Subject: RE: Robert Johnson films at youtube
From:
Big Al Whittle
Date: 02 Jan 08 - 06:02 PM
I don't want to offend you Jim, as I obviously have. And Les (the villan) has asked me to behave myself - so I will try to make amends.
I think the video with Robert Johnson's mouth moving like that looks grotesque.
he was a man who lived a life of terrible poverty and degradation. and yet he left us this beautiful and complex music. If you want to know how difficult it is to play - I would urge to get a copy of Scott Ainslie's wonderful tuition video.
I would feel the same as if you did that to the face of Ann Frank. people like this paid at the office. they don't need that sort of humiliation of their memory.
okay so - I'm acting like a humourless bore - I'm sorry.
I leave those of you with patience to dip into at least an essay by the aforesaid Scott Aislie that I received by e-mail. Part of it deals with the environment that Robert Johnson lived in:-
BluesNotes, May 2007
©2007, Scott Ainslie
Examining the historical context of the Blues is tricky for anyone,
though perhaps doubly so for whites. The music was built, freely
played and enjoyed by people of color whose lives, livelihoods–and,
sometimes, deaths–were shaped by forces on the loose in the American
landscape that are unexamined and unfamiliar to many listeners. I do
not believe this is out of callousness generally, but is more due to
the fact that this dark history is glossed over or entirely absent in
our schools.
History, in fact, is the worst taught subject in America–not out of
disability, but out of fear. The actual history of America
contradicts cherished myths of America. To study our actual history–
to question the myth of America–is widely considered to be subversive
and unpatriotic.
Our popular history is littered with familiar myths, startling
omissions, and sometimes outright lies that allow uneasy truths about
our actual history to slip ever deeper into a forgotten past so as
not disturb our collective sleep. Many of these myths surround issues
of greed, race, and violence. And, sadly, they continue to color our
perceptions of each other. When our perceptions are based upon myths,
our understanding and our actions will be based on myths, as well.
Truth needs a place at our table, no matter how startling. We can
deal with a hard truth. We cannot deal with lies; we cannot heal with
myths.
How we heal our communities, understand our circumstances, and
endeavor to create measurable progress, depends on whether we
continue to regard each other dimly through a history crippled by
myths, half-truths, and lies, or see each other and how we got here
in the clear, cold light of the truth. Years ago, Desmond Tutu, after
thanking us for the examples we have given the world–Dr. King, the
Civil Rights Movement, engaged nonviolence–said that South Africa
wanted to return the favor, offering us a gift in return, something
America badly needs: a truth commission. As a nation, we have yet to
take him up on it. But it is something individuals attempt. Without
widespread agreement on our history, we are going to be condemned to
not just repeat it, but carry it, a millstone around our necks. No
one person can put down this burden. It doesn't work like that. It
will take all hands to get it off our necks. The power to lift it is
agreement. We need an agreed upon past. The burden of our history
must be shouldered, and later surrendered, together.
We are not alone in preferring myths over reality. The Japanese, the
Russians, the Chinese, and to a lesser extent the English and the
Germans have all subscribed to sanitizing their histories, and all at
the same cost – if truth will set you free; lies enslave you.
Well-taught, history makes the present more comprehensible: not by
providing answers so much as by raising questions. Every new fact
blazing into our skies brings with it a trail of questions: some
worthy, some not. The trick, as always, is to find a good question. A
proper history makes the road we're on clearer; a tenaciously held
myth gets us lost the weeds.
As a matter of record, I was not taught this history either, but have
come across it in the reading and work that I do to deepen my
understanding of African, African-American, and American culture,
music, and traditions, as part of my attempt to make myself more
useful on stage.
I thank you for reading along.
This spring in New England, I'm drawing on three remarkable books to
fill in some of the potholes in our history:
"After Appomattox: How The South Won The War"
Stetson Kennedy (University Press of Florida, 1995)
"Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War"
Nicholas Lemann (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006)
"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America"
Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001)
One of the most startling myths about our history–a pat lie endlessly
repeated in general history books and courses at almost every level–
is that following our bloodiest war, the Civil War (the North's 'War
of Rebellion'; the South's 'War of Northern Aggression'),
Reconstruction of the South 'failed'.
The sheer passivity of this description belies the truth.
Reconstruction didn't have a chance to 'fail'. It was violently and
brutally murdered along with hundreds-to-thousands of Black American
citizens who were terrorized and abandoned to organized White mob
violence by a Federal unwilling and State governments unwilling, or
in some cases unable, to exert themselves to protect the
Constitutional rights, lives, and property of their newest citizens.
