Left Coast Cowboys

Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly

Another golden oldie post from my cross-country roadtrip chronicle: RoadGals.

In the course of researching the Southern portion of our journey, I’ve discovered the Blues. Okay, I’ve been aware of the Blues. Like anyone who’s ever read more than three copies of Rolling Stone, I know most of our “Rock Gods” from Keith Richards to Eric Clapton to Janis Joplin were heavily influenced by the Blues, while hundreds of current artists continue to reference them. But that’s how I’ve heard most of my Blues, in the “White Kid” versions offered up by mainstream artists.

It’s a whole different world when you start listening to the real thing. Finally I understand why a nice middle class English boy like Mick Jagger so often sings with a whiny, drawly moan. He’s trying to sound like he’s a 45 year old Mississippi Black man, just released from years of chain gang labor on Parchman Farm — facing poverty, discrimination and his own mortality. I don’t want to belittle Mick’s experience. I’m sure he had some Dark Nights of the Soul at the London School of Economics. But listen Mick, you’ve got nothing on Leadbelly who did serve on that chain gang for years of his life, including a stint in Louisiana’s infamous Angola Prison. Even after he was discovered there by musicologists John and Alan Lomax, who first recorded his songs, he only had a few short years of music career until his untimely death from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Until recently, White Boy Blues were the only Blues I knew. Enjoy these guys, but try to catch the real thing.

But could that man put across a song! The one that really slapped me in the face and made me stand at attention was Pick a Bale of Cotton. We sang that song in my segregated-in-all-but-name elementary school in Maryland. (One day five Black students showed up in our previously lily-white school. They were taught by a Black teacher who appeared with them and even ate lunch with them at a small separate table in the lunchroom. With nobody saying anything, we kids got the message that we were not expected to “mix”.) I just found on the Internet where two years ago, a Black parent and a Civil Rights organization wanted a Detroit area school to drop Pick a Bale of Cotton from a school choir program. They claimed the song “glorifies slavery”. If they’re talking about the jaunty, upbeat version we White kids were taught in Sixties Maryland, they’re at least partially right. Sung frivolously, it’s more than offensive.

Now, far be it from me to tell an African American what is or isn’t insulting to them. I don’t have that right. But I’d suggest they listen to Leadbelly’s version.

We’ve planned a tour of the Mississippi Delta, down legendary Highway 61, we hope to see Parchman Farm (just a glimpse), the crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the Devil for Blues guitar playing prowess, and Clarksdale, MS, pretty much the epicenter of the Delta Blues.

First of all, there’s no sprightly “Jump Down, Spin Around” when he sings it. In a mournful, but strong voice, backed by an a cappella chorus, Leadbelly sings as if he’s still on that chain gang. The steady rhythmic beat sounds as if it’s the only thing keeping bone-tired arms functioning, as if the support of the group singing is all that’s keeping men, beyond fatigue and without hope, functioning. The “call and response” format and rhythm has echos even beyond the Black church, seemingly reaching back to some memory of African cadences. You can feel the oppressive Mississippi Delta humidity. You can smell the sweat. You’re brought face to face with one of the results of a system that regularly incarcerated people in labor camps, in conditions worse than slavery, for crimes that often amounted to not much more than being Black and poor. Leadbelly sings as if he knows nothing will ever change and he just has to get through one more row, then one more day, until the days end.

Yet, you won’t hear defeat in his voice. It’s as if by singing about the experience, he owns it and in some way has mastered it instead of letting it victimize him. Through everything that was thrown at him and his race, he’s still there. And he’s still singing.

Jeez. THAT’S a song.

To back up a bit, I’m not one of those obnoxious musical purists. The type of person who would insist that only a Delta-born Black man who suffered under Jim Crow and survived the Deep South penitentiary system can sing the Blues. Los Angeles-raised and operatically trained Odetta belts out a version of The Midnight Special that would have old Leadbelly checking to see if she were sharing leg irons with him. Mose Allison wrote classics like Parchman Farm so convincingly that Jet Magazine once asked for an interview under the mistaken belief that he was Black. Another instance: Eric Clapton. He gets it. I’m sure Leadbelly would have shared leg irons with Eric.

