Patriots and Peoples concerns history. While I write about many topics (mostly North American history), the name of the blog stems from investigating ideologically driven histories from both the Right and the Left as described in an early post: "Patriot's and People's Histories". In "Worth Another Look" are summaries and links to some of my best posts.
The revolutionary generation who separated the American colonies from Britain and crafted a new nation managed to blend the secularism of the Enlightenment with Puritan Christianity into a consistent view of themselves, their needs, and the nature of government. At the heart of their views was the public interest. Gordon S. Wood explains in his seminal The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).
The traditional covenant theology of Puritanism combined with the political science of the eighteenth century into an imperatively persuasive argument for revolution. Liberal rationalist sensibility blended with Calvinist Christian love to create an essentially common emphasis on the usefulness and goodness of devotion to the general welfare of the community. Religion and republicanism would work hand in hand to create frugality, honesty, self-denial, and benevolence among the people.
Wood, Creation, 118.
One almost gets the impression that Wood had been listening to The Youngbloods while writing this book. In 1969, their version of "Get Together" peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now
Chet Powers, "Get Together" (1964)
Maybe he was listening to The Kingston Trio who first brought the song to the attention of the public several years earlier.
For Wood, this view of the blending of Puritanism and eighteenth century rationalism embodied the hope that America could become what Samuel Adams called "the Christian Sparta".
I love the People of Boston. I once thought, that City would be the Christian Sparta. But Alas! Will men never be free! They will be free no longer than while they remain virtuous.
Samuel Adams to John Scollay, 30 Dec. 1780
Republican virtue meant shunning luxury and privilege. The common good took precedence over individual ambitions.
On the last day of July 1971, the Grateful Dead played at the Yale Bowl. When this football stadium was built in 1914, it was "the largest amphitheater built since the Roman Colosseum," according to Landmarks in Yale's History. The Dead's performance there was the first of "Sugaree" and "Mr. Charlie," and the final performance of "Darkness Jam." During "Sugar Magnolia," the audience clapped in rhythm with the band, and continued doing so through the next song, "Casey Jones." Some discussion on the Grateful Dead website alleges that rioting outside the stadium that night ended the venue for concerts, but concerts were held there until 1980 when continuing complaints from neighbors brought them to an end. Little River Band was the last group to perform in the Yale Bowl.
Rick Perlstein shared this link on Facebook. Campaign songs from former President Richard Nixon's political career proposed as a soundtrack for Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008).
Warning: these songs may induce nausea, particularly for anyone old enough to remember Nixon.
I remember Woodstock. These memories filter through intervening scenes, perspectives, and mentalités. I'm more a child of the Seventies than the Sixties and missed the festival at Max Yasgur's farm forty years ago. I was too young.
My memories of Woodstock are second hand experiences animated through Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (The Director's Cut) (1997), The '60s (1999), and the study of history. Woodstock and the Sixties first presented themselves in my study of history through Professor Leroy Ashby's lectures in U.S. History, 1941 to present (the course covered a forty year period when I took it).
Ashby's innovative lectures brought history to life. His narratives were supplemented with clips from such music as Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Country Joe and the Fish, and maybe Eric Burden and the The Animals or Joan Baez. I lack his song list, but attempted to reproduce his style a few years ago while teaching a course called Recent American History. My list of "protest music" included "Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard, Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come," and Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marching Anymore." I should have presented Frank Zappa's "Plastic People" alongside "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield as springboards for reflection upon the so-called riots on Sunset Strip. Seeing these demonstrations protesting the closing of Pandora's Box through the contrasting lenses of these two songs (one of which was performed in Monterey 1967), students might develop some critical historical questions for exploring the youth movement of the Sixties that Woodstock has come to symbolize.
Woodstock serves as the denouement for the fractured family sub-plot in The '60s. The Herlihy family at the heart of the film includes three typical children. Katie (Julia Stiles) gets pregnant as a teenager and follows her lover to San Francisco, where his feeble, "bummer," is offered when she needs cash in order to buy medicine for their sick baby, cash that he just spent on drugs. Through this film, we see the dark side of the Summer of Love. Michael's (Josh Hamilton) Catholic idealism carries him into the civil rights movement, the Pentagon siege, and into constant struggle with a rival suitor for the heart of a woman. She begins to consider Michael again after the rival dies in a self-created blast as a member of the Weather Underground. Brian (Jerry O'Connell) joins the Marines and goes to Vietnam. Through a deus ex machina (some movie critics use the term flaw) the divergent paths of all three siblings converge upon Woodstock where they find each other after several years apart. They return together to their parents in Chicago and enjoy a happy reunion, and start the process of healing.