The history of the violent end of Reconstruction is well-told in
Stetson Kennedy's "After Appomattox: How The South Won The War" and
in Nicholas Lemann's more recent "Redemption: The Last Battle of the
Civil War". These books, provide chilling, detailed, historical
accounts of how the North and the Federal government abandoned Black
voters and citizens to organized bands of bloodthirsty vigilantes
and Confederate veterans bent on winning after the war what they
could not win during the war: the continued oppression of Blacks and
the virtually complete suppression Black and Republican votes (back
when Republicans were the party of Lincoln). Reconstruction was
finished off by the wholesale terrorizing, lynching, and murder of
innocent Black citizens, voters, and officeholders by marauding
Whites. It is here that we find sad and shocking precedents in our
own short history for the sort of barbaric sectarian violence ripping
apart the neighborhoods of Baghdad, the countrysides of Darfur,
Afghanistan, and Somalia today, where memories are far longer.
We are rightly outraged at the torture killings by Iraqis who are now
routinely drilling holes in the skulls of their living neighbors,
removing fingers, noses, tongues, ears, and scourging them with fire
before finally beheading or shooting them. But our outrage is
untempered by the certain knowledge that Mississippians did these
very things to their fellow Mississippians from 1875 until 1965 with
deadening regularity and with assured impunity. In the white South, a
jury of your peers regularly nullified the rule of law.
And this violence wasn't committed in some abandoned neighborhood
under the cover of night. In the early decades of the Twentieth
Century, these mutilations, maimings, and executions were often
carried out right in the town square, with women and children
gathered around: picnics down by the courthouse. This is well-
documented in contemporary newspaper accounts and photographs. Less
than seventy-five years ago, postcards of lynchings were routinely
mailed all over the country. Souvenirs. It is a wonder America
doesn't know.
Across the South, prompted by convenient, but unfounded rumors of
imminent Black uprisings, 'race riots' erupted all over the country
causing the wholesale killing of Blacks. Nicholas Lemann in
Redemption assures us that there were race riots in Mississippi in
the 1870s, but they weren't started by Blacks. These 'riots' were
well-orchestrated acts of political terrorism planned and executed by
Whites who took up arms against their Black neighbors to remove their
Federally guaranteed Constitutional rights and take away their newly
granted freedoms, property and lives.
Starting in Mississippi in the mid-1870s, Whites launched campaigns
of indiscriminate violence, assassinating legally elected black
officeholders, local black leaders and voters, cutting the legs out
from under the Union victory, won at such terrible cost to the nation.
Black citizens were left unprotected by State and Federal authorities
and had to fend for themselves against the White Liners, White
Leagues, former Confederates soldiers, and the Ku Klux Klan. These
groups rampaged across the South, often crossing State lines, to
participate in raids and attacks bent on stopping Black participation
in what Whites considered 'their' society and 'their' democracy.
In Lemann's "Redemption"–his title, a term used by the Whites to spin
the campaigns of terror and unprosecuted murders that ended
Reconstruction–it is clear that the key to the success of this
strategy lay in a deadly combination of the war weariness of the
North, the political timidity and hedging wariness of President
Grant, and the long-standing willingness of northerner Whites to
ignore the ugliness, violence, and inhumanity of white Southerners
and slavery–so long as that unpleasantness remained out of view and
out of mind in the South.
According to Louis Menand in his prize-winning book, "The
Metaphysical Club," the ground work for both the Civil War and for
the violent resurgence of Confederate veterans in the South was
exposed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Menand writes:
"The Fugitive Slave Law was the least-debated item in the Compromise
of 1850, but it radicalized the North. It pushed many previously
passive unionists into active animosity toward the South–not because
they considered the law an encroachment on the liberties of black
Americans, but because they considered it an encroachment on the
liberties of Northern Whites.
"It was 'a degradation which the North would not permit,' wrote
Ulysses S. Grant near the end of his life, and he regarded it as the
prime instigator of the war: '[T]he great majority of the people of
the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they
were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to
play the role of police for the South in the protection of this
particular institution.'"
The Supreme Court ruling that affirmed this law in the Dred Scott
decision enjoined Northerners to participate in the return of escaped
slaves from the free soil of the North to the torment and vengeance
of their Southern owners. This law, and the shameful Supreme Court
decision upholding it, quickly transformed a fringe radical
Abolitionist movement into a major force in American politics,
polarizing Northern voters and the Congress, thereby setting the
stage for war.
The willingness of Northerners to parse their concerns about the
treatment of Blacks and the institution of Slavery in this way–going
along with it, so long as Northerners could remain at some
comfortable moral distance from it–played itself out again a quarter
of a century later in 1875 when rampaging Whites began terrorizing
and slaughtering black voters and officeholders, bringing
Reconstruction of the South to a violent end and ushering in the Jim
Crow era. This time they were not forced to look upon it or
participate in it. Federal forces stayed home.