What Odetta, Allison and Clapton bring is an understanding and respect for where the Blues came from and their truths, even if they don’t have the shackle scars on their ankles.

Which is all a digression from my main point that the Blues — especially as put across by the greats such as Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith and Son House — have the power to make someone as different from them as me understand, at least a little bit, but still on a visceral level, what it was like to be them, at that particular time, facing lives I would otherwise barely be able to imagine.

There’s a great scene in the movie Walk the Line where Sam Phillips says to Johnny Cash:

“If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song. One song that people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up. You tellin’ me that’s the song you’d sing?. . . Or would you sing somethin’ different. Somethin’ real. Somethin’ you felt. Cause I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. . .”

The Blues artists I’m listening to are singing those kind of “Let God Know” songs.

Which isn’t to suggest I think only a Blues artist or a Black man can sing a song with those sorts of truths. Whether Sam Phillips ever really said those words, Johnny Cash certainly had his share of “Let God Know” songs. Willie Nelson actually took the popular Irving Berlin standard, Blue Skies, and sang it as if he were an old cowboy who’d seen too many long trails, but still hoped against hope that things might get better. It’s pretty close to a “Let God Know” song. I’d even venture that Frank Sinatra, especially when he was in his Lonely Man at the End of the Bar phase, had one of those songs in One More for My Baby (And One More For the Road). Judy Garland, when she was breaking your heart, (and she was pretty much always breaking your heart), had albums full of those songs.

But there’s something special about the Blues. While Leadbelly can make me feel in a few short stanzas what it was like to live under Jim Crow, could a Garland or Sinatra song illuminate for a poor sharecropper what it was like to be Judy or Frank? I’m not sure.

Which brings me back to those people who wanted to ban Pick a Bale of Cotton. The president of the local chapter of the NAACP was quoted as saying: “People shouldn’t have to be subjected to this, especially our children.”

Again, I can’t speak for him. And maybe he’s right that it isn’t a song for a predominantly white elementary school choir to sing in concert. But if someone of my background had produced a song that so powerfully demonstrated a central experience of my race and a part of my history, I’d treasure it. Leadbelly, and the Blues artists I’m currently listening to, let God — and us — Know.

ADDENDA:

1. Read about the Pick a Bale of Cotton controversy here.

2. I hope you don’t think I’m older than official integration and the start of the Civil Rights movement. My elementary school days were more than a decade and half after Brown vs. The Board of Education which officially struck down the concept of “separate but equal”. In reality, change was a long, long time coming.

3. Read Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. No wonder the Blues came out of the Black experience!

4. I know African American is the current politically correct term. But even Whoopi Goldberg says she has reservations about it. (In fact she says she was “all right with being a Negro”.) I’ve used Black because it’s shorter and easier to type. No offense meant.

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This is a golden oldie post from my first blog, RoadGals, which covered an epic cross-country roadtrip I took with my 24 year old niece two years ago. Since the original site was done with iWeb, I can’t automatically import the posts into this Wordpress site. Which gives me a wonderful opportunity to recycle some of them into this site by hand whenever I’m too lazy to create a new post. Search on the Roadgals tag to find all the posts in the series.

Some times it seems as if all the millions of blogs out there are just an endless recycling of the same tired meme, the same YouTube clips, Party talking points disguised as “opinon” and regurgitated content. Then, just as I despair of the InnerTubes, I stumble across a blog so worth reading that I find myself compulsively checking it every day and cursing the mornings when there is no new content. See, for me, the best blogs include the adventures, thoughts and musings of interesting people, people I’d want to go down to the coffee shop with if they lived on my block. Except often, what makes them so interesting is that they live some place completely different from me and I get to experience another life just by clicking that bookmark. The common denominator: these bloggers can all write like nobody’s business. Even when they reference something on the Web or talk about a current “hot topic”, they add their own wonderful, unique spin on it. I told you about one such blog, The 7MSN Ranch in this post. Now I want to tell you about another.