Such is the hope found in the memories of Woodstock that many celebrate today.
Last weekend, The New York Times got the scoop on the anniversary and published assessments of Woodstock's legacy from such writers as Ishmael Reed, Rick Perlstein (whose Facebook alert put me onto this article), James Miller, Joan Hoff, and others. Miller called the festival a pseudo-event. Others, too, have been critical.
Freedom from Responsibility
A tone of moral censure underscores the narrative of the Sixties in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen.
Rock music reaffirmed the sexual and drug revolutions at every turn. By 1970, although still exceptionally popular, neither the Beatles nor their bad-boy counterparts, the Rolling Stones, had the aura of hipness, having ceded that to rising new and more radical groups whose music carried deeper drug overtones. Schweikart and Allen, 703
For these authors, hipness was rebellion against authority. The music industry cashed in on this rebellion with the Woodstock festival. The authors of A Patriot's History omit stories of how the mega-concert became free as the crowds overwhelmed any semblance of security, and the promoters took a bath. But, they mention the full-length film--Woodstock (1970)--that followed the event and that continues to bring profits through several anniversary editions.
Schweikart and Allen cite one critical source for their brief discussion of the music festival: David Dalton, "Finally, the Shocking Truth about Woodstock Can Be Told, or Kill It Before It Clones Itself," The Gadfly (August 1999); their citation also mentions conversations with Dalton by one of the two authors, presumably Schweikart as he started his career in a band. From Dalton they offer the observation that at Woodstock drugs "ceased being tools for experience ... and became a means of crowd control" (704).
The authors of A Patriot's History emphasize the drugs and sex, the garbage left behind, and the commercialization of the music. They frame Woodstock between the sexual revolution and the mayhem in Hollywood perpetrated by Charles Manson's followers the week prior to the festival. They do not inquire into the motivations of the organizers nor the experiences of the participants.
People's Histories
Neither A People's History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn nor Paul Johnson's A History of the American People (1998) mention the Woodstock Festival. Even so, Zinn's three chapters on the Sixties emphasizing the Civil Rights Movement; protest against the American presence in Vietnam, and the crimes of Richard Nixon; and the emergence of Red Power, Black Power, Chicano nationalism, and woman's liberation all seem to suggest a broadly positive assessment. Even so, Zinn might object to the ways the youth movement was exploited by corporate America. Schweikart and Allen note how "peace, love and rock-n-roll" became an advertising slogan not only for Woodstock, but for other products.
Johnson's one indexed reference to drugs credits popular music with fomenting the spread of drug culture. From 1920s jazz, swing and bop in the 1930s and 1940s, ...
There followed 1950s cool, hard bop, soul jazz, rock in the 1960s, and in the 1970s blends of jazz and rock dominated by electronic instruments. And all the time pop music was crowding in the phantasmagoria of commercial music geared to the taste of countless millions of easily manipulated but increasingly affluent young people. And from the worlds of jazz and pop, the drug habit spread to the masses as the most accelerated form of downward mobility of all. Johnson, 706
Johnson repeats this theme of downward mobility in his discussion of Gangsta Rap, where he segues into expressing his affinity for the arguments in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education (1991). It's clear that his views of Woodstock would not deviate far from those of Schweikart and Allen.
Addendum (24 August 2009): Earlier this morning, Larry Schweikart posted "Woodstock at 40 ... er, wait, is it 40 already?" on his blog A Patriot's History of the United States. In the second sentence, he calls Rush Limbaugh his mentor, or he imagines Rush Limbaugh as the mentor for his imaginary reader that he is quoting--the syntax of his parenthetical statement lacks some precision on this point. He then suggests that he and Rush share a love of the music of Woodstock, and that he has seen the film something like twenty times. He repeats and emphasizes David Dalton's assertion that at Woodstock drugs became a means for "crowd control".
