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Rutherford County Courthouse

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Are you afraid?

It was an era when those protesting for civil rights had moved from nonviolent techniques to more confrontational stances, and the nightly news carried stories and photos of clashes in cities across the country between the police and protesters. The tribal nature of our communities was coming into focus for everyone to see. While we lived on Main Street, our neighborhood was mixed both economically and racially. And here I was, playing pickup basketball on a local court, when a player on the opposing team asked me that question.

He wanted me to acknowledge that I was the only person scuffling around on the asphalt, shooting at hoops with torn nets and battered backboards, who was not African American. The question insinuated that I should feel out of place and uncomfortable and was followed by another: Don’t you feel scared?

Playing on the local courts as a young teenager with whatever group of neighborhood kids came along was just what I did. “No,” I replied. I knew most of these guys, and several were in my classes. Yet somehow the question arose and I was pushed to confront it. While I thought, my opponent blew by me for an easy layup, and my education in both privilege and sports continued.

I’ve thought about that conversation many times since the late 1960s. It came to mind briefly in 2008 when Business Week magazine included my hometown, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as one of the best places in the country to raise children. My initial response to the Business Week article was that if they’d just asked me, I could have told them about Murfreesboro’s attributes a long time ago. But that 2008 response has become more nuanced with reflection and time. And that basketball court conversation has come up again during the current protests, including in Murfreesboro, over racial injustice and the symbols of privilege and white supremacy,

I had a pretty idyllic childhood, and Murfreesboro’s history — which was very real and very present to me as a child — is one reason. It was also a history that challenged me as I grew older, and continues to challenge me today.

I’m challenged by the fact that I could walk four blocks to the town square and visit the 1850s courthouse, which had a plaque affixed to the wall that served as a reminder of the notorious Nathan Bedford Forrest and his 1862 raid on the city, and not give a great deal of thought to what that history meant to my basketball teammates and their families. Yes, Forrest’s brutal military tactics, including war crimes at Fort Pillow, made him an unusually harsh model of the great but flawed Southern leaders who were part of the air I breathed. I preferred to read Douglas Southall Freeman‘s biography of the noble Robert E. Lee and listen to my grandmother and her friends in the United Daughters of the Confederacy talk about the Lost Cause. But Lee and Forrest were all part of the same rebellion working toward the same goals. It wasn’t until I was into my high school years that I began to face facts and shake free of that hagiography.

Confederate Memorial in Murfreesboro, TN

I’m also challenged by the Johnny Reb statue, erected in 1901 next to the courthouse in the first wave of Southern restoration and Jim Crow resistance and known – with no sense of irony – as the “Guardians of Peace” memorial. It was almost invisible to me as a child, such was my privilege and superficial understanding of the messages being sent by this sentinel, gazing to the north, ready to battle our nation’s government and repel the next invasion.

And notwithstanding the light anti-war sentiments in the statue’s official history, if you don’t think those who erected the monument were prepared to fight another invasion as they did in The War of Northern Aggression — the preferred name for the Civil War in many a white Southerner’s heart during my childhood — then you’ve missed the nearby tablet teaching readers about “The Square During Occupation“: a tablet that refers to the American military as an occupying force in Murfreesboro, which was bravely defended by the Confederates.

So how do we deal with the challenge of the proposed removal of Confederate memorials and iconography, especially those that were not erected to honor the dead but that exist to glorify and reinforce white supremacy, put in place a full generation or more after the end of the war?

I have some sympathy with those who worry about the “erasure of history” with the removal of monuments. Some sympathy, but not much in this case.

The history portrayed by those monuments of the Southern restoration period told a false story. As a result, the erased history isn’t what is happening today with the removal of the monuments; instead, the erased history is what happened more than 150 years ago, beginning shortly after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The whole Lost Cause narrative was to change the story from the South’s defense of slavery — of owning other human beings and treating them as property — to one that puts forward the Southern cause as noble, in defense of states rights, and with leadership that stood as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry. Those noble southerners, so the changed and false story goes, were defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South’s superior military skill and courage. Defenders of keeping the Confederate monuments today often add that they are about “heritage, not hate.”

But that easy slogan is just not true. The groups that erected the monuments and the Southern historians who wrote during this period simply erased the history of slavery from the record books. They erased the story of hate. If you look at the words of those who led the secession movement, it is clear that it was all about slavery. Don’t trust me, read what they said:

  • South Carolina’s Declaration of secession concluded with an invitation to form “a Confederacy of Slaveholding States.”  
  • Mississippi, not to be outdone, said in their declaration that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. 
  • And, of course, the Constitution of the Confederacy — which was ratified by Tennessee and the other 10 CSA states — explicitly stated that “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, made one of the most explicit ties between slavery and secession when he told a Savannah, Georgia, crowd in 1861 in what’s now known as the “Cornerstone Speech,” that,

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [as those of slavery foes]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

He went further: the battle over slavery “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” Confederate President Jefferson Davis didn’t really appreciate Stephens saying the unspoken reasons out loud, but there it is.

The serious scholarship and records show that the Confederacy was formed to protect slavery, and the leaders knew they were committing treason against the United States. And if the statues that were erected after the Southern restoration of the late 19th century were about something other than white supremacy, then why are there three times as many Confederate monuments as Union monuments in Maryland, which was a Union state and sent three times as many men to fight for the Union as for the Confederacy? Why was there — until recently — a Confederate memorial in Montana, which did not even become a state until 1889 some 24 years after the Civil War ended? These monuments were part of a systematic movement to change the national narrative, erase history, and make the case for white supremacy.