Get yourself as fast as your little typing digits can send you over to The Women’s Colony. Yeah, I know if sounds vaguely crunchy, but once you see the tagline — Arts, Letters, Shenanigans — you know you’re in for something special. The Women’s Colony is the brainchild of and is presided over by the inestimable Mrs. G, who lives in a state of mind called Derfwad Manor. She has a wit drier than any Martini James Bond ever drank and she always writes in the third person. You, on the other hand, while reading her, will find yourself drooling with laughter as you collapse on the floor or shoot your coffee through your nose. (Better not make a practice of reading her in Internet Cafes.)

You'll long for Jello and curse Hippies when you read Mrs. G's brilliant post.

There are hundreds of her posts I could point you to, but why not start with this one. It’s a memory piece that does two things brilliantly: takes Americans of a certain age back to that Jello, Red Velvet Cake and Mac & Cheese glory that was the Cafeteria (not the school kind, the Cliftons in LA kind) and mercilessly skewers her humorless hippie step mother and her Granola-Nazi ilk. I think the term Mrs. G coins, “Cafeteria Killing Whore”, pretty much sums it up.

The Women's Colony is a full service facility. Service being provided by Cabana Boys. Or Mancake as Mrs. G calls them.

But Mrs G is only the icing on the cake (or the olive in the Martini, depending on the metaphor you prefer.) The Women’s Colony, as Mrs. G conceived it, is a women only retreat, where those who are ready to retire from taking care of and catering to others, can relax in convivial fellowship attended by a bevy of comely Cabana Boys such as George Clooney, Johnny Depp and Hugh Jackman. (Read Mrs. G’s manifesto and building plans here.) But since The Women’s Colony is still held up at the Planning Commission, Mrs. G has decided writing well is the best revenge. So she’s organized a community blog where you, Gentle Reader, can read well-written and frequently hilarious essays from a variety of bloggers under categories such as Confessional, Bedroom and Rec Room. You can even read about the latest nominees for Cabana Boy at Cabana. (Warning, these recommendations can become hotly contested, such as the time Robert Redford was pitted against Paul Newman for consideration. I think Paul was leading the votes with an Al Franken margin, until it was decided both should be hired.) You can even put forward your own candidate. In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I have somehow wormed my way into the Colony and can sometimes be found pontificating by the Campfire. Although I did make my case at one point for Cesar Millan as Cabana Boy. (What? You think I’m retiring to The Women’s Colony without my terriers?)

So get yourself to The Women’s Colony and put yourself under the wing of Mrs. G. And contribute! There is always room for more good writing at The Colony.

And while you’re at it, tell Denzel, the Cabana Boy, I need another Mojito.

All photos lifted from The Women’s Colony. Along with some towels, a robe and a few of those mini bottles of shampoo.

So I was scanning the news feeds and I came across this article about how the Republican party is splitting in two ideological directions. One faction, the Florida Model calls for more moderate views and reaching out to swing voters. The Texas Model says the GOP should consolidate around a staunch right wing agenda as far and as differentiated from the Democratic Party as possible. But what really caught my attention was a synopsis of the 2008 Texas GOP platform, which outlines the issues the Texas Model is rallying around. Among the planks in that platform: “We support adoption of American English as the official language of Texas and of the United States.” Oh, I’m aware of the danger those tricky newcomers pose with their refusal to speak perfect English two weeks after arriving here. You take a stroll to a place like San Francisco’s Mission District where most of the billboards are in Spanish and Hey Presto! before you know it, you’re singing “La Cucaracha”. Do I even need to enumerate the insidious danger of bi-lingual instructions? Hey, I signed up for a Spanish course at the community college, so they’ve already got me.

You let these foreigners have their way, and soon your kids are talking like Cisco and Pancho instead of like REAL Americans Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Now granted, I’m not that educated on the issue. I was under the impression that English was the language of the United States. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t all government business — from the Oval Office to neighborhood association meetings — conducted in English? If English is not “official”, it’s at least de facto. I mean, can you name me anyone who’s risen to the top of any profession here or is enjoying any sort of success who DOESN’T speak fluent English? Okay, besides Salma Hayek. Still, I foolishly thought that most immigrants were desperately trying to learn English. At least the huge crowds in the English As A Second Language classes at San Francisco Community College would seem to say so. (Although in the early stage of the classes, I’m sure the students appreciate the bilingual signs to the bathrooms. I know I do as I’m sure it’s saved some embarrassment.)

