Shake it and Break it!

 

Down the Rabbit Hole . . .

 During the summer of 2010, I wondered down a YouTube "rabbit hole" while searching for songs that I hadn't heard in a long time. I came across a video of someone playing "Baker Street" on a turntable. It looked kind of cool, so I started looking for others playing records on YouTube. It didn't take long for me to find people who were spinning old 78 rpm records. Howlin' Wolf is more suited to my taste these days than Gerry Rafferty. Finding these videos made an impact on me as I wrote about in Reason in 2013:

The man holding the Howlin' Wolf 78 is Rich Hynes, owner of the Underground Record Shop in Indianapolis. I discover that he has posted many more clips as well. Sometimes they feature artists I've enjoyed for years, such as Muddy Waters and Johnny Cash; sometimes they introduce me to great musicians I've never encountered before, such as the Alabama Jug Band and the rockabilly pioneer Lattie Moore.

Looking for and listening to old records, I soon learned about how little I knew about American music. For a long time, the Blues was my favorite genre and I had the good fortune to see performers such as Koko Taylor, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and John Lee Hooker perform live in the 1980s. My interest and knowledge of the genre went back as far as Robert Johnson, but no further. I had seen Yazoo reissues of artists like Blind Blake and Charley Patton but I figured that sort of old-timey thing wasn't for me. I eventually discovered how wrong that assessment was by listening to Barbeque Bob, Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Lewis Black as well as Blake and Patton. 

The same is true with Country, also known as "Hillbilly" or "Old Time Singin'." I knew of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers, but not the Allen Brothers or Charlie Poole or Buddy Baker. I also learned to put less emphasis on genre—I look for music that I like, which often may be characterized as "Pop" or "Vaudeville." Occasionally "???" is good a description as any. My policy is that if a record is cheap and looks interesting, I will probably give it a home. 

When I first started looking for 78s, I skipped over Hawaiian records—and they are pretty common— until I by chance took one home and listened to it. Now, if you want to hear a 100+ year old July Paka record on YouTube, my channel is your only source. Picking up various "ethnic" records introduced new (to me) instruments—like the tambouritza (very scratchy) and reintroduced the familiar, as when I spun an old Italian record and said to myself: "It's that song from the Godfather!"

After years of record collecting, and writing on the topic, I was about to fall down yet another rabbit hole. It bothered me that I had so much interest in music, but I couldn't play any instrument more challenging than air guitar—having failed to master the other kind in my youth. The music that I like the most tends to be made with stringed instruments—guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, etc.

After giving the subject some thought, I decided to get a ukulele. They are smaller, lighter, less expensive (though one can drop a lot of money on a uke) and easier on the fingers than a guitar or banjo—both of which I was tempted to try. A ukulele, however, is not a toy and it takes practice and skill to play well. In the right hands, it can work magic. Some talented guitarists such as Del Ray and Ledward Kaapana also show their skill on the ukulele.

I've played for more than four years now, and I am competent, but not as good as I'd like. While I may never match the finger-picking skills of Kaapana, playing the uke has both increased my respect for talented musicians on all chordophones and my interest in the history of the instruments, which in the case of the ukulele—an offspring of the Portuguese machete—is fascinating. 

While collecting old records led me down the path to playing the ukulele, playing the uke has influenced my taste in music and caused me to seek out old records featuring the instrument. Once again, I am discovering new (to me) artists such as Hamtree Harrington. You never know where you end up when you start falling down rabbit holes.

Jelly-Roll King!

Claude McKay:

"Then Banjo keyed himself up and began playing in his own wonderful wild way.

'Old Uncle Jack, the jelly roll king,

Just got back from shaking that thing!

He can shake that thing, he can shake that thing

For he's the jelly-roll king. Oh shake that thing!'"

Subject, Not a Citizen

Willie Dixon was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on July 1, 1915, and in the years after World War II, he would become an important figure in the development and growth of Blues, Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll. After performing with a succession of R&B groups, Dixon would work for Chess Records in Chicago, starting in 1951, and except for a brief period in the late 1950s, he would stay for two decades. Don Snowden, Dixon’s co author of I Am The Blues described his role there. “Dixon was a full-time employee after 1951—producing, arranging, running the studio . . . His role was so crucial that Leonard Chess would later describe him as ‘my right arm.’” His greatest impact was as a songwriter. He would pen “Hoochie Coochie Man” for Muddy Waters and “My Babe” for Little Walter. In the 1960s, his music would be recorded by The Rolling Stones (“Red Rooster”) and Led Zeppelin (“I Can’t Quit You” and others).