And I’m fascinated by the strange monument career of James Longstreet.

Delaware historian Kevin Brown asks, “Why isn’t Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet chiseled into Stone Mountain, Georgia rather than two Virginians and a Mississippian?”

“Longstreet won the greatest Confederate victory in the west in Georgia at Chickamauga. Longstreet was a Confederate hero, Robert E. Lee’s second-in-command, and actually a Georgian for most of his life. Why does he have so few statues (Longstreet has two statues, one at the site of his home in Gainesville, Georgia and one at the Gettysburg battlefield) when Lee, Jackson, Forrest, etc. have dozens?”

Well, the answer is obvious if you know the story. Longstreet — who was a friend of U.S. Grant and actually attended his wedding — supported civil rights for Blacks after the war and led mixed race forces against the white supremacists at the Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans in 1874. Longstreet sought to heal the wounds of the Civil War through his actions, Professor Brown notes; something that Lee is often given undue credit for, but that Longstreet actually did.  

I think about all this as I reflect on my childhood in Murfreesboro and how I came to face that question when I was suddenly in the minority, and staring — if only for a brief minute — at the situation that was reality for those who weren’t so lucky to be born white, Southern Baptist, and straight in the 1960s South. They were often scared and afraid, for good reason.

As I’ve think about my hometown, I see Johnny Reb on the courthouse square and know that my friends and teammates on the playground understood the message his presence was sending, even if I remained clueless for much too long. And I listen today to those who did understand that message and lived with the consequences.

Scales Funeral Home was three-to-four blocks from our house on Main Street. I went to high school with the children of the owner, Robert “Tee-Niny” Scales, who was also the first African American to be elected to City Council in Murfreesboro. Councilman Scales went on to serve as Vice Mayor, his wife Mary was the first African American faculty member at Middle Tennessee State University, and his daughter Madelyn now fills the Vice Mayor’s seat.

Madelyn Scales Harris tells the story that she was eight years old when a white man spit on her because he didn’t like the color of her skin. The man kept walking as her brothers ran inside to get their dad. Many years later her father — a respected leader of the city’s African American community — told Madelyn that he had to make a choice between going after that man that day or living to see her grow up.

There’s always been a harshness that I just didn’t see.

I wonder how much thought the editors of Business Week gave to what it feels like to raise a child in a community where the seat of government is still guarded by a symbol of the soldiers who fought to keep one class of citizens enslaved. Did they think about how, a century later, white men still felt it was okay to spit on black children? Did they consider the ingrained racial injustices in our communities, systemic injustices that we are now facing following the death of George Floyd and so many others? I look at controversies over Confederate statues and consider how I would respond if I was in the minority, beyond for just an hour or so on a blacktop basketball court.

I’ll admit that it took me too long to come to this conclusion, but like other preservationists, I “support the removal of Confederate monuments from our public spaces when they continue to serve the purposes for which many were built — to glorify, promote, and reinforce white supremacy, overtly or implicitly.”

We more than owe that to our fellow citizens who have walked in the suffocating shadow of Johnny Reb for far too long.

In thinking about a good place to raise a child, Business Week may have gotten it right…but maybe only for part of us. Children need to live in places that foster a sense of community and fairness. Places that foster and support a sense of real conversation. Places where everyone has a chance to earn a living with a fair wage. Places where all are valued and everyone’s story is worthy and worth telling. Places where Black Lives Matter as much as other lives. Places for everybody.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Rutherford County Courthouse in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

A Wizard of Oz trifecta

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What if you held a comeback rally and nobody came? Or, to be more specific, what if you selected a venue that holds 19,200 people for that rally to “kick off” your campaign, and slightly less than 6,200 people — or just under one-third capacity — show up?

A political satirist I enjoy recently said, “You’re like a Wizard of Oz trifecta. If you only had a brain…and a heart…and courage.”

Guess who she was talking about. And yes, it is the same person who held that anemic comeback rally.

There are so many actions from the president and his enablers where one can turn for illustrations to fit that Wizard of Oz description. The botched coronavirus response now resulting in the deaths of more than 120,000 Americans; the unconstitutional reaching out to foreign governments for help in meddling with our elections; the economic recession; and the tone-deaf response to racial injustice and the murder of black men, women, and children at the hands of police officers around the country are just the most recent. To pile on, it has been a busy two weeks with tell-all books and Supreme Court decisions that were made — in part — because of the incompetence of the administration. I don’t have time to go into the president’s call for credit for making Juneteenth “famous.” Which was accomplished, you’ll remember, by the president scheduling the comeback rally to excite his overwhelmingly-white base of supporters at the site of a race massacre on the same date. And don’t get me started on Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts threatening to withhold coronavirus relief funding from any local governments in his state that mandate masks inside government buildings. That’s an American state punishing their own citizens for fighting a pandemic. Punishing them for protecting their own health.

The list is endless and mind-boggling and the news moves too fast to stay current. But let’s narrow it down and see what a few pundits and observers are saying about each piece of that trifecta, beginning with the brain.

Trump calls John Bolton and other former top aides ‘dopes.’ Why did he hire them?

“Bolton joins an unprecedented group of former top-level advisors who have turned on their former boss. The list includes John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff; James N. Mattis, his former Defense secretary; Dan Coats, his former director of national intelligence; and Rex Tillerson, his former secretary of State. Like Bolton, they were quickly labeled losers, liars or worse by the man who once lavishly praised their qualifications and counted them among ‘the very best people.’ The record of retrospective insult raises an obvious question: If they were such incompetent dolts, why did Trump hire them in the first place?”