On a recent road trip, one of those distinctly American activities, I put an old CD in the player. It's a compilation of songs that are good driving songs, and that tell a story of sorts about the United States--past and present. I created the compilation when someone else asked me to put together some music that might facilitate conversation. It was the first in a series I titled Trippin' Through Amerika. Volume one has twenty tracks.
1. Cream, "Crossroads (Live at Winterland)," from The Cream of Clapton
Recorded at the Winterland Auditorium in San Francisco, 10 March 1968 as part of the British band Cream's second US tour. The Cream of Clapton is a 1995 compilation album that includes Eric Clapton's solo work and music from several bands.
2. Dizzy Gillespie, "Salt Peanuts," Jazz Biography
This Bebop standard emerged from Gillespie's play with the Lucky Millinder Band in 1942.
3. Cher, "Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves," The Way of Love
Cher's first number one chart song reached the Billboard Hot 100 #1 on 6 November 1971. This episode from 1971 television--the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour--has been preserved on YouTube.
4. James Taylor, "Line 'Em Up," Hourglass
This song, which calls to memory the day President Nixon resigned, bridges Cher's fiction and James Brown's critique.
5. James Brown, "Funky President (People It's Bad)," James Brown: Greatest Hits
Although this song makes me think of Nixon, James Brown stated in James Brown: The Godfather of Soul (1986) that it concerns Gerald Ford. In any case, a funky President is always worth contemplating.
6. Elvis Presley, "Big Boss Man [Alternate Take 9]," Today, Tomorrow, & Forever
When I was compiling this CD, I wanted to include Koko Taylor's version of "Big Boss Man," but had it only on an old cassette tape. In the world of digital, I had to settle for Elvis. The song was recorded in 1967.
7. Gene Autry, "Back in the Saddle Again," The Roots of Country
This classic, first released on the eve of the Second World War, is one of very few five star Country Songs. It sometimes makes me think of the Eighties.
A song about superficiality and compromise on the road to fame, ironically became one of the best known songs and top hits released by Glen Campbell.
9. The Byrds, "Citizen Kane," Byrdmaniax
The Byrdmaniax album was released in 1971 to a poor reception amid some controversy. Nevertheless, I think this song, based on a movie, cuts to the heart of many contradictions in American culture.
10. Grateful Dead, "Uncle John's Band," Workingman's Dead
The world's greatest jug band's signature song. It is neither their best song, not the best recording. But it is true Americana and everyone should know it well.
This video is a Halloween performance in 1980 at Radio City Music Hall.
11. Fruteland Jackson, "Goin' Down to King Biscuit," I Claim Nothing But the Blues
Fruteland Jackson is a relatively young man (b. 1953) devoted to acoustic blues from the Delta and Piedmont. This song presents American history that never appears in textbooks, but is every bit as significant as work within the beltway.
12. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit," The Very Best of Billie Holiday
Now that we've headed into the South, it's time to remember John McCain's statement, "We never hide from history. We make history." Of course, he hadn't yet said that when I put this compilation together.
13. Cisco Houston, "This Land in Your Land," This Land is Your Land: Songs of Freedom
There are few listeners that properly appreciate Woody Guthrie's voice singing America's all time number one song, but Cisco Houston's sweet voice pleases many. It's not my favorite version--I prefer Odetta, Arlo Guthrie, Will Geer, and others on A Tribute to Woody Guthrie,--but space is an issue when packing twenty songs into one CD.
14. Joan Baez, "Joe Hill," Best of Joan Baez
John McCutcheon's Live at Wolf Trap album includes this song with a heartwarming story about Paul Robeson in Australia, but Joan Baez has such an alluring voice that it's difficult not to prefer her version.
Phil Ochs sang another piece about Joe Hill worthy of attention, although not as well known as the "I Dreamed I saw Joe Hill" song sung by Baez.
15. Miles Davis, "John McLaughlin," Bitches Brew
John McLaughlin played the guitar for Miles Davis, and earned the rare distinction of having a song named for him on one of the most important Jazz albums of all time.
16. John Lee Hooker, "This Land Is Nobody's Land," The Real Folk Blues / More Real Folk Blues
After Woody's classic, Baez singing America's number one labor protest song, and an instrumental song celebrating a musician in the band that performs it, the Blues' chords strike deep. Hooker may be well known for a drinking song covered by George Thorogood, but this song deserves more airtime.
