a key. As they began playing, I recognized the tune: “The Darktown Strutters Ball.”
I know. It’s just a song. An old song. A remnant from a very different time. But I couldn’t stop thinking about where we were, and how the song fit in. Right where we were standing was the center of the domestic slave trade of the 19th century — the very railroad station where black people had once been transported and put up for sale. Despite what I thought was historic irony, I reflexively tapped my feet, swayed to the rhythm, and began remembering the words.
Just to jog your memory — or to introduce you to a classic, written in 1915 and performed by just about every ragtime, Dixieland and jazz band on earth since then, plus Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Domino — below is an antique [early 20th century] recording of it, along with some very interesting video.
Is the title considered a racial slur? Am I over-reacting? The word “darktown” sure sounds pejorative to me. But according to some historians, at the time the song was published, the title referred to a section of Chicago where black people lived. That designation presumably was okay in that era — but perhaps a reflection of the baked-in racism that was prevalent then. [Today, of course, using skin color as a way of defining a neighborhood would be completely unacceptable, and that is probably what I am responding to.]
In “A Short History of ‘Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” author Matt Macucci further explains that “…the song was inspired by an annual ball in Chicago, Illinois, that was ‘a kind of modern equivalent of the medieval carnivals of misrule, financed by wealthy society folk but with a guest list of pimps and prostitutes.’
“The “Darktown Ball” was, in fact, a real event:
…but it did not start out as being for the higher classes. It was originated by the ladies of the evening in the Darktown area of Chicago. They decided to create the ball as their way of showing that, for at least 1 night per year, they were just as good as everyone else. It was by invitation only and, over time, became THE most sought after ticket. Even the Major of Chicago could not attend without an invitation.
The composer was Shelton Brooks, a black man who was celebrating the event and the fact that it had become such an important part of the city’s history.
So, singing that song in the Montgomery railroad station — is that insensitive, ironic and further evidence of racism so inbred into our culture that we don’t even see — or hear — it? Or is it just an innocent celebration of a very popular song from the early jazz era? It’s a complicated question, for which I have no answer.
Enjoy the song. Read the lyrics. Cringe at the imagery.
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]]>The post The Warmth of Other Suns plus “Lift Every Voice” concert: A powerful combination appeared first on Occasional Planet.
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My experience recently at the “Lift Every Voice” concert at Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis was much different than it would have been if I hadn’t just read Isabel Wilkerson’s amazing book —The Warmth of Other Suns — about what came to be called the Great Migration, the movement of over six million African Americans from southern states to points north and west between 1915 and 1970. Wilkerson interviewed over 1200 individuals and used the stories of three of them to illustrate in painstaking detail what life was like during the Jim Crow era for Americans who happened to be born with black or brown skin.
Most American history text books used in high school and for introductory college classes briefly mention the Jim Crow laws and might show a few photos of separate water fountains, rest rooms, etc. In fairness, textbooks that cover “Civil War to Present” as most do, must skim over a lot of material out of necessity.
I would like to think that our understanding of race relations in America would be much improved if Americans who did not experience the degradation of the Jim Crow South would read Wilkerson’s book. That may be naïve of me, but I know there must be millions of Americans like myself whose hearts are open to feeling the painful experiences of others.
I had to force myself to read some of the gruesome details related by the people Wilkerson interviewed. One story, about two young boys listening to a man being whipped to death in the woods, will haunt me the rest of my life. The man was screaming and begged his killers to let him pray before he died. They gave him one minute and then continued the whipping. The final words the boys overheard were “The sonabitch is dead.”
That was a story related to Wilkerson by Robert Joseph Pershing Foster who grew up in Louisiana. I will expand on his story, but the stories of Ida Mae Gladney of Mississippi and George Starling of Florida are equally compelling.
Monroe, Louisiana, 1933
Pershing Foster, son of the principal and a teacher at Monroe Colored High School, describes how he would escape the limitations of his world on the wrong side of the tracks by going to the movies. He remembers climbing the back stairs two, three, four, flights up and smell of urine surrounding him. The one toilet that blacks could use was usually out of order and was not a priority for the theater owner.
At the end of the school year, his father would borrow a pickup truck, take a few strong boys with him and drive to the high school for the white kids and load up whatever books, supplies, etc., that school was discarding. That’s how they got their educational materials.
Pershing described how he made a game of jumping the puddles that gathered after a heavy rain in the dirt roads on his side of town. Of course the whites had paved roads by the 1930’s, but there was never enough money to improve the roads the blacks had to use. The boy blames those roads and lack of sidewalks for the fact he never had the chance to learn to roller skate. He told Wilkerson, “We could buy skates, but we couldn’t buy sidewalks.”
