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Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
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From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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One Mississippi, Two Mississippi. John Hurt. Fred
McDowell
By
Kalamu ya Salaam
The blues, the basic root of most
all of modern black music. The blues, often referred to
but not often fully understood; indeed, most often
misunderstood, twisted into simplified stereotypes,
become most unrecognizable except for a few popular
elements. But, you see, the blues is a big sound, the
sound not of downpression but people’s spiritual
resistance to being put down. Or so I have come to
believe.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Mississippi John Hurt.
Mississippi Fred McDowell. And on top of that, here are
two more ways to do that thing, two which a ways most
have not heard as the blues. First, a gentle,
story-telling, finger picking style, so quiet you could
sing it in church. Second, a blues you do sing in
church. Whoa nah! Get ready for some other kind of
blues.
Mississippi John Hurt was Mississippi born and
bred, might have died unknown to most of us were it not
for the folk music revival of the sixties and a renewed
interest among college whites in this archetypal music
of academically uneducated black people of the deep
south.
Born March 8, 1892 in Teoc, Mississippi—died November 2,
1966 in Avalon, Mississippi, John Smith Hurt is widely
considered one of the major country blues artists. He
made his first recordings in 1928 but his career was cut
off by the depression before he became popular. He spent
most of the remainder of his life rearing 14 children
along with is wife and working as a sharecropper.
In 1963 based on a hunch occasioned by a line mentioning
Avalon as Hurt’s home town, folklorist Tom Hoskins
located Hurt near Avalon, Mississippi. Hurt had kept up
his guitar skills by playing for neighbors on the
weekends. Hoskins arranged for Hurt to play the famed
1963 New Port Folk Festival and to record for Vanguard
Records. For the next three years until his death in
1966 Hurt was very popular on the folk music circuit
playing festival, colleges and clubs.
Hurt’s gentle, story-telling song style and his flowing,
finger-picking were different from what most people
think of when referring to Mississippi blues.
Nevertheless, Hurt’s music is quintessential blues—check
out “Talking Casey” (from
Rediscovered) which features Hurt’s guitar imitating
not only the human voice but also train sounds.
A hallmark of Hurt’s style was his wry humor as
exemplified in songs such as “Coffee Blues” and the
children’s song, “Chicken Blues” (both from the Coffee
Blues album). Hurt also specialized in folklore
narratives such as “Stagger Lee” (from The
Immortal album) and “First Shot Missed Him” (and all
the other songs from
Last Sessions).
“Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me” combines ironic humor
with a gentle, lilting melody which contrasts with the
subject matter of death and burial at sea. “Cast my body
out in the sea / save all the undertaker’s bills / let
the mermaids flirt with me.”
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Mississippi Fred
McDowell is originally from Tennessee (born circa
1904 around Rossville and died 1972 in Memphis), Fred
his adult life about forty or so mile below Memphis in
Como, Mississippi, but as soon as one hears Fred, the
man is instantly associated with the Mississippi Delta
bottle-neck blues guitar style. It’s a rough tradition
full of violence, evil doing, instability and a general
reveling in miscellaneous misdemeanors and minor
indiscretions. The Delta blues in particular is often
contrasted to gospel in a wrong (blues) / right (gospel)
dualist opposition.
So take in these selections from a prototypical Delta
blues musician not only singing gospel himself but
working with his wife and with friends (The Hunter’s
Chapel Singers of Como, Mississippi) in a program
consisting entirely of gospel oriented material. The
album is aptly titled
Amazing Grace.
Any one of the six songs is a great example but I would
like to point to two in particular: “The Lord Will Make
A Way” and “Amazing Grace.” The former song is basically
Fred alone with just his guitar counterpointing his
voice. It rocks fiercely and at the same time rambles
though the melody, the wide vibrato of the steel strings
vibrating throughout. The second song features the full
choral group issuing forth a sound that may have
emanated from the fabled belly of a storm-tossed slave
ship during the middle passage (which is the actual
origin of the song itself that was written by a slave
ship’s captain).
This is the kind of music that is both primal and
powerful. Some might call it primitive—actually, rather
than “primitive” it might be more accurate to say
unsophisticated but there is nothing simple about it.
Here is the power of the blues mated with the spiritual
longing of gospel. For those who have never heard music
like this, these songs are surely both a surprise and
possibly a delight.