I'm not quite sure how to define American English. But I know Yosemite Sam speaks it.

Anyway, what caught my attention was the specification of AMERICAN English. Not just English, and apparently, not Pigeon English or Australian English or Spanglish or any other flavor of English. But AMERICAN English. Okay, that’s touching a raw nerve. You think that growing Hispanic population is threatening our ability to keep speaking our native tongue? Let me tell you about the British. After nearly thirty years over here, Andy still has the plummiest English accent this side of a Merchant Ivory adaptation of an E.M Forster novel. He’s married to an American, he works surrounded by Americans. But like most immigrants, at least according to what I’m hearing from the Texas Republicans, he’s not only clinging ferociously to his language, he’s forcing native-born Americans to adapt to HIS needs. You think I’m talking just his accent? No, I’m talking a whole different language than the “American English” the Texas GOP wants to make official.

Can I tell you how many times I’ve gotten to the grocery store and stood in confusion because I can’t remember the American words for the foods Brits call Courgettes and Aubergines? It’s an outrage, I tell you.

Here’s where the Brits are far more dangerous than even those insidious Hispanics: they don’t just speak a different language, they further confuse matters with a secret subset of that language.

I'm a college-educated American. And my husband has forced me to talk like the Artful Dodger. See, these are the dangers of not designating American English as our official language.

Yes, I’m talking about Cockney Rhyming Slang which Andy and our predominately British cast of friends lapse into without warning. You can find all about CRS here, but in a nutshell, it was an argot developed by underworld denizens of London’s famous East End to confound cops and informers. The basic premise is that you come up with a rhyme for a word. Like Apples and Pears for Stairs and Plates of Meat for Feet. Then you really confuse matters by sometimes (but not always) dropping off the rhyming bit. Thus Andy often announces it’s time for bed by saying he’s going to “take me plates up the apples to Bedfordshire”. (Bedfordshire, not being rhyming slang, but just another weird Britishism.) Now some Cockney Rhyming Slang is as quaintly Victorian as a Dickens novel. Say Syrup, which is short for Syrup of Figs (Wig), Barnet, short for Barnet Fair (Hair). Butchers, short for Butcher’s Hook (look). Put it all together and it will make your head spin: “Take a quick Butcher’s at the Syrup on that bloke. Better to have no Barnet.”

But just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, Rhyming Slang changes with modern references, which somehow all Englishmen transmit to each other by osmosis. So you have Becks and Posh for Nosh, which itself is an English slang word for food, comparable to “eats”. (And if you don’t know who Becks and Posh are, this whole post is lost on you.) The same site I referenced before has a pretty good Dick’n'Arry (Dictionary) of terms, but I still can’t keep up with it.  As cute and quaint as you might find this, it’s only funny until you find yourself yelling at Bill O’Reilly on the screen and accusing him of “telling Porkies” (Porky Pies, Lies). Or, worse yet, understanding when your husband talks about his “Trouble”, he’s referring to YOU (Trouble and Strife, Wife).  

And there will always be some people who will get around the rules. Probably by looking like this.

Yes, these foreigners must be stopped. I’m here to tell you, it’s a slippery slope and I’ve been pushed down it.   My question is: what’s the enforcement? Deportation seems a little harsh for slipping into Cockney Rhyming Slang or any other non-sanctioned form of English. After all, the non-native born in my life do provide many things, not least of which is a certain amusement factor. Fines, too, would be draconian. How about a re-education program? Okay, all violators will be sentenced to American English Immersion. Since there may be some question as to what is “American” English, I say we expose them to a broad spectrum. They have to navigate Marge Gunderson’s “Ya sure, ya betcha” in Fargo, then master Valley Girl in Clueless, pick up some Southern Fried English with Billy Bob Thornton in Slingblade and take in a dollop of surfer-speak from Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High… I think you’re catching my drift. I hope all my British friends and relations are taking notes here. There will be a test. And if I have to become a Texas Republican to see this gets enforced, I’m going to do it.