17. Judy Collins, "Get Together," This Land is Your Land: Songs of Freedom
This anthems of the 1960s, written by Chet Powers in the early decade, and sung in many elementary schools by the end of the decade. Judy Collins recorded it in 1966 at Newport.
18. The Blind Boys of Alabama, with Tom Waits, "Go Tell It On the Mountain," Go Tell It On the Mountain
This Christmas song doesn't sound out of place in the spring and summer.
19. Louis Armstrong, "We Shall Overcome," Louis Armstrong and His Friends
This version of "We Shall Overcome" last nearly seven minutes was recorded in May 1970.
20. Leonard Cohen, "Closing Time," The Essential Leonard Cohen
Most poetry in the world isn't on the page. Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo speaks about her new CD, Winding Through the Milky Way.
I've been reading and enjoying Harjo's poems since the late 1980s, and met her in 1991 when she did a reading where I was in graduate school. Her grace and charm made a deep and lasting impressions upon me. I've long enjoyed the way she plays the saxophone during her readings as an integral element in her poetry. Her comments in this video respond to those that see music as separate and distinct from the lines she writes and reads.
Satire: The sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
Jonathan Swift
First Box
Rock music is for liberals, and Country is for conservatives. We all know that, and it helps us understand why no one we knew listened to Country in the 1970s, but some of our friends started doing so secretly in the 1980s and more overtly in the 1990s every time Billy opened his fly.
The Box Inside
The recent Country Music Awards was one of the dullest shows on record, perhaps because they've retreated from airing their politics after the flap over the Country "Southern Rock Tribute" during the Grammys of 2005. See Jeanne Fury's review or the complete line up if you've forgotten. Thrasher's Wheat--a Neil Young fan's blog--offers a bit of useful history challenging the assumptions that erupted in controversy.
And Inside That Box...
In 2005, Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying" earned Best Male Country Vocal Performance. This song is on the same album that includes "Back When," with catchy lyrics that seem upon first hearing to be making fun of street slang, often associated with Black America, while celebrating icons of rural whiteness: "A fried bologna sandwich / With mayo and tomato."
...Another Box
Of course, there's plenty of God-talk in "Live Like You Were Dying," in many of the songs performed at this year's awards, in the thank you speeches, and so on. God-talk, we all know, is conservative because Jesus (if he were alive today and living in America) would vote for Ron Paul or Mitt Romney. Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics, has another view about God-talk and politics, if not about the ideology of Country music.
A Razor Along the Seam
"Back When" is not so simple. The lines, "Sittin' round the table / Don't happen much anymore," are conservative only in the most generic sense, and could just as well be taken as a veiled reference to Joy Harjo's poem "Perhaps the World Ends Here" as to anything else. I'll leave for another day my discussion of McGraw's first hit, "Indian Outlaw," and what it says about stereotypes and making a travesty of history.
The heart of "Back When" is a celebration of radio that wasn't as broken down by genres and styles as today: "I had my favorite stations / The ones that played them all." Likewise, Lynyrd Skynyrd's allegedly racist song celebrates a mix of styles: "Now muscle shoals has got the swampers / And they’ve been known to pick a song or two." Imagine Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, and GZA on the same station and you get the idea, but for now Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) is the closest we'll get to that.
Looking at Cardboard, and the Cut on my Hand
There are conservatives who think they own Country music to be sure, and some of them, such as Jake Easton, harassed the Dixie Chicks after they had the courage to say something intelligent about Texas patriotism and the invasion of Iraq. The longer Bush stays in office, however, the more often folks who listen to Country say they've always liked the Dixie Chicks.
The Jewel Inside
The roots of Country music go way back: back to a time when Country was indistinguishable from Folk, back to a time when Woody Guthrie was writing songs that everyone in America knows. The Country Music Hall of Fame, the Country Music Awards, and Country music fans everywhere may not yet acknowledge all of their history, but Peter La Chapelle thinks they should, as he argues in his essay "Is Country Music Inherently Conservative?" at the History News Network.
[Postscript 18 December 2007: As a few gentle readers missed the gist of "Conservative Country?" in light of expectations created by the Blog Focus, I've added an epigraph and section headings as a roadmap of sorts.]
When I created this post, originally, it carried a readability rating that embedded an image from another site. That image transmuted into something nefarious. Now, this entry from my first month of blogging is the holding cell for other things.