This singing makes you feel good.
This is the music that helped enable people to survive
the fierce brutality of daily life in Mississippi. If
nothing else recommends it, the fact that this is
survival music means we should know it and celebrate it.
(And by the way, although they are often thought of as a
Chicago outfit, the Staples Singers led by Pops Staples
musically is based in the country Mississippi style of
gospel singing. In what Fred McDowell is doing you hear
a direct antecedent.)
These men and women are true American heroes, not just
survivors but heroes. This is the music that was the
bedrock for not only rock and roll but also the aural
fuel of the civil rights movement.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi. John Hurt. Fred
McDowell. Give thanks.
Source: Breath of
Life
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You gotta
move
Lyrics by
Mississippi Fred McDowell and
Rev. Gary Davis
You got to move
You got to move
You got to move, child
You got to move
But when the Lord
Gets ready
You got to move
(guitar)
You may be high
You may be low
You may be rich, child
You may be po'
But when the Lord gets ready
You've got to move
(guitar)
You see that woman
That walk the street
You see the policeman
Out on his beat
But when the Lord gets ready
You got to move
(guitar)
You got to move
You got to move
You've got to move, child
You've got to
But when the Lord gets ready
You got to move. |
posted 19 November 2008
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Mississippi Fred McDowell—You gotta move /
Mississippi Fred McDowell—Highway 61
You Gotta Move" is a song written by
Fred McDowell and Rev. Gary Davis. Being a
well-known song of McDowell's, covered by The
Rolling Stones in their 1971 album Sticky Fingers.The
album which included this song was recorded at
McDowell's home in Como, Mississippi in 1964, and in
Holy Springs, Mississippi and Berkeley, California
in 1965.Personnel: Mississippi Fred McDowell
(vocals, bottle-neck guitar); Eli Green (vocals,
guitar); Annie McDowell (vocals).CD Release Date:
November 30, 1993. Label: Arhoolie Records.
Mississippi Fred McDowell—I Walked All Night Long
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Mississippi Fred McDowell—Goin Down to the River
Fred McDowell—Shake Em On Down /
Mississippi Fred McDowell (1904-1972)—What's the
Matter Now?
This is from the "Lomax - First
Recordings." Fortunately Fred was alive in the
fifties and sixties during the renaissance of Folk
Blues, so that his talent could be recorded for
posterity, for us. "In the spoken introduction to
the Capital Blues Collection "I Don't Play No Rock
'N' Roll," Mississippi Fred Mc Dowell says, " My
type of blues, I play it with a bottleneck, you
understand, see - rib what come out of a steak."
Mississippi Fred later switched to a glass
bottleneck because "it gets more clear sound out of
it."
Mississippi Fred McDowell—When I Lay My Burden Down
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Mississippi Fred McDowell—John Henry
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Mississippi John Hurt—Nobody's Dirty Business (1928)
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Mississippi John Hurt—Salty Dog Blues
Mississippi John Hurt—Stack O' Lee Blues (1928)
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Mississippi John Hurt—Make Me a Pallet on the Floor
Mississippi John Hurt—Louis Collins (1928)
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Mississippi John Hurt—My Creole Belle
Mississippi John Hurt I'm satisfied /
Mississippi John Hurt—Big Leg Blues (1928)
According to
personal biography of his life John Hurt learn to
love and appreciate music and guitar playing from
William H Carson, a man infatuated with his teacher
at the St. James School, located in Avalon,
Mississippi. John Hurt stated, " I wasn't allowed to
bother Mr. Carson's guitar. I would wait until he
feel asleep at my house, then I would slip his
guitar into my room and try to play. There I learned
to play the guitar at the age of nine years old.
After that, my mother bought me a second hand guitar
at the price of $1.50! 1 can tell you there was no
beautiful sound than my own guitar music. I was
playing for country dances at the same time working
very hard on a farm new Avalon Mississippi."
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Mississippi John Hurt—Spike Driver Blues /
Mississippi John Hurt—Goodnight Irene
Seen here with Pete Seeger & Hedy
West. Not sure of date, circa 1950's-60's(post
Seeger blacklist). Playing John Henry (Steel driver
Blues). Lived:(March 8, 1892,Carroll County,
Mississippi - November 2, 1966, Grenada,
Mississippi) the eighth child of ten.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. — WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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