After a week when childish yet dangerous tantrums from a group of bullies dominated the news, I couldn’t get the classic Bully of the Town out of my head.

When I walk this levee round and round
Everyday I may be found
When I walk this levee round
I’m looking for that bully of the town

Bully of the Town is an old tune with somewhat unknown origins. It may have been a folk song known along the Mississippi River before it became a pop hit. The Traditional Tune Archive suggests that the song was originally written by Charles E. Trevathan in 1895 for the stage show “The Widow Jones.” It was sung in the production by Trevathan’s girlfriend, May Irwin. Bully of the Town was frequently heard at old-time fiddlers’ contests in the early 20th century and the Skillet Lickers (led by fiddlers Gid Tanner and Clayton McMichen, with Riley Pucket on guitar and vocals, and Fate Norris on banjo) recorded the song in Atlanta in April 1926, one of eight sides for Columbia records. Blues researchers suggest the song was developed from an earlier blues ballad based on a real-life incident in New Orleans.

Whatever the origin, one of my favorite instrumental versions was performed by guitar legend Norman Blake on his Back Home in Sulphur Springs album. The cross-picking is pure Norman.

Blake also joined Nashville guitarist extraordinaire Bryan Sutton on Sutton’s wonderful Not Too Far from the Tree album (which he recorded with his guitar heroes) where they play the tune as a duet.

The incomparable folk guitarist Etta Baker recorded Bully of the Town as a finger-picked instrumental.

A rather raucous version by the Memphis Jug Band gives a flavor of how the tune may have sounded when it was played in the blues and old-time music venues of the American South.

The lyrics have been altered many times depending on the artist, genre, or venue but the many bluegrass groups that recorded the tune through the years usually played it as an instrumental. Allen Shelton (one of Jim & Jesse’s Virginia Boys) included it on his Shelton Special album from the 1970s as a banjo tune.

Levi Lowrey, who handles the vocals and second fiddle in this version with the modern Skillet Lickers, is the great grandson of Gid Tanner, who headed up the original band.

So why all the focus on bullies? Well, Tuesday was, as Joyce Vance wrote,

. . . a day for sad firsts, further evidence of the damage Donald Trump has done and continues to do to our country. Today was the first time a (thankfully former) American president behaved in such an outrageous manner as a defendant in a civil lawsuit that a judge entered a gag order against him. And it was the first time a Speaker of the House was removed by a motion to vacate.

And bullying was very much in evidence everywhere.

Let’s begin with Trump, that life-long insecure bully whose public pronouncements in recent weeks have become increasingly violent and morally depraved. Vance’s description is both accurate and entertaining.

With little fanfare (and none of the warning federal Judge Tanya Chutkan has provided Trump with in the District of Columbia case), New York state Judge Arthur Engoron slapped Donald Trump with a gag order this afternoon. The Judge entered the order after Trump posted on Truth Social about the Judge’s law clerk. The Judge said, “consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff.”

Trump had posted a picture of Judge Engoron’s law clerk standing with New York Senator Chuck Schumer — the type of picture people and politicians take all the time — and salaciously suggested she was his girlfriend. Surprise . . . that is not true.

Judge Engoron, in a no-nonsense fashion, ensured the post was removed. He admonished everyone . . . that “personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I will not tolerate them in any circumstances.” In case that wasn’t clear enough, he put it down where the hogs could get it, saying, “Failure to abide by this order will result in serious sanctions.”

The ouster of former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is another example of the bullying traits of today’s Republican party.

Rep. Matt Gaetz essentially bullied McCarthy from the day he took over as Speaker, pressing buttons to get a rise out of the spineless leader. He finally filed the motion to vacate the chair, which passed with eight Republicans voting with all the Democrats. (Hey, it isn’t the job of the opposition party to protect the Speaker, especially one that has tried to bully them and has lied to them repeatedly over the years.)

In the Democratic caucus meeting, to decide how to vote, Rep. Adam Schiff quoted The Big Lebowski, when telling colleagues he agreed with Matt Gaetz that you couldn’t trust McCarthy. Gaetz “isn’t wrong, he’s just an a**hole,” Schiff said.

And then, as Heather Cox Richardson reported, Representative Patrick McHenry pulled another classless, bullying stunt when one of his first official acts as temporary speaker was to order former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to vacate her private Capitol office, announcing he was having the room rekeyed (and probably going beyond his authority).

What a bunch of rude, angry, bullying, and petty jerks.

Joyce Vance again:

All of that comes to a head in this moment — the effort to destroy versus the effort to sustain and nourish. The outcome is not certain, but to be an American means to have hope in the aspirational, to believe that we can persevere and move past difficulties . . . the burden is for all of us to carry, not just the judges who must hold Trump to account or the Democratic legislators who refused to support a politician who wanted the Speaker’s title so much that he debased the office. All of us have a solemn duty to stay informed, to prepare for the upcoming elections, to get engaged in local and national politics. Democracy hangs, quite literally, in the balance, and we continue to have important work to do.

More to come . . .

DJB

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay