THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
"You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings."-Pearl S Buck
It has been one of those weeks for our family where mortality is on the mind. The idea that we are going to die fuels everything we do…is such a driving force. And endings are so visceral and dramatic. They are something many of us have run into in one way or another over the past year, and by experiencing them we are irrecoverably changed.
This Sunday is the birthday of Big Bill Broonzy. And with his birthday a story comes to mind about finalities. It is a story I think I have told before, so pardon me if you have already heard it. But it is a story that really fits my headspace.
To start with, Broonzy was one of those bluesmen who found success when most of his piers shoved their guitars under their beds and went on different paths of life. Big Bill found success in Europe…along with Josh White and Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry. You know the story about how the Stones and the Who and the Animals and the rest who were inspired by the American blues enough to come over and start a revival, digging up those artists who had been forgotten? Well, they had been turned on to the blues by the likes of Broonzy, who brought it alive by touring in their back yards.
It was 1957 and Broonzy was suffering from some pretty harsh throat cancer. In order to live a little longer, he was going to have to have a surgery that would end his career as a singer. Right before the surgery, Cleveland disc jockey Bill Randle and the legendary Studs Terkel took him into the studio for one more session. What resulted is an epic moment of music history and nine hours of recordings, of Broonzy telling his story and the story behind the songs he chose to sing. Sometimes jovial, sometimes deeply serious, Broonzy sang a blues songbook, each with the power and fullness that got him his fame, each song for the last time. He was looking his mortality in the face in front of a microphone with the red record button pressed and blazing.
Verve released a box set of 6 of the 9 hours from this session, including his talkin’ and thinkin’ in between tracks. It is aptly called The Bill Broonzy Story, and is truly a life document that we are so lucky to have access to (it is all over the streaming platforms). Broonzy’s story is also a masterclass in the history of the blues and American music in general. Terkel asked him the great questions, and Broonzy reflected on the musicians who came before him, the legends that were his fellow blues travelers, and his family and friends that were fading out in the rear view mirror of his life. He talked the deep philosophies behind the music he had played all of his life, talked about Elvis as a bluesman, really just doing what Broonzy is doing. He talked about his respect for gospel music and why it is so different than from from the blues, he talked about slavery and the impact it had on his generation. He spoke deeply and profoundly on so many different subjects as he spoke as an artist for the last time. (the record is so very much worth a deep listen)
The set opens with KEY TO THE HIGHWAY, a song of endings. The last lines more chilling than they had ever been before:
So give me one more kiss baby
Give me one more kiss baby before I go,
'Cause when I leave this town
I won't be back no more, no moreSo goodbye, goodbye baby
Baby I must, I must, I must say goodbye
Cause I'm a roam this mean old highway
Until the day I die
I'm gonna do this til the day I die folks
Even after his surgery Broonzy kept touring, limited to instrumental guitar blues; he died within a year. McGhee & Terry visited Broonzy in the studio during that last session. Supposedly, the three of them recorded for around an hour, talking and singing….saying their goodbyes. It is one of the nine hours that has yet to be released, and I would give anything to hear it (C’mon Verve….open up your vaults!).
Happy 128th Birthday Big Bill Broonzy.
The Search For the Lost Print: The Making of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons
The Magnificent Ambersons was already magnificent in my eyes when I heard that the original ending was even better and more tragic than the one released. It soon came to my understanding that as far as Wells was concerned, the movie was dismantled and ruined by the studio. Now it looks as if there might be an original cut of the film, all this time thought lost, somewhere in Brazil where Wells was attempting to make his next masterpiece while Ambersons was under the knife. Will the newest search for the lost cut bear fruit? Maybe they will turn up the truth behind Ambrose Bierce’s death in the process!
New York, New Music 1980–1986 @ the Museum of the City of New York
“The Museum of the City of New York opened New York, New Music 1980-1986 on June 11, 2021. The exhibition will ‘highlight diverse musical artists—from Run DMC to the Talking Heads, from Madonna to John Zorn—as a lens to explore the broader music and cultural scene, including the innovative media outlets, venues, record labels, fashion and visual arts centered in New York City in these years.’”
“For over ten years, (Juliane) Fürst has been researching Soviet hippies and conducted over 130 interviews with former members of the movement. Inspired by the music, fashion and lifestyle of their Western counterparts, the hippies of the USSR challenged the norms of their socialist environment and, despite state repression, survived as an underground community until the early 1990s.”
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster denied legal recognition in Australia
David Pescovitz always delivers the incredibly intriguing stories through the boing boing, but it seems he has been on extra fire lately. I feel like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster would do so well in San Francisco…at least the San Francisco I grew up in….
Immortalising Lafcadio Hearn, our man in Japan
I just read an incredible New York Review of Books article on Lafcadio Hearn, talking about his sensational translated Japanese ghost stories. It being his birthday today I started hitting the search key to read up more about him and fell into this sweet piece.
The Mississippi River Empties Into The Gulf
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
none of them emptying anything,
all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
it is the great circulation
of the earth's body, like the blood
of the gods, this river in which the past
is always flowing. every water
is the same water coming round.
everyday someone is standing on the edge
of this river, staring into time,
whispering mistakenly:
only here. only now.