Noah Bierman, Eli Stokols, Chris Megerian, Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2020

Now, about that heart.*

2020 Time Capsule #17: ‘Empathy and Simple Kindness’

“This past Saturday, former President George W. Bush released a brief video whose subtweeted message was unmistakable. It recognized the suffering of those who had lost family members, or economic prospects, or hope itself; it emphasized the all of us rather than the us and them response to national crisis; and it appealed to the generous rather than the resentful in human nature. In short, it was the kind of message that leaders of any nation have been expected to transmit, as part of their duty, in time of national hardship. And it highlighted by contrast the signals of “empathy and simple kindness” that Donald Trump himself had never managed to convey or even feign.”

James Fallows, The Atlantic, May 4, 2020

And finally, do we have to go anywhere other than the Senate Republicans to find a lack of courage?

Trump’s Bolton problem is nothing compared with Senate Republicans’ woes

“Anyone outside the Trump cult will be unsurprised by Bolton’s allegations. We knew Trump was willing to sell out to any foreign country. He invited foreign interference from the White House driveway. The ones who really will suffer, deservedly so, from Bolton’s account are the Republican senators who refused to hear his testimony and then voted to acquit (for lack of evidence, some said). Bolton’s book confirms how much harder it would have been for them to let Trump off the hook had a longtime conservative known for copious note-taking been called to testify.”

Bolton’s testimony would have highlighted how deep in the tank Republicans were for Trump and how uninterested they were in defending the Constitution….They must have hoped — and likely still do — that by now no one will care, that the passage of time will have dimmed our memories of their political cowardice….I come back time and again to House impeachment manager Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif. ), who brilliantly summed up the stakes in his closing remarks to the Senate:

‘We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.'”

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, June 18, 2020

The perfect Wizard of Oz trifecta says it all. If they only had a brain…and a heart…and courage.

Vote like your life depends on it. Because it does.

More to come…

DJB

* Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times wrote a long article about Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in the recent Supreme Court case protecting LGBTQ people against workplace discrimination. It is another example of an enabler’s lack of heart, and I recommend her perspective.

Image of Emerald City by Beri Garrett from Pixabay. Images of Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow by Clker-Free-Vector-Images and Mallory Muse from Pixabay

Lift Every Voice and Sing

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The songbook that was my introduction to the Black National Anthem almost 30 years ago

In honor of Juneteenth (+ 1), I want to use my Saturday Soundtrack post to celebrate the song known as the “Black National Anthem” — none other than the soul-stirring Lift Every Voice and Sing.

With words by James Weldon Johnson and music by his brother John, Lift Every Voice and Sing was written at the turn of the 20th century, a time when Jim Crow laws were beginning to take hold across the South and Blacks were looking for an identity. In a way that was both gloriously uplifting and starkly realistic, it spoke to the history of the dark journey of African Americans. “It allows us to acknowledge all of the brutalities and inhumanities and dispossession that came with enslavement, that came with Jim Crow, that comes still today with disenfranchisement, police brutality, dispossession of education and resources,” Shana Redmond — author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora — says. “It continues to announce that we see this brighter future, that we believe that something will change.”

Lift ev’ry voice and sing

‘Til earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the list’ning skies

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun

Let us march on ’til victory is won

Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer

I came to Lift Every Voice and Sing later in life. But when I did I had the privilege of learning the song and its history directly from one of the foremost scholars in African American gospel music, the late Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer, at a 1992 music conference in North Carolina. Dr. Boyer was the general editor of 1993’s Lift Every Voice and Sing II: An African American Hymnal for the Episcopal Church. I was fortunate to be a part of a group that he led in his week-long workshop on African American gospel music. It was life-changing.

The version I learned is the one from the hymnal that you hear in churches and concerts, such as seen here from late November 2016 — an especially auspicious time — at Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Stony the road we trod

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died

Yet with a steady beat

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered

Out from the gloomy past

‘Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

There are many popular arrangements of the song and I’ll only highlight a few. An all-star version from 1990 with Melba Moore features Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, The Clark Sisters, Freddie Jackson, Anita Baker, Bobby Brown, Howard Hewett, Take 6, Stephanie Mills, BeBe & CeCe Winans and Jeffrey Osborne.

Beyoncé famously sang the anthem’s first verse in her 2019 Beychella concert.

For an earlier generation, enjoy the great Ray Charles from 1972.

And finally, in a recording uploaded yesterday in the midst of the pandemic and with the heightened focus on racial injustice and the celebration of Juneteenth, Nicole Heaston gathered 65 Black opera singers accompanied by Kevin J. Miller and conducted by Damien Sneed to sing Roland Carter’s arrangement of the Black National Anthem. As Ms Heaston says, “This song expresses the strength and resilience of the Black spirit during this time of turmoil and reflection.” It is one of the most moving versions I’ve ever heard.

God of our weary years

God of our silent tears

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light

Keep us forever in the path, we pray

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee

Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee

Shadowed beneath Thy hand

May we forever stand

True to our God

True to our native land

I’d vote tomorrow to have The Star Spangled Banner replaced as our anthem by This Land Is Your Land along with Lift Every Voice and Sing. Until that glorious day arrives, listen or sing along and remember that Black Lives Matter.