But before the fame and success came along, Willie Dixon was a subject of Jim Crow Mississippi. While still in his teens, Dixon was jailed in the Magnolia State for hoboing and the experience marked him. I am the Blues detailed the horrors, including his witness to a murder. “They beat this guy until blood was running out of his mouth at the cage. He died right there in his own blood and that dirt would be so hot and that dust so thick that it would burn your feet through your shoes. After they beat him, they drug him over to the side and a little breath was still life was still left in him. Where he had been bleeding out of his mouth and nose, you could see a little, bloody-colored bubble coming up from where he was breathing there. After awhile, you didn’t see them no more and they’d tell you, ‘Go bury this nigger.’”

This sort of experience was doubtless in his mind when he started receiving draft notices in 1941. Congress enacted a draft in 1940 as the country drifted towards entering World War II. Dixon decided that he would refuse to serve, and he was eventually arrested while performing in Chicago. “They came on the stage down at the Pink Poodle when the Five Breezes were playing one night, when we came back the second time. This was during the time that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and they picked me up and put me in jail. I told them I was a conscientious-objector and that I wasn’t going to fight for nobody. . . I said I wasn’t a citizen, I was a subject. I was telling them about the 14th and 15th Amendment[s].”

After nearly a year in jail, Dixon was released and declared unfit for service. His memoir lists his classification as “5-F” which probably should have been 4-F.

I don’t know how widely (if at all) this type of protest was made by other black men during World War II, but Dixon wasn’t the only person to feel the way he did. Harlem Renaissance journalist and Black No More author, George Schuyler also opposed African American participation as Oscar R. Williams wrote in George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative. “Schuyler’s reasons for opposing African American participation in World War II were primarily rooted in his firsthand experience with racism while serving in the army during World War I. ‘I saw what was done to the Negro during the last war and I heard a lot more than I saw,’ he wrote. ‘I consider the Negro’s treatment during that period unforgivable and indefensible. I foresee that his treatment during the next war will be the same.’”

Ironically, this prominent draft-resister’s widest exposure would come during the inaugural celebration George H.W. Bush, after the latter’s vapid Flag Factory/ACLU Card/Willie Horton campaign of 1988.

Records & Rarities

I have owned records for more than forty years now, though I only became a serious collector about three years ago. The longest continuing record in my collection is the LP Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck, that I bought in 1976. I still purchase and listen to LPs but I "collect" 45 rpm records in the sense that I'm always looking for rare and unusual artists, labels and songs in that format, and I have little difficulty finding them, mostly at a trio of local records stores in Knoxville.

The embedded playlist below has videos of a few of my favorite rarities. Some of them feature recognizable songs, including one co-written by Merle Haggard and another made famous by Jim Reeves. A few of them were from labels based in East Tennessee and presumably received only a regional release.

My favorite part of sharing these records on YouTube is receiving feedback from viewers, especially those for whom the old records have sentimental value.  I have heard from the daughter of one artist and from a persistent gentleman who bugged me until I sold him a record that he hadn't seen or heard in more than forty years.

RIP MLK

The January/February issue of The American Conservative will soon be out with my review of Manufacturing Hysteria. It is appropriate that it come out near the Martin Luther King holiday as the FBI' COINTELPRO harassment of King was one of my topics. I wrote:

The most famous target of Hoover and the FBI was Martin Luther King. The investigation of King was based the assumption that some of his associates were Communists, but the FBI’s level of attention suggests a more personal motivation. Hoover intervened to keep Marquette University from granting King an honorary degree and was especially agitated at King’s winning a Nobel Peace Prize. The bureau’s most egregious abuse of power in this case was a crude attempt to wreck King’s marriage by sending him illegally recorded tapes of his marital in"infidelities, accompanied by a crudely forged letter encouraging him to commit suicide before his “filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Writing in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald discusses King's opposition to militarism and the Vietnam war, which should be highlighted along with his views on racism, poverty and civil rights:

King argued for the centrality of his anti-militarism advocacy most eloquently on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City - exactly one year before the day he was murdered. That extraordinary speech was devoted to answering his critics who had been complaining that his anti-war activism was distracting from his civil rights work ("Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask?"). King, citing seven independent reasons, was adamant that ending US militarism and imperialism was not merely a moral imperative in its own right, but a prerequisite to achieving any meaningful reforms in American domestic life.