As we’re going to be driving across Oklahoma, I thought I’d reacquaint myself with the Dust Bowl. But there’s no way I could face reading The Grapes of Wrath again. Don’t get me wrong, I think Steinbeck’s book is perhaps one of the contenders for The Great American Novel. Everyone should read it once. But once might be about all you can take. It’s a thick book and every ten pages something so horrible happens that you just can’t imagine anything worse could be visited on the Joad family. Then Steinbeck ups the ante. I think the ending is supposed to be uplifting, showing the humanitarian spirit of a people who still give after everything else has been taken. But it’s horrific.

The Joads may have had it easy. It's the Okies who stayed who really suffered.

So I turned instead to history, specifically New York Times reporter Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. Turns out Steinbeck didn’t know the half of it. First of all, the Dust Bowl wasn’t confined to Oklahoma. It stretched from below Lubbock, Texas up through the panhandle of Oklahoma, over to New Mexico and Colorado and up through most of western Kansas to the Republican River in Nebraska. Basically, it included all of the High Plains of Middle America, what was once one of the most extensive grasslands in the world.

A wall of dust up to 2000 feet high rolls across the High Plains. Reporter Timothy Egan says, in 1934, three tons of dust for every American then alive blew off the plains. Then it got worse!

I’ll grant I may not have been paying attention, but Steinbeck left me with the impression that the Dust Bowl was caused by a great drought, a collapse in agriculture prices and greedy bankers. He also made it sound like the worst things happened to the Okies when they left. The reality, as reported by Egan, is much more frightening. Turns out, it was one of the greatest man-made ecological disasters in human record and it all happened in a few short decades. The High Plains had always known severe drought. At least twenty since the late 1790s were verified by tree rings, all as bad as the 9 year drought in the Thirties. And fierce winds had always pummeled the plains. The difference was the area had been covered with Buffalo Grass, that amazing vegetation that can withstand years of drought, holds the soil fast through onslaughts of wind, and stands up even to the trampling hooves of millions of buffalo. In a few short years, that former grassland looked like the Sahara Desert, blasted by abrasive sand storms and covered under drifting sand dunes six feet high in places. People died of dust pneumonia, farms disappeared under sand overnight, and the land blew away.

Walter Cronkite calls this “can’t-put-it-down history.” Uncle Walter is right! Tim Egan tells the story through first-hand accounts from people who stayed in the Dust Bowl and survived it -- or didn’t.

It all started with the Oklahoma land rush, when the Government, aided by charlatans and speculators, encouraged the wholesale settlement and plowing up of land that was never meant to sustain fragile, thirsty annual crops such as corn and wheat. With the Government cheering them on, by the Twenties, these settlers produced the largest crop yield the world had ever seen. Then the Depression hit, the bottom fell out of the wheat, corn and cattle market and people plowed up even more land in a desperate bid to plant twice as much to earn half what they had on a fraction of the acreage a few years earlier. Worldwide markets dropped even further, banks foreclosed and acres and acres of former grasslands, now ripped up for crops, were allowed to lie fallow. Then the drought came. Even the former native grass couldn’t re-establish itself as tons and tons of topsoil blew away in windstorms so strong one blotted out the sky as far away as New York City and even out into the Atlantic.

But get down on your knees and thank Franklin Roosevelt. Aided by early conservationists, he recognized that man had made this disaster and established the Conservation Corps to replant native grasses, buy out failed farmers, and encourage those remaining to practice more ecologically sound practices. His dream was to return the High Plains back to its former grassland glory and bring the Comanche, Kiowa and other Native American tribes, and even the buffalo, back to it. Sadly, this dream was only partially realized although large portions were replanted with grass and set aside as national parks, and some headway was made in encouraging remaining farmers to respect the land and farm sensibly.