His father was paid half of what the principal at the white high school was paid despite having the same education and credentials. Salaries of public employees like teachers and principals were published without apology in the local paper. Never having more than barely enough to feed and clothe a family made it impossible for Pershing’s father to pass an inheritance on to his children.
Wilkerson explained that “The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.” P. 85
The colored school, where Pershing’s mother taught seventh grade, was a small brick building with 1,139 pupils and a teacher for each grade kindergarten through eleventh. When a fire broke out in the basement of the school and destroyed all the furniture and equipment they had, the city refused even to replace what was lost. The city leaders said they needed the money for the new building being constructed for the white students.
Pershing’s father had to raise the money among the students’ families to replace what he could. He didn’t want to dwell on the situation because “…it would have done them no good, but their very existence, their personal aspirations, and the purpose of their days were in direct opposition to white ruling-class policy on colored education—that is, that colored people needed no education to fulfill their God-given role in the South.” P. 86
As one southern woman told journalist Ray Stannard Baker, “If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms, what shall we do for servants?”
Fortunately for Pershing, his parents were able to scrape up enough money to send him to Morehouse College in Atlanta where he graduated in spring of 1939 with a major in math and minor in biology. Despite his strong desire to leave the South, Pershing entered Meharry Medical College in Nashville after his mother’s earnest pleading.
Over time, he began using his first name and became a very successful medical doctor in Los Angeles, even becoming the personal physician to Ray Charles. Wilkerson interviewed him at his LA home which she described as a “grand home where he threw exuberant parties.” But Robert Foster, MD, never felt he was accepted as an equal by the medical community.
I can’t help but include a personal story here. From 1966 to 1968, I lived at Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota where my husband served as a medical doctor. One of the dozen or so MD’s on base was an African American from Tennessee. He told us at a party one night about how he had gone into the City of Grand Forks to buy take-out chicken dinners for his family and had been treated very badly. At first, the employees wouldn’t wait on him at all. Finally they relented just to get him out of the store. When he got home, he opened the food buckets and found only scraps and bones. Some of us who heard that story were furious and wanted to picket the store in town. But the good doctor didn’t want to cause any more trouble for the Air Force since the base was fairly new and there was a lot of resentment about black service members coming to town. To this day, I can still get my hackles up when I think of how our friend was treated just because of the color of his skin.
As I said, after reading The Warmth of Other Suns , my experience at the “Lift Every Voice” concert was much different than it would have been otherwise. Although everyone obviously thoroughly enjoyed the amazing IN UNISON chorus and the always extraordinary St. Louis Symphony, I had to wonder how different the experience must have been for those whose family members lived through the period of southern apartheid. Do they feel, as Robert Foster MD did in Los Angeles, that they will never be fully accepted as equal in status by white America? I don’t know.
I do know that there will be a program on PBS tomorrow night called “The Talk—Race in America.” Previews describe how black parents have to warn their children, especially their sons, how to obey to a point of subservience any law enforcement officers who approach them. Of course, ALL parents warn their teenagers about safe driving habits, etc., but I don’t remember having to tell my children when they were learning to drive that, if stopped by a police officer, to be sure to keep their hands on the steering wheel in plain sight.
When I look closely at the Americans who roar approval at Donald Trump’s rallies, I see more than just anger and frustration about the lack of economic progress being made by working class families over the past few decades. We should all be angry about the huge gap between the majority of Americans and the tiny minority who control most of the wealth in our country. But I also see in the faces of those Trump supporters an anger and bitterness that has less to do with income levels and more to do with the need to have a class of people to look down on. For a further understanding of the history of the American caste system, I highly recommend White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg.
For my part, this search for understanding of race relations in America will continue through reading, talking to others, spending more time with my African American friends and watching educational programs on television. I always thought the problems of race relations had nothing to do with me because I am second generation immigrant on my father’s side and third generation on my mother’s side. None of my ancestors owned slaves, so I must be exempt from caring about the plight of the blacks in my country. MY country? That reveals a sense of ownership, doesn’t it. I wonder how my African American friends feel about their place in our society? Dare I ask?
My grandfather emigrated from England and walked into a good job at a textile mill in central New York State… a mill where blacks couldn’t even apply for work. That’s “white privilege” and I have to own that. When I hear “Black Lives Matter” now, I think I understand just a little bit more than I did a month ago.
Never too old to learn.
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]]>The post The devolution of feminism appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>It saddens me that feminism has come to be associated with elderly Cat Ladies condemning the oppressive institution of matrimony in their solitary existence, and bra-burning hippies denouncing the constriction of monogamy, and with immodest women vending their wares for the world while justifying it as having the morals of a man, and ruthless high-high-heeled business moguls viciously beating out their male counterparts in bouts of reverse sexism.