More to come…

DJB

Finding your potential: Aging in a time of turmoil

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I recently dove into two books on aging. It wasn’t because I felt old, aged, infirmed, or any of those descriptors we often use when talking about the elderly. However, I can read a calendar, and I recognize that I can’t claim to be middle age when no one lives to be 130 years old.*

My study began just as the global pandemic struck, with the coronavirus focusing so much of its potency on the vulnerable and those 60 years of age and older. I finished the second book as the nation roiled from both the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression and the injustice that was highlighted in the grotesque and brutal deaths of black men, women, and children at the hands of the police. Whether I liked it or not, I was forced to think about aging in a time of turmoil.

Talk about your inauspicious timing.

In light of current events, I quipped to some friends that these book choices could be interpreted as:

  • a sign of naiveté,
  • a sign of optimism, and/or
  • a sign of resistance to those suggesting that the elderly should be willing to die to boost the stock market.

Whatever your interpretation, I made it through both books with my optimism intact and, frankly, without having given serious thought to silly notions spoken by politicians who, as one satirist noted, have hit the Wizard of Oz trifecta — if they only had a heart, and a brain, and courage.

Let’s be clear: no one signed up for this tumult. Among the incalculable impacts of these times people are going without sufficient food, graduations have been upended, job searches have been dropped, careers have been stalled, babies have been born only to be isolated from their grandparents, relationships have flourished, and relationships have floundered. Most grievously, many have died and more have lost friends and loved ones. Needlessly. We are all trying to navigate the phase of life where we find ourselves at the moment.

These times of turmoil can give us the chance to “change the status quo” about how we see the roles older people play in daily life, even as we consider ways to support new generations and new perspectives. Encouraging younger generations is part of my core beliefs. From climate change to social injustice, from historical scholarship to politics — in just about any field one cares to consider, much of the forward-looking energy and leadership comes from the young and from those who have too long been marginalized when it comes to power. But that doesn’t give those of us who have decided to step down from full-time careers the license to slink away and decline as circumstances change.

It has been my experience that the elders in our lives can be critical to guiding us through both calm and tumult. “Elders are so comforting and healing,” author Krista Tippet notes, but “not everybody becomes an elder; some people just get old.”

She made that observation while speaking with Resmaa Menakem, a therapist and trauma specialist who “activates the wisdom of elders and a very new science, about how all of us carry the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word ‘race’ in our bodies.” In his latest book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Menakem says,

“All adults need to learn how to soothe and anchor themselves rather than expect or demand that others soothe them. And all adults need to heal and grow up.”

How, exactly, do we heal and grow up, moving closer to being an elder and resisting the path of becoming grumpy as we just get old? That’s among the questions that brought me to study these two books.

The line “changing the status quo” comes from the introduction to 2020’s Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives by Daniel J. Levitin. In this, his most recent book, Dr. Levitin examines what happens in the brain as we age and what are the keys to aging well. In 400 pages packed full of the latest science, Levitin makes the strong case that aging is not inevitably a period of decline and loss and irrelevance.

A major piece of the research about the changing nature of aging is understanding neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to change itself. Some form of neuroplasticity is with us throughout our life spans, so Levitin makes the case that older adults’ brains “are plastic, capable of great feats of rewiring and adaptation.” He uses the science to show that neuroplasticity does not seem to slow down “nearly as much for older adults who have been making demands on their brains to think differently and rewire for many years.” In a recent PBS interview, Levitin noted, “You can change yourself at any age. That’s the good news. You can look at your life when you’re 75 and say I’m going to do something different and do it.“

Levitin’s work assures us we don’t have to wait to learn how to heal and grow up. All of us can begin right where we are.

The other book in my rite of passage reading was 2002’s Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life by George E. Vaillant, M.D., based on the oldest, most thorough study of aging ever undertaken. Dr. Vaillant’s description of the key findings to emerge from the study include several thoughts that relate to the idea of successful aging in a time of turmoil “It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us,” he notes, “it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age.” “Healing relationships” — as in Menakem’s admonition to heal and grow up — “are facilitated by a capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness, and for taking people inside.”

What did I learn from those who have successfully navigated the next third? To find the power and potential of our lives, we should:

  • Maintain a future orientation that provides the ability to anticipate, plan, and hope. Learn something new every day.
  • Stay engaged with meaningful work.
  • Exercise, but don’t worry about getting a gym membership.
  • Spend time with younger people.
  • Build the capacity for gratitude and forgiveness and focus your perspective around empathy for how others see the world.
  • Get enough sleep.
  • Do things with people, as opposed to doing things to people.

Oh, and as Levitin reminds us at the end of his book, don’t forget to laugh. “Whatever’s going on around you, remember to laugh.”

That list, I would suggest, is not a bad prescription for successful aging in the midst of turmoil.

Live well.

More to come…

DJB

Image by skalekar1992 from Pixabay

*I subscribe to the division of a life into thirds, roughly divisible by 30 years.  Both my grandmothers lived to be close to 90 or beyond, and my father was just a month or two short of 91 when he passed away.  I realize nothing is given, but I’m trying to be intentional about my possibilities.

Sturgill Simpson on my mind

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Sturgill Simpson is the hard-to-classify, but always intriguing singer and songwriter who sounds like Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard (take your choice, as both were great singers); writes about topics not often heard on contemporary country radio; has outspoken progressive politics sure to rub many country music fans the wrong way; and who has a gift for surprise…as you’ll find at the end of this Saturday Soundtrack post. (Bluegrass fans who can’t wait should just jump there first!)

