CHAPTER 37

 

 

#64: MICKEY NEWBURY

"An American Trilogy"

from the album Frisco Mabel Joy

Released: October 1971

 

 

I just saw something on Twitter. It was a group of policemen in Tennessee hustling a woman out of hospital. She had been discharged because she didn't have insurance. Too poor to live, you see. The police demanded that she vacate the premises, which was difficult because she was in the middle of suffering a stroke. They bundled her into the back of the van, and she died there. Coming to a country near you, soon.

I read a piece in The Nation yesterday about the history of "education" in Florida. What de Santis is doing is reinforcing old prejudices and removing anything that gets in their way. The tradition there has always been to teach its children the differentials between "Americanism" and Communism. As a subject it is considered second only to basic literacy. Most libraries in the state have stripped their bookshelves entirely, so as not to fall foul of moneyed reactionists.

 

 

I read the many books written by Percival Everett and am reminded that, no matter how avant-garde, intelligent, perceptive and handsome you may be, all count as nothing when set against the colour of what They call slave skin.

These are not the "They" of Kay Dick's eroding England - though that will presently come to pass - but seem set on reversing all human progress and retreating into an animal state. As a protest. Against what They cannot really delineate or define.

 

 

Of course it is coming here. Turnips for avocados. Black Lace for Daft Punk. David Walliams for Charles M Schulz.

 

 

But but but.

 

 

It is a folk club in west Los Angeles, late 1970, and a guy is up on stage with his guitar. He is going to sing a proscribed song, a song misused and abused by some of humanity's worst. A song of the South, written by a Northerner (Dan Emmett of Knox County, Ohio). He wants to reclaim that song, make it mean what it used to mean, what it ought to mean.

One idiot in the audience starts to clap in march time and is rapidly made to look an idiot by the fact that he is not performing the song in that tempo - his is far, far slower. Some of the audience are rapt, others baffled. One is Barbra Streisand, bored out of her tree and as yet unaware that she inspired this approach with her funereal "Happy Days Are Here Again." But her then-partner, Kris Krisofferson, a man whose work was primarily inspired by the performer on that stage, is adamant; they must stay.

He gets to the end of his "Dixie" and notices the face of Odetta, wet with tears. Overcome, he cannot stop, and segues straight into the song of the North, the "oppressor," which was written, or adapted anyway, by Julia Ward Howe of Rhode Island. Even then he cannot complete his argument until he reaches the third point of the triangle, a Southern gospel song predating the Civil War sometimes known as "Bahamian Lullaby" - hence why it is so fitting that Rihanna, of Barbados, should make the song "Umbrella" into the collectivist, anti-racist hymn nobody realised it was. It might be raining now, but the struggle will soon be over. If "we" want it.

When the performer finished, there was a silence which lasted for several seconds. Then everybody, led by Mama Cass, started cheering, standing up and cheering as though a song had been...saved.

Also in that audience at Bitter End West, 8409 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, was Joan Baez. Some months later the performer, who was otherwise a very good friend of Baez', became extremely vexed by her hit version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," which its originators The Band had performed as a deliberate tripartite threnody, making you feel for the least sympathetic people on Earth. Then along came Joan celebrating the destruction of the South like it was a Christmas party.

Provoked, the performer decided to record that medley he'd done, and it is very quiet and patient - there is no real build-up and quite a lot of pregnant silence. Perhaps its most frightening factor is its barely perceptible instrumental coda, with violins sounding like bagpipes blowing the long regret of the Apocalypse.

You had to think of Vietnam, of John, Martin and Bobby, even donate some thoughts in the direction of the dim bulbs who to this day believe that the Civil War has never ended. But what the melange offers is a simple message: all of this constitutes "America." Where you particularly stand in that world is up to you. As long as we do not let it die. In whatever way, from whichever angle. As long as we can evolve into a species which values life above money, revelation over dogma, empathy ahead of arrogance. The allowed time is now seeping into stoppage.