So have The High Plains been restored and all is right with the world? I guess we’ll see as we drive through to Amarillo. Hopefully at some remote diner, we’ll meet up with a survivor of the Dust Bowl and get his story. But Timothy Egan, in his afterward, says we’re starting to head down the same sorry road. He cites the mining of the Ogallala aquifer, a huge underground lake that is America’s largest source of underground fresh water. Currently large agribusiness is siphoning down the water eight times faster than nature can refill it. And what are they doing with that irreplaceable resource? According to Timothy Egan, farmers in Texas are dramatically increasing cotton production, for which there is no longer an American market, selling their crop to places like China — where it is made into cheap clothing and sold back to stores like Wal-Mart. By the way, more than THREE BILLION DOLLARS of your taxpayer money subsidizes all of this. (Read this interesting Salon article about how T. Boone Pickens is a prime player in this water grab. Then read this MoneyWeek article about how China is creating a Dust Bowl that could swallow a dozen versions of the original American Dust Bowl.)

I think I’m going to have to venture more than my Penguin Water Carbonator and Toyota Prius in response to this. But, Gentle Readers, get Timothy Egan’s book. NOW. And write your congressman. Boycott Wal-Mart. Save water and recycle.

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This is a golden oldie post from my first blog, RoadGals, which covered an epic cross-country roadtrip I took with my 24 year old niece two years ago.  I’m pleased to report that the former Dust Bowl was one of our favorite stretches, largely for the wonderful people we met there. And Oklahoma’s beautiful. For now.

Since the original RoadGals site was done with iWeb, I can’t automatically import the posts into this Wordpress site. Which gives me a wonderful opportunity to recycle some of them into this site by hand whenever I’m too lazy to create a new post. Search on the RoadGals tag to find all the posts in the series.

I learned an interesting fact the other day from visiting one of my favorite bloggers, Carson at The 7MSN Ranch. Actually, I always learn interesting facts from Carson, especially as she’s about 15 years ahead of me in this City to Ranch transition. Unlike my Dubya Style Ranching (defined as a having the trappings of a ranch except no livestock but terriers), Carson has a real ranch in, as she describes it, Seven Miles South of Nowhere, New Mexico. You want livestock? She’s not only got livestock, but the most personality-forward livestock this side of the set of Babe. As an added bonus, most of them are named after iconic country singers. There are the goats, Willie and Waylon (the latter now sadly deceased), Lyle and Hank the Horses, George and Alan the Burros (named after Strait and Jackson for you non-country fans), and Wynonna the Pig. There were some chickens called The Dixie Chicks, but they aren’t talked about much these days. Carson’s now veering off to naming conventions from the great Western novel, Lonesome Dove, hence Deets the Barn Cat. Smooch the Dog, deserved a name of her own devising.

Anyway, back to that interesting factoid. Have you ever wondered why the West, with millions and millions more acres of tick-infested grasslands, doesn’t have the same or higher incidence of Lyme Disease as the built-up East Coast? Okay, I wonder about these things.

Turns out, we can thank this guy: The Western Fence Lizard.

Apparently, when ticks are young. Really young and about the size of a pinhead, their host of choice is the Western Fence Lizard. But when they draw in the blood of the lizard, an interesting thing happens. The tick’s blood is cleansed of the Lyme Disease spirochete (or whatever it is.) So when that tick then grows up and bites you, or your horse, or your terrier, it’s disgusting, but not as dangerous. (It’s all more scientifically explained here.)

Hey, Oscar! Leave that lizard alone. He's a medical professional.

Western Fence Lizards, in addition to hanging out on fences, absolutely love stone walls. Luckily, we’ve got loads of them. Yes, we went a little crazy with stone walls up here. Maybe because we have more stones than anything else on our property and we know a great father/son pair, Felix Jr. and Felix Sr., who build beautiful stone walls the traditional Mexican way. Now I’m realizing the stone walls are a health clinic as well as a Club Med for Western Fence Lizards. We’re talking a first line of defense in the prevention of Lyme Disease. I’ve never been so grateful for Oscar and Lucy’s general incompetence as hunters.

(In spite of the help of the hardest working lizards in show business, still be vigilant about tick bites. Work hard to prevent them and, if you get one, watch for the tell-tale signs of Lyme Disease.)

Oh, and Carson? Check out her site. Especially one of my favorite posts: the one where the herd takes on a pack of coyotes and kicks butt.

Gratuitous shot of burros, Alan and George, from Carson's website.

Wynnona displays way too much porcine pulchritude.

Above two photos Copyright Linda Carson at The 7MSN Ranch.