A native of Kentucky, the son of a secretary and a Kentucky State Trooper, Simpson is the first male on his mother’s side of the family to not work in a strip mine or deep mine. Nonetheless, that blue collar, hard working sensibility comes through with every song he writes and every note he sings. He is a Navy veteran who speaks up in his songs and in interviews about the dangers of the military industrial complex. In a famous Facebook Live post outside the 2017 Country Music Association awards show, Simpson said,

“Nobody needs a machine gun. Coming from a guy who owns quite a few guns. Gay people should have the right to be happy and live their life any way they want to, and get married if they want to, without fearing getting drug down the road on a pickup truck. Black people are probably tired of getting shot in the streets, and getting enslaved by the industrial prison complex, and hegemony and racism is alive and well in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you very much.”

Simpson started making a name for himself with his 2014 debut album High Top Mountain which featured from-the-heart country songs — most written by Simpson — such as Railroad of Sin (as in, “On that railroad of sin I was a high balling train”). Here’s a great version with his “big band” at 2016’s Farm Aid:

Simpson’s second album,  Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (with a title that is a takeoff of the old Ray Charles album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music) was where others, besides the music critics and really loyal fans, began to take notice of this new talent. Long White Line — one of the great trucking songs — is from that album and Simpson performs it in this video in historic RCA Studio A in Nashville.

He took his work to the next level with 2016″s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth, which won Best Country Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. It ended with the powerful Call to Arms, with its lyrics sure to inflame the Love-It-Or-Leave-It crowd.

I done Syria, Afganistan, Iraq and Iran

North Korea tell me where does it end

Well the bodies keep piling up with every day

How many more of em they gonna send

Well they send their sons and daughters off to die for some war

To control the heroin

Well son I hope you don’t grow up

Believing that you’ve got to be a puppet to be a man

Simpson tore down the house with his raucous version of Call to Arms on Saturday Night Live in 2017

Another shift in style came with 2019’s Sound & Fury, which was, by Simpson’s own description, a “sleazy, steamy, rock ‘n’ roll record.” He was out touring for this album (which was to include a performance at the Anthem in Washington on May 17-18) before the entire tour was cancelled and Simpson came down with COVID-19.

Which brings us to June 2020, where one can find a video of a live-streamed one-hour Simpson concert held on Friday, June 5th, at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium — the mother church of country music — with an all-star bluegrass band.

And I’m here to say it is wonderful!

Simpson recruited some of the best stars and session players of bluegrass in Nashville and has been recording an album with them over the past couple of weeks. As a “reward” for his fans hitting a $200,000 fundraising goal he’d set for three charities, they then performed a live concert, to a completely empty Ryman. But Simpson live-streamed the show and you can find the video on YouTube. Most of the songs are from Simpson’s back catalog, played — as he says — in the bluegrass style for which they were originally written. So we get Living the Dream (8:18 mark), Life of Sin (14:17), Long White Line (21:17), Sitting Here Without You (28:17), Railroad of Sin (50:00) plus more, including two great Stanley Brothers songs — Pretty Polly (45:38) and Sharecropper’s Son (54:16).

And the band is made up of some monster players. The incredibly talented Sierra Hull plays some silky smooth mandolin licks and handles a number of the backup vocals. Her bandmates are banjo player Scott Vestal (longtime member of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, the Sam Bush Band, and more); former bass player for the Del McCoury Band Mike Bub; guitarist Mark Howard; long-time Simpson drummer Miles Miller; and top session (and Nashville Bluegrass Band) fiddler Stuart Duncan. They rip through these tunes like the professionals they are, with smooth changes, adventuresome solos, and tasteful backup to Simpson’s unique vocals.

I loved the entire concert, so I encourage you to pull up a chair, crack open a cold one, and listen to some great bluegrass players perform a terrific set of songs that only Sturgill Simpson could have written. I’ll be “sitting here without you / And with you on my mind.”*

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

*From Simpson’s “Here Without You”

Listen, learn, love…and act.

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I Am A Man

This past week the nation reached an important inflection point in our 400-year-old history with race and racism. The horrific murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in Minneapolis after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street, touched off nationwide protests and confrontations with the police and the Trump administration. The photo showing Chauvin on Floyd’s neck while casually looking away, hand in his pocket, hit like a punch in the country’s collective gut.

Pictures can both reflect and change history. The iconic May 1963 photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs and officers with fire hoses attacking peaceful protesters in Birmingham depicted savage assaults that, in civil rights historian Taylor Branch’s words, “struck like lightning in the American mind.” The 1968 photos of sanitation workers, with their “I Am A Man” signs, remind us of why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Memphis on that fateful April day. While I have no idea if it will have the same impact, the video footage and photo of a white police officer’s almost nonchalant pose while snuffing out George Floyd’s life following a complaint about a $20 counterfeit bill shows the casual nature of racism and injustice in a way that is impossible to ignore.

For those who choose not to ignore it, how we respond now and in the future will determine if change takes place.

A number of very smart commentators and activists, people of color who have worked to combat injustice their entire lives, have made various recommendations for those of us of privilege. First, while we should stand up in the moment for an end to racism, white people like me need to listen, listen, and then listen some more. Second, we need to educate ourselves about the systemic nature of racism, the ties to implicit bias, and how we can train ourselves to be anti-racist. But listening and learning, without action, will not change history. And as the first African American presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, counsels, our actions should come as we walk a path of love.

Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer Jonathan Capehart had a simple suggestion on Friday: “Dear white people, please read White Fragility.” Capehart, an African American, notes,

“I have been wild about (Robin) DiAngelo’s book since I read it last year because the associate professor of education at the University of Washington at Seattle is a white woman writing unflinchingly to white people about race. DiAngelo forces white people to see and understand how white supremacy permeates their lives and to recognize how they perpetuate it. More importantly, she shows them what they can do to change themselves and dismantle this pernicious system.”