Here is audio of one of speeches on the war:

800 Pound Gorilla . . .

Somehow Glenn Reynolds and Michael Barone talk about polling and the election for more than thirteen minutes and never get around to discussing Nate Silver:

More Damaging Romney Footage . . .

This won't help the Romney campaign:

Operation Shift Blame

In the near term, at least, Barack Obama is a solid favorite to win the 2012 election. Since the economy is weak and the president is a KENYANSOCIALISTCHICAGOALINSKYITEMARXIST, his rightwing critics are straining for reasons that he is in the lead.

John Hindraker (via Memeorandum) thinks he has found it, and apparently, the fact that Republicans brought about the disaster in the first place and people don't trust them has nothing to do with it:

I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy.

I would give his argument more credence if he defined his terms and used hard data—how much "over 100 million" and what does he mean by "welfare"? The term "public employee" is reasonably precise, but as Paul Krugman notes, government payrolls have shrunk under Obama.

William Jacobson sees another cause—a Liberal Media Conspiracy to demoralize Republicans and conservatives:

It’s November 7.  Barack Obama has won.  The Republican presidential strategy has failed.  The media is jubilant.  The right-blogosphere is going through a serious introspection.  The left-blogosphere is dancing on our graves and shoving it down our throats.  Four years of fighting the Obama agenda was for nothing.
Oh, I’m sorry.  Let me correct that.  It’s September 9, not November 7.  The rest of the paragraph above can remain as originally written.

 The most absurd part is Jacobson's assumption that right-blogosphere is capable of "serious introspection."

I don't know how the election will come out, but I'm becoming more confident that Obama will prevail and I'm certain that far from introspection, the rightwing will become more detached from reality and blame the Liberal Media, or Hollywood or fraud: anything but their own failings.

Gotta Have Somebody Serve . . .

I read Michael Brendan Dougherty's article on Obama's Right Wing with interest. I would qualify as a member of that category except for the fact that I didn't vote for Obama in 2008 and I doubt I qualify as a conservative anymore.

I came close to voting for Obama in 2008 (I opted for Nader) and I favored his victory. This fall, I plan to vote for the President, which will be my first presidential vote for a Democrat and my first for a major party candidate since Reagan in 1984. I have little doubt that I will regret my vote, assuming that he wins, like I did after voting for Reagan.

The Obamacons Dougherty interviewed cite a variety of reasons for their apostasy but I was disappointed that none of them discussed the state of the broader conservative movement. I can think of many terms to describe the right-wing in the age of Obama, but the ones that spring to mind are "repulsive" and perhaps "insane." This applies to the leadership of the Republican party at the top, down to the creeps who at Weasel Zippers who think that Michelle Obama is some sort of fat cow.

Republicans amply demonstrated that they are terrible at governing between 2001 and 2008, and have attempted to make the country ungovernable in the Obama years. Since Mitt Romney seems to have no fixed beliefs other than that the rich are better than you and I, it's difficult to predict how he will govern.  I suspect that Romney will prattle about abortion, etc. just enough to placate the rubes and will appoint the most conservative judges confirmable; but his primary concern will be the care and feeding of corporations. The only upside of a Romney victory will be that Republicans will stop actively trying to destroy the country.

Stabbed in the Back!

The cultish nature of modern conservatism is obvious. Dan Riehl's response (via Memeorandum) to NRO's call for Willard to release more tax returns is simply example # 1,387,176 or so. For Riehl, National Review's editorial isn't simply a tactical error, but a betrayal:

Next time you opt to stab a GOP candidate in the back, how about having the balls to put your name on it? I don't think that's too much to ask. 

I really, really want to play nice with everyone on our side, but when I see this high minded BS from people who've never even run for anything, it smokes my butt. . .And don't give me this, well, we can disagree BS, either. 