Rumors of armed Black uprisings were used over and over again across
the South to whip up fears and then to justify violence by the white
community. Northerners were unwilling to re-fight the Civil War, or
even to return Federal troops to guarantee Black voting rights and
guarantee the peace. Northerners and the Federal Government turned a
blind eye to the killing, fatally content to let the South be the
South. This was an attitude that was to hold sway for nearly a century.
Detailed in Lemann's "Redemption", Mississippi's senators and
congressmen, knowing full well that they were fronting a violent
overthrow of will of the United States government, Reconstruction and
the Constitution, stood calmly in the chambers of Congress and
assured their colleagues in Washington of their determination to
guarantee, in the absence of Federal troops, Black participation in
state and federal elections.
Even as their constituents were scourging, hanging, shooting and
burning the bodies of Black voters all across their state,
Mississippi's politicians busied themselves in laying the ground work
for segregation, the myths of White Supremacy, Black uprisings, and
the 'failure' of Reconstruction.
To the lasting shame of the Federal government,dishonoring the
sacrifices of Northern soldiers in the war, Northern interests turned
a blind eye to the slaughter of Blacks in Mississippi. As Lemann
notes, in one representative Mississippi county where 20,000
Republican votes were tallied in the early 1870s, following the
unremitting violence of 1875, in the following election, only four
Republican votes were cast. And it is likely those were cast at the
cost of their lives. It was this lethal combination of Southern
violence and Northern indifference that did more than anything else
to preserve the desperate privations of Blacks and to maintain the
privileges of Whites in the Old South for the ninety years between
1875 and 1965. The effects of these ninety years have proved quite
durable.
The news of Mississippi's success at suppressing Black voter
participation by pairing distant calm assurances of their statesmen
in Washington with the brutal savagery and indiscriminate violence of
lower class Whites against their black neighbors quickly spread
across the former Confederacy. Following their example, Whites in
Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Florida, South and North Carolina, Georgia
and Virginia did the same.
It should be noted that violence was not the only tool used to remind
Blacks of their perilous place in the society. They were routinely
jailed, fined, and confined. Convicts were leased to businesses and
landowners and provided a ready supply of cheap/free labor. The law
was not their friend. The legal apparatus became simply another tool
to harm and intimidate them. And this sort of oppression cannot be
safely tucked away in pages of the history books either.
The New York Times recently reported the results of a study of the
American justice system which showed that when a person with no
previous criminal record turns up before a judge for sentencing,
Blacks are incarcerated eight times as often as Whites. If an illegal
drug is involved in the charges, Blacks are imprisoned 49 times as
often as Whites. This sort of treatment of Blacks by our legal system
clearly has deep roots. Even today, in 2007, there are far more
Blacks in prison than in college. Second chances go to Whites.
Finally, in the 1960s, Northern consciences–and the Federal
government–were offended by the widely televised attacks on well-
dressed and well-behaved civil rights demonstrators by white
policemen with fire hoses, clubs, and police dogs. They were also
roused to action by the killing of northern civil rights volunteers.
It was clear to the North who the more civilized participants in this
Southern drama were. Not quickly mind you, but eventually, after
nearly a century of unprosecuted lynchings and murders of Blacks,
Federal authorities finally dispatched Federal troops into the
South; troops that could have – and should have – been sent in 1875.
And so, in the mid-1960s, the Reconstruction of the South began once
again.
Any attempt to deepen one's appreciation of the Blues while ignoring
the circumstances of the lives of the people who made it will fall
desperately short. This dark part of our history has echoes in our
present day race relations, our economic, and our civic lives. I also
has an unsettling resonance in the world events, sectarian violence,
torture, and terrorism in which we have embroiled ourselves today.
The Blues were noticed at the turn of the Twentieth Century, as the
first and second generations born out of slavery came of age. The
generations that birthed the Blues were raised on the desperate
turmoil, hope, bloody terrorism, and final violence that shut the
door on social and political change in the South for almost a
century, conclusively ending the postwar Reconstruction initiatives.
This violence locked Southern Blacks in an artificially brutal and
constricted world where the Constitution of the United States and the
laws of our land simply would not protect them. There they remained
throughout nearly all of the 20th Century.
To borrow a phrase from Alan Lomax's book of the same name, that is
'the land where the Blues began'. That is the social landscape.
Hemmed in by what Jonathan Kozol refers to as a 'surround of force'–
poverty, despair, and violence–these folk sang.
They sang!
And part of the triumph of this music is a profound testimony to the
plain fact that, no matter what's happened to you, if you can get up
in the morning and sing: you win.
But of course, you have to be breathing to sing.
Scott Ainslie
May 7, 2007
Brattleboro, VT
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sj