For a short introduction, take a look at this four-minute video with DiAngelo talking about the paradigm shift necessary to combat racism.

Understanding how the concept of race was developed can be beneficial in understanding the context of this moment. This podcast may be helpful. Here are other works that may also be illuminating.

  • Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt’s powerful book Biased  (2019) looks at the hidden prejudice that affects us all. Her reports on trainings she has held through the years for various police departments are especially illuminating in this moment.
  • The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) by Michelle Alexander is an important and disturbing book about police brutality and mass incarceration that contends that “what has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it.”
  • Michael Eric Dyson, in Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (2019), argues that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remains “so important to this generation, to this time, to this nation, to our people,” because he “spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.”
  • Finally, let me point you to two highly influential works: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015) and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy (2014).

When Ta-Nehisi Coates sees hope in this current moment, as he stated on Friday in an interview with Ezra Klein, then perhaps we really are at an inflection point. And when the District’s Black Lives Matter mural can be seen from space, the social injustice that is all around us on the ground becomes harder and harder to ignore.

More to come…

DJB

“I Am A Man” image of Memphis Sanitation Workers in March 1968 outside Clayborn Temple (photo credit: Ernest C. Withers/Withers Family Trust)

Music for troubled times: The old songs

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I’ve found myself drawn to several musical performances online this week during our troubled times. Most are covers — where musicians perform works by other musicians — and while the date of the originals range across centuries, most of the versions that have touched me were recently recorded. While some are instrumentals, knowing the lyrics to the songs has given me a context to hear the music in new ways. I want to share with you a few of my favorites from this music for troubled times.

Rhiannon Giddens Freedom Highway

“We’re not doing my original songs,” Rhiannon Giddens says in her recent NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, before she and her partner, Francesco Turrisi, launch into an old spiritual, “’cause with these kinds of emotions, the old songs say it best.” The set list for the 20 minute mini-concert, filmed at Turrisi’s home in Ireland in late May, goes back to “the origins” as Giddens says, and includes Black As Crow, Spiritual, and the tune set Carolina Gals / Last Chance. While all are wonderful, the haunting vocals and lyrics of Spiritual (at the 9:16 mark of the video) seems especially meaningful for this time:

“I’m gonna tell God of all my troubles, when I get home / I’m gonna tell God of all my troubles, when I get home / I’m gonna tell God of all my trials, my hardships, my self-denials / I’m gonna tell God of all my troubles, when I get home.

I’m gonna tell God the road was rocky, when I get home / I’m gonna tell God the road was rocky, when I get home / I’m gonna tell God the road was rocky, and my heart it is so heavy / I’m gonna tell God the road was rocky, when I get home.”

The Cranberries 1994 song Zombie is covered in a beautiful piano and cello interpretation by the Brooklyn Duo. Pianist Marnie Laird and her husband, cellist Patrick Laird, have built quite the following on YouTube with classical interpretations of popular songs. With Zombie — inspired by the IRA bombing in Warrington, Cheshire, England on March 20, 1993, where two children were killed — you have a song that Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan wrote as a cry against man’s inhumanity to man. The original video — with its stark depiction of both British soldiers and Irish children — was both effective and controversial. As one commentator wrote, where the original version conveys the anger against the inhumanity, the Brooklyn Duo’s version conveys the sadness in the song.

“Another head hangs lowly / Child is slowly taken / And the violence, caused such silence / Who are we mistaken?

But you see, it’s not me / It’s not my family / In your head, in your head, they are fighting / With their tanks, and their bombs / And their bombs, and their guns

In your head, in your head they are crying / In your head, in your head / Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie / What’s in your head, in your head / Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh”

Aoife and The Jacobsens brings together the beautiful musicianship of Aoife O’Donovan with her husband, the cellist and conductor Eric Jacobsen, and his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, for a cover of Bob Dylan‘s Not Dark Yet. As Dylan said in 1997, “I try to live within that line between despondency and hope,” and this poignant song about the end of life certainly falls in that category. The beautiful and complex instrumental support on violin and cello — including the insertion of Franz Schubert’s An Die Musik (“To Music”) — is a great complement to Aoife’s timeless vocal.

And to come full circle, let’s return to Rhiannon Giddens singing a beautiful version of one of my favorite songs — Wayfaring Stranger — accompanied by the haunting sound of her fretless banjo and the mournful accordion played by Phil Cunningham of Silly Wizard fame. This version is from a 2017 BBC Northern Ireland program also called Wayfaring Stranger. With one of the most expressive and powerful voices in music today, Giddens transports us to a deeper spiritual place, no matter our beliefs.

Stay well.

More to come…

DJB

Image by glynn424 from Pixabay.

Observations from…

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Rev Gini Gerbasi
The Rev. Gini Gerbasi (from @GiniGerbasi)

It is not surprising that two women and two African American men have been the most effective religious leaders speaking truth to power to Donald Trump over the past few days.

My “Observations from” series usually includes a location. But this one doesn’t because, well, I don’t know where we are at this moment in this country. One of our most amoral presidents in history is walking and driving around the nation’s capitol looking for religious props for photo ops while he orders peaceful protesters tear-gassed and forcibly removed from his sight. Protesters who are, by the way, angry over yet another senseless and grotesque murder of a black man by a white police officer. Oh, and at the same time, his Secretary of State is tweeting about Chinese authoritarianism and meeting with Tiananmen Square survivors. Rightwing religious extremists are saying of the president’s use of the sacred symbols of Christendom, “Well, at least he’s pro-life.” Irony is apparently something that the modern-day Republican party doesn’t understand or at least doesn’t do anymore.