You aren't even on any team you're a got damned cheerleader on the sidelines and right now you look silly in that frilly skirt you're wearing. So STFU if you don't have anything good to say, or just go the hell away. It isn't like anyone would miss most of NRO if it did, frankly. (emphasis added)

Get it NRO?—Mitt is now Leader of the Cause and the Cause must be served.

Now Who's Being Naive?

I don't normally think of Jim Antle or Robert Stacy McCain as being naive, but I can't otherwise understand their praise for Mitt Romney's non-pandering before the NAACP. Antle wrote that, "Romney isn't exactly known for his willingness to communicate unpopular truths. He deserves credit for doing so here."

That's only true if you assume that the people in the room with Romney were his intended audience. I suspect that the NAACP crowd were simply props and Willard was pandering to the Republican base. And seeing some of the reactions; such as the comment from Skippy on Antle's post that "anyone belonging to the NAACP is a racist, or Rush Limbaugh's (via Memeorandum) idiotic ravings, it would appear that his pandering worked.
UPDATE: Antle replies.

It's Not A Lie . . . If You Believe It . . .

The USA Today reports that the President plans to host an Independence Day barbecue for military families. Admittedly, it is not a particularly exciting story, but Glenn Reynolds is telling Instapundit readers that the president plans to celebrate the 4th " with a fundraiser in Paris."
The link goes to a Big Government story with a headline reading "Obama Campaign Celebrates Independence Day . . . With Fundraisers in Paris."(emphasis added) Big Government links to an article in the Hollywood Reporter, that has the real story:

Meanwhile, the Continental branch of the Obama fundraising effort will kick off next week in Paris with an Independence Day reception at the Rosenbloom Collection on the chic Rue du Chevaleret. Organizers Forrest Alogna, Pamela Boulet, Zachary James Miller, Valerie Picard, Joe Smallhoover and Curtis Young will host an early-evening event whose ticket prices range from $250 to $1,500.

I searched several of those names and I don't think they should be confused with the "Obama campaign," but at least the Big Government story doesn't claim the President himself is going to raise money in France on the Fourth of July, of all days. It is tempting to say that Glenn Reynolds is simply lying, but it is more complex than that. Reynolds, it would appear, needs to believe the worst about his enemies; so a story about some Americans in Paris fundraising for the President's reelection on the Fourth is streamlined into a factoid about how Obama is evil. Reynolds—it would seem— has internalized the wisdom of George Costanza:





UPDATE-- Costanza, I mean Reynolds makes a rare clarification: " Let me be clear: It’s the Obama Campaign. Obama himself won’t be in Paris."

The Rifleman’s Stalking the sick and the Lame . . .

The above video features NRA executive Veep Wayne LaPierre from 2011 expounding a conspiracy theory about how the Obama administration plans to implement gun control in his second administration: "get re-elected, and with no other re-elections to worry about, get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms freedom." This sort of thinking is totally nuts but it explains the rightwing obsession with the Fast and Furious operation that was supposedly part of a nefarious Obama plan to—in David Limbaugh's words—"manufacture 'evidence' for tightening gun control legislation."
I reviewed the Steve Sailer book, America's Half-Blood Prince (cobbled together from VDare columns) for Chronicles and debunked a similar argument:

 Sailer suggests that Obama will save his true self for a second term. “In Obama, ambition and caution are yoked. Becoming president is not his ultimate objective. Becoming a two-term president is. . . . Nixon’s first administration was one of the most liberal in American history. There were hints at the beginning of his second term, before Watergate . . .that Nixon, . . . intended to move toward his innate conservatism. That analogy suggests that a second Obama administration might more truly reflect the real Obama.” This is dubious. If Obama has studied recent history he will have noticed that recent second presidential terms have been become mired in scandal.
Sailer is correct that Obama wants a second term—every president does; but if he wants accomplish anything, he needs to act while he has the votes in Congress and the support of the public.

Since the Democrats lost control of the House in the last election, even routine measures such as increasing the debt limit have become near impossible. The whole notion that Barack Obama plans to use a second term—currently somewhat in doubt—to enact some secret radical agenda known only to Wayne LaPierre and other delusional cretins is absurd.