That’s not feminism. That’s cynicism, psychedelic trances, immodesty, and reverse-anot upon the fronts of masculinity and femininity, but of humanity. Feminism is women being equals to men because they are human. Feminism is believing you don’t have to prostitute yourself to be value, because you are worth as much as any human. Feminism is having human morals. Feminism is human equality.
We, as a society, have universally condemned the Victorian Eras of Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch, as sexist, chauvinistic, oppressive, and generally anti-women, in order to champion women’s suffrage. We agree that until the early twentieth century, women were degraded and treated as inferiors. But is twenty-first century America really that much different than sixteenth century America?
Take a look at these quotes. Which comes from the 19th century and which from the 21st?
“Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it… is narrow-minded [and] thoughtless to condemn them… if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
“To all my second string bitches trying to get a baby… now you talkin’ crazy.” “Hurry up with my damn massage/ Get the Porsche out the damn garage.”
Perhaps the eloquent prose of the first and the deplorable grammar and vulgarity of the second gave away the answer, but that is a different complaint all together. The content of the first is more likened to modern thinking than the degradation of the second is, yet the truth is our media and music more frequently contain messages resembling Kanye West’s 2013 piece than Jane Eyre (1847). Consider that if any unfortunate child was to be exposed to such music as the second quotation, the message they would readily absorb is that women are good for nothing but sex and housework. If it’s no longer permissible to talk about women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, why is it permissible to talk about them like servants and prostitutes? If you think about it like that, we have actually devolved in our thinking of women.
If you need another example, consider Robin Thicke’s highly popular “Blurred Lines.” If you were fortunate enough not to have heard this degrading song, these lyrics should sum it up:
“Yeah, I had a bitch, but she ain’t bad as you,
So hit me up…. I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two… Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you.
He don’t smack that ass and pull your hair like that…
Not many women can refuse this pimpin’.”
In case that didn’t quite repulse you, let me just explain his music video (I humbly request you not watch the video if you have any iota of respect for women). It consists of four and a half minutes of naked women strutting past Robin Thicke and his cohorts as they ogle their breasts and dance around them. The women take great pains to seem appreciative of their “attentions.” The men seem to really enjoy themselves. Disgusting.
Continuing to examine modern music, it’s not just male pop stars that treat women as pieces of meat hawked to the highest bidder. Females permit this to continue.
“Are you gonna stay the night? Doesn’t mean we’re bound for life… Come pour yourself all over me.”
Hayley Williams sings in an acknowledgment that women are only appreciable when used for casual sex; she uses her body as the only means to maintain a relationship, essentially telling men it’s okay to think women are good for nothing but sex because women think the same thing. Perhaps Ms. Williams and Mr. West would get on swimmingly.
Lady Gaga, generally known for her antics and self-confidence, seems to surrender on this front as well. Her song “Do What U Want” takes a slightly more feminist approach, but still is largely conducive to permitting men to be womanizers (more on that term later).
“You can’t stop my voice cuz you don’t own my life, but do what you want with my body. Do what you want with my body.”
While, yes, some of her lyrics seem to show a certain resilience and refusal to become an object (as opposed to a human being with feelings), most of it—to a casual listener, at least—seems to be resigned to men using women for nothing but their bodies. For other demeaning songs, see “Get Lucky,” “Suit and Tie,” “Where Have You Been,” “You Make Me Feel,” “Come and Get It,” or (unfortunately) simply tune in to your local radio station.
Just to emphasize the “modern” sentiment, let’s revisit 1920 thoughts with Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
“I’m sick of the hypocrisy… Women ought to be free- as free as we [men] are.”
In case all that seems too objective, let’s look at some cold, hard facts, too.
Before concluding, I’d simply like to say that I am not in any way advocating women’s superiority or innate moral supremacy. Nor am I proposing that our society treat women as “more” than men or the entirely opposite side of the spectrum from Robin Thicke, which would result in validation of Camille Paglia’s claim that “educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood.” I am simply advocating true feminism (see second paragraph) and looking to expose a certain double standard and hypocrisy in our society, both of which are personal pet peeves.
I apologize for the obscenity in this piece as I personally oppose such vulgarity, but I did not want to dilute the repulsion through censorship. I felt a completely accurate depiction could only be achieved without any “sanitizing.
For more startling anecdotes on the unfair treatment of women, see Amanda Hess’s “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.”
If you need a little cleansing laugh from the disgust of some of the song lyrics or statistics may have created, see How to Deal With a Mansplainer: Starring Hillary Clinton” for some female empowerment (definition of mansplaining here).
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