So just a few observations…from wherever.

A force to be reckoned with. The Rev. Gini Gerbasi is a long-time friend who was an associate rector at St. John’s Lafayette Square before moving a couple of years ago to become rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Georgetown.* Last evening she wrote a harrowing and moving post on her Facebook page about how she was helping to comfort the peaceful protesters at St. John’s Lafayette Square when she — along with all the other people standing in front of the church — were attacked with tear gas half an hour before the curfew set in and were forced to move a block away so that Trump could walk over from the White House and hold up a Bible in front of the church. Her post ended with her anger clear and her resolve strengthened, when she says she will be “a force to be reckoned with.” I just saw her interview with Jake Tapper on CNN. Gini is a funny, loving, and caring person. She is also a powerful witness. I’m honored to know her and call her my friend.

And our bishops are pretty wonderful as well. Today’s Washington Post story led with the observation that, “The Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, was seething.” As she had every right to be. Federal officers had just used force to clear away peaceful protesters in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church located at Lafayette Square for Trump’s use of her church as a prop.** And her anger, in statements and interviews, is palpable. Likewise, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, spoke out powerfully about how the president used religious props for his partisan and hateful actions. Then today, Washington Roman Catholic Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory issued his own powerful statement about the president’s planned visit to Saint John Paul II National Shrine:

“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree. Saint Pope John Paul II was an ardent defender of the rights and dignity of human beings.  His legacy bears vivid witness to that truth. He certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace.”

She’s had it. Speaking of women speaking truth to power, longtime Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin has been fighting a years-long war against Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Trump’s actions of the past few days led her to throw down the gauntlet and call out the entire set of enablers and urge that they be treated as pariahs after the administration leaves office (hopefully next January.) Rubin makes the righteous case that, “we should not treat former officials as respected reservoirs of historical or political wisdom. No cushy university perches….Private employers should be wary of hiring people of such low character. Yes, serving in an administration so corrupt, racist, dishonest and anti-democratic should deprive one of the benefits ex-officials of other administrations enjoy.”

Who is this person and what have they done with George Will? Long ago I used to read George Will on a regular basis, until his sanctimonious tone finally drove me away. However, I happened upon his column yesterday, and he had — at the end of this paragraph — one of the best lines about today’s Republican party I’ve read in some time.

“In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.” (my emphasis)

That’s enough for now.

More to come…

DJB

*She was not “transferred” Newsweek. Episcopalians don’t transfer their priest. She was “called” to be the rector at St. John’s Georgetown. Get your facts straight.

**In the Episcopal Church, the diocese, headed by a bishop, controls the property of the church and is ultimately responsible for those buildings. St. John’s Lafayette Square — known as the church of presidents — is one of the most historic churches in the city.

UPDATE:  In the second note above, I state (correctly) that the diocese is the owner of the church property and the bishop — as the CEO of the corporation — represents the diocese as the owner. Given our First Amendment rights as Americans (i.e., “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) — the bishop should have access to her church. But, in our new world order, Donald Trump and Bill Barr extended the barriers up to one-quarter of a mile out from the People’s House (otherwise known as the White House) and did not allow Bishop Mariann to have access to her own church building on Wednesday, June 3rd. While that blocked access was removed by Thursday, James Madison is rolling over in his grave as we speak. Also, when protesters pushed back on the bishop and the church as taking the focus away from the demonstrations around racial inequality and policy brutality, she sat down in the street to have an extended conversation with the protesters. Writing on the Episcopal Diocese of Washington’s website, Bishop Mariann said,

“One of our churches has been a focus of attention this week, but you have been clear that our focus is on the issues that have caused so many to engage in peaceful protest. As the Rev. Dr. Gayle Fisher Stuart said so well, ‘I hope the outrage over the continuing abuse and destruction of black lives is as great as the outrage over the president holding a bible in front of a church.”’To that I say, amen. Let’s keep our focus where it belongs.”

When leadership fails

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There’s no escaping the sense that too many things are moving backwards in America across too many fronts. Democracy is under attack. Those who benefit from discord are dividing us over matters, such as the public heath response to a pandemic, that should bring us together. Inequality continues to grow as the wealthiest take advantage of the global health crisis and the serious economic downturn to further enrich themselves. And another senseless death of a black man and the subsequent unrest it produces points to the setbacks that are too often part of our history in the long struggle for racial equality and justice.

Leadership has clearly failed. But we have to hold ourselves accountable for giving in to fear, hatred, and greed in choosing those leaders and in permitting them to divide the country. The famously acerbic newspaperman and political commentator H.L. Mencken wrote of the presidency in 1920, “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

The inner soul of the people in 2020 is troubled.

This is not the first time Americans have faced life-threatening crises while in the midst of a leadership vacuum. We’ve seen this sad story far too often in our past. Two of our worst presidents — James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover — lacked a strong, empathetic core and were paralyzed by events taking place around them. Yet history has also shown the positive impact effective leadership brings during times of upheaval. Resilience, reliance on a moral compass, and boldness are certainly important traits to successfully navigate rough waters.

Steven Levingston, the author of Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights, suggests that when facing violent unrest, presidents also need to be compassionate, flexible and well-informed. In a different era, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the nation following riots in Birmingham. He took to the airwaves to call on his fellow Americans to stop and examine their conscience, saying “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” Effective presidents understand their place in history and their responsibilities to the larger community.

Facing a global pandemic, economic calamity, and brazen acts of racist violence, we find ourselves far from having the leadership the moment requires.