The title, a lyric from Green Day refers here to the warning that my writing is not for the minimally literate. Now, perhaps, it takes on new meaning. Beware what you embed from the sites of others.
I should write books. Print is stable.
24 August 2009
"Fresh Roasted Martian Coffee" (original draft)
I rarely agree with my Representative in Congress. We do not share the same political commitments, nor the same priorities. Even so, she is among my "friends" on Facebook. As a consequence, I saw the update when she spoke at the ribbon cutting for the opening of the North Spokane Corridor, the first drivable leg of the North-South Freeway first proposed in 1946. She (or a staffer) posted a photo on TwitPic, and her Facebook page offered a link.
I asked a question of my Representative through this social networking site, although I'm skeptical that she will respond.
Cathy, what are you doing to make certain the project gets completed while there is still petroleum on the planet, and to support the development of vehicles that run on other fuels so the new freeway connecting I-90 to Wandermere will not have been an egregious waste of taxpayer money?
IMHO, the ensuing conversation with other "friends" of Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers was interesting, so I'm pasting it here with a few tiny edits to accommodate formatting differences between Facebook and Blogger.
I was not there but I hope you reminded the folks that , President Obama's mandated health care reform, He will make it work. . Seniors Citizens at 68 years of age will be mandated to CHECK OUT OF MEDICARE to reduce the growth in cost of END-OF-LIFE HEALTH CARE SPENDING. If you are still around at age 70 you will be mandated to CHECK OUT OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM, that is all the longer that he is guaranteeing you to live.
Garlan: Some liar has scared you to death. Not to worry. There'll still be medicare. The tough part will be living to 65 to be eligible for it if there is no health care reform and costs of insurance & care continue to spiral.
James, do you really think that we will run out of oil? Are you familiar with the new reserves found in Brasil? Are you familiar with the seeps in California (http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/seeps/where.html) or the Gulf of California? Do you really think the project will take a couple of hundred years?
Mike, There is no question that we will run out of oil. It is a finite resource of unknown quantity, but not renewable. We can find new reserves, and develop technologies for extending existing ones, but the earth will not create more during the span of humanity's tenure on the planet. There no question of whether, but there are plenty of questions concerning when.
The world that oil wrought was the twentieth century. That twenty-first will differ in the main is crystal clear--just look into the ball ;-).
The North-South freeway meets the needs of Spokane in the 1970s, and it remains a long way from completion, especially since it is not yet fully funded. Even so, it will relieve congestion and serve usefully if completed in the next decade. I think Rep. Rodgers' views on government create ambiguities in her profession of support both for the freeway, and for the transportation nexus it serves.
Mike, thanks for the links, although it would be nice to see a source more credible than WorldNet Daily for the possibilities that science might need to significantly revise our understanding of how crude oil is formed. As for tapping reserves in outer space, the consequences for prices at the gas pump seem likely to be unpopular.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/051011_oil_origins.html seems more balanced than WorldNet Daily, and it is a science source rather than an opinion oriented "news" source. According to LiveScience, abiogenic petroleum likely requires thousands of years, just as biogenic petroleum.
James, an interesting article. The main thing that I came away from it with is 'we don't know how it's done or how long it takes.' It seems the scenario is not quite as bleak as you originally painted it. BTW, do you have any energy sources that can handle the current requirement without disrupting today's society? If not then I'll have to stick with the current source and I believe that others will reconsider their earlier stand on the green revolution. BTW 2, I looked at the author not the media presenter, in the WND story. I have no affinity for WND and considered the story in terms of the author's quals. BTW 3, [;)] Boy do I wish we could drill on Titan, and maybe vacation on Mars. Enough of my flights of fantasy! Have a good one.
Mike, we seem to view the world, especially the past and future, from substantially different perspectives. I do not see the complete depletion of petroleum as "bleak," nor societal change as disruptive. Society has never been static. To say that the twentieth century was petroleum centered and that the twenty-first likely will not have been so when we are dead and it is history is not to paint a bleak picture of the future, but to imagine possibilities--I'll warrant that drilling on Titan is also imagining possibilities, as is sipping fresh roasted Martian coffee!
My original question to Representative Rodgers might be rephrased thus: Are you pursuing legislation that is not rooted in static notions of twentieth century realities as normative for our future? I hope not, although I fear that such is precisely the case.