Occam's Bullshit Detector

The simplest, and most likely explanation for this poll result (via Memeorandum) is that it is bogus:

President Barack Obama is rapidly losing support among African-American voters in North Carolina, a new poll out today from the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling shows.
The poll finds that Mitt Romney would get 20 percent of the African-American vote if the election were held today, compared with 76 percent for Obama.

If I'm confident of anything in the coming election, it is that black people are going to vote overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. Of course, that won't stop people from reading into this outlier pole what they want to see. Maggie Gallagher thinks that it is about gay marriage. Glenn Reynolds who spent most of 2008(you know, when the economy collapsed) proclaiming "dude, where's my recession,"  thinks that it is about the economy. I think that it's bullshit.

"Copperhead Paddy"

From Chapter iv of The Copperhead:

I fairly yearned to ask him what this
something was, and what was the matter
with his face, but it did not seem quite the
right thing to do, and presently he began
mumbling, as much to himself as to me, a
long and broken discourse, from which I
picked out that he had mingled with a group
of lusty young farmers in the market-place,
asking for the latest intelligence, and that
while they were conversing in a wholly
amiable manner, one of them had suddenly
knocked him down and kicked him, and that
thereafter they had pursued him with curses
and loud threats half-way to the tavern.
This and much more he proclaimed between
mouthfuls, speaking with great rapidity and
in so much more marked a brogue than usual,
that I understood only a fraction of what he
said.

He professed entire innocence of offence
in the affair, and either could not or would
not tell what it was he had said to invite
the blow. I dare say he did in truth richly
provoke the violence he encountered, but at
the time I regarded him as a martyr, and
swelled with indignation every time I looked
at his nose.

I remained angry, indeed, long after he
himself had altogether recovered his equanim-
ity and whimsical good spirits. He waited
outside on the seat while X went in to pay
for the baiting of the horses, and it was as
well that he did, I fancy, because there were
half a dozen brawny farm-hands and villagers
standing about the bar, who were laughing
in a stormy way over the episode of the
" Copperhead Paddy " in the market.

"Negro Sovereignty in the Republic"

From the first chapter of The Copperhead:

Gradually the old blood-feud with the Brit-
isher became obscured by fresher antagonisms,
and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of
Belial who deserved to be hated more even
than had Hamilton and Marshall. With me
the two stages of indignation glided into
one another so impreceptibly that I can now
hardly distinguish between them. What I do
recall is that the farmer came in time to neg-
lect the hereditary enemy, England, and to
seem to have quite forgotten our own historic

foes to liberty, so enraged was he over the
modem Abolitionists. He told me about them
as we paced up the seed rows together in the
spring, as we drove homeward on the hay-load
in the cool of the summer evening, as we
shovelled out a path for the women to the
pumps in the farm-yard through December
snows. It took me a long time to even ap-
proximately grasp the wickedness of these
new men, who desired to establish negro
sovereignty in the Republic, and to compel
each white girl to marry a black man.

The fact that I had never seen any negro
" close to," and had indeed only caught pass-
ing glimpses of one or more of the colored
race on the streets of our nearest big town,
added, no doubt, to the mystified alarm with
which I contemplated these monstrous pro-
posals.

Copperhead the Movie: Week One . . .

Closed Window

Perhaps it is time to stop the insanity:

Tensions have risen between Washington and Kabul, as President Hamid Karzai criticized the U.S. for failing to consult with him on an air raid on an Afghan village killed 18 civilians including 9 children.

I would guess that the window of opportunity to accomplish anything in Afghanistan closed sometime in 2002, yet we are still there. Does every occupation have to turn into a quagmire?

Le-gal Dim-bulb-i-tude

Law professor, half-wit; William Jacobson is mad at people who publicly supported Barack Obama in 2008, and Amber Lee Ettinger in particular, she of the famed Obama Girl video: From what I gather, Jacobson began blogging because he couldn't understand how anyone could oppose the political party that dragged the country into two foreign quagmire and brought about the worst financial collapse since the Great Drepression.

Citing an article stating that Ettinger won't be endorsing anybody this election cycle, Jacobson excretes, "no, you are not excused, fool" even though she didn't ask to be. What an idiot.