The U.S. used to be a global leader. We were the country that got things done. We were far from perfect, but the world’s leaders and the world’s poor looked to the U.S. at different times for guidance and support. That status — whether fully deserved or not — has ended under Donald Trump. Our bonds with allies are broken and our word is considered worthless. We pull out of the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization at a time when the twin crises of climate change and worldwide pandemic demand a global response. Because of a botched response to COVID-19 by this administration, 100,000-plus Americans are dead in three short months from the coronavirus. We now lead the world in a statistic where you want to be anything but at the top of the charts. Yet through it all, there has been nary of word of consolation from the person who sits in the office where some of our greatest leaders have shown true, humble empathy for others. Instead, today we get constant lies, wild conspiracy theories, and personal attacks on political enemies.

Donald Trump’s stewardship of this country, supported by the wealthiest Americans and the Republicans who emulate and enable him, is reason enough to call out our failed leadership. However, racists and white supremacists, who feel released from social constraints by this administration, are now escalating an already tragic situation, making it even more dangerous to be black and be anything — birdwatcher, jogger, security guard, EMT personnel, you name it — without the threat of being killed. This past week, that awful fact of life in America exploded.

With the events arising in the past few days out of the Amy Cooper / Christian Cooper white privilege confrontation in Central Park and George Floyd’s murder by police officers in Minneapolis, we’ve seen what happens when the people choose a president utterly devoid of a moral compass and when broader leadership fails in our civic and business life. The impact comes through our news accounts, on our social media, in reflections from our parish priests, from national religious leaders, and in conversations with colleagues, family and friends. On a business site, I read one open letter to CEOs where the writer said,

“…a vast majority of employees of color would say that they work with ‘Amy Cooper.’ Amy Cooper has been our team member. Amy Cooper has been our manager. Amy Cooper has been our customer. And the dishearteningly and dangerous reality is that an Amy Cooper is what leads to a George Floyd who could have been my husband, my father, my son, my brother, my uncle — or better yet, my coworker.”

So many writers and commentators have noted that the pandemic, the economic collapse, and the rising tide of racism affects people of color disproportionately. As a result, one writer noted that she and other people of color, “are exhausted. We can’t breathe. We feel physically and psychologically unsafe both in the world and in the workplace.” To pretend not to see this pain, especially during this past week, “is not only problematic — but it is in itself part of the problem.”

All of us are responsible for where we find ourselves today. So what can we do?

We can begin, as Kennedy called us to do some fifty years ago, by taking the time to seriously examine our conscience. It is past time for white people in America to call ourselves to account, as well as those in position of power, for the racism that is our original sin and continues to wreck this country and its ideals. We need that national reckoning before we can move forward.

Some of the best suggestions I’ve read for how we can respond come from a college president who is an African American woman and a highly regarded scholar of English literature with work reaching into neuroscience and the arts. G. Gabrielle Starr called on her community to tenaciously and peacefully stand up for change. We need to turn to each other and care for our community. We need to listen. Some of us may seek out and test policies that might change the way force is used. Others will intervene in cycles of poverty. Others will be called to use art to motivate us, while others will use “the powerful tools of the law at its most just to bring aid to those who need it.”

In the words of Bishop Michael Curry, we need to move forward with love.

And in November we need to vote as if our lives depend on it. Because — no matter where we live and no matter the color of our skin — they do.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Wevans2360  from Pixabay

Saturday Soundtrack: Brooks Williams

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Singer and guitarist Brooks Williams hails from Statesboro, Georgia, the town made famous by country-blues legend Blind Willie McTell. Williams’ backstory provides a bit of context as to why this Cambridge, England resident has a love for country blues — evident throughout his three decades of work — that comes so naturally.

“Ranked in the Top 100 Acoustic Guitarists, he’s a mean finger-picker and a stunning slide guitarist. Plus, ‘he has a beautiful voice,’ says Americana UK, ‘that you just melt into.’ Not one easy to pigeon-hole, Brooks’ music is the love-child of country-blues and soulful Americana.”

Williams has been playing live and releasing albums since 1990. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of his first record, Williams recently recorded an album of 12 of his favorite songs from his back catalogue. Called Work My Claim, the recording features musicians John McCusker (Mark Knopfler), Christine Collister (Richard Thompson), and Aaron Catlow (Sheelanagig) in addition to Williams.

We’ll begin our tour with a soulful and bluesy version of You Don’t Know My Mind from Work My Claim. Williams has a fine guitar riff going on his Atkin guitar to underpin the  vocals, and his fingerpicking comes to the forefront and is showcased beginning around the 1:35 mark of the video.

That strong guitar continues with the funky grove of Snake Oil, co-written with Boo Hewerdine. The guitar vibe fits perfectly with this song about what happens when the carnival comes, and then leaves, town (as in “all you got left is snake oil”). Also from Work My Claim is this lovely cover of Dave Alvin’s King of California with fiddler Aaron Catlow.

Williams 2018 album Lucky Star features the New Orleans-influenced No Easy Way Back. “I love those old Sun and Stax records,” says Williams in his notes to the official video, “and that’s the vibe I was aiming for in the studio. No isolation booths, no overdubs, no headphones, just musicians playing songs together in a way that used to be pretty common, but isn’t anymore. It makes for exciting music.”

Williams is a talented singer and guitarist who has a devoted following. To end this review with something completely different, check out this 2014 slide version of the traditional tune Sitting on Top of the World, played on an electric cigar box guitar!

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

Image: Brooks Williams (photo by Ira Hantz via brookswilliams.com)