Blues fans,
The final 2 tracks from the CD have finally been uploaded.
Let me personally recommend track 18, Will Starks’ oral history narration. It’s a great compilation of stories, several dealing with the Hopson farm, located just outside Clarksdale.
Enjoy!
As the dozen or so people who have bought my book can attest, Mr. Perkins endorsed my novel. I’m not sure he ever got to read it, and I so much wanted to read it to him. He lived less than a mile from me in Austin, TX. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. There are degrees of regrets in life, and this is a small one in the grand scheme of things.
I wrote my story thinking of people like Mr. Perkins, and hoping my words expressed the reverence, gratitude, and adoration I have for the community of blues artists and their struggle and journey through the 20th century.
I will remember Mr. Perkins and his friends who reached out and helped a young author. I will endeavor to pay it forward.
Rest comfortably behind that piano wherever enlightenment has taken you, and know that you are loved and missed.
Allen Whitley
My parents both smoked for about 30 years. I call it the golden age of cigarettes – a time when smoking was actually good for you. I used to wander downstairs to get some water or something to eat, and they’d be lounging in their living room puffing away. During really big parties, the smoke would be so thick I’m not sure how they could see each other. But it created a nice ambiance and looked cool, especially with a cocktail. There was no better conversation starter than to light a woman’s cigarette with a good-looking, expensive gold lighter. Years later, it certainly caught us all off guard when I was diagnosed with asthma at 11.
If you’ve ever read the Anti-Cancer by David Servan-Schreiber then you know about mighty mouse. This was a mouse with such a superlative immune system that no matter how lethal the dose of cancer cells given to him by researchers, his furry little body fought off the attack on his system. It’s truly fascinating. And if you ever had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Perkins at a festival, you know he was a smoker. He claimed to have started when he was 9. Even if he wasn’t a chain smoker just think of the number of bars he performed in where he was exposed to second-hand smoke – decades of exposure. There is no doubt that like mighty mouse, Mr. Perkins was able to combat the effects of smoking. His body was strong, resilient.
Don’t we all hope there’s a little Pinetop in all of us.
With heavy hearts, blues lovers around the world certainly feel blue with the news of Pinetop’s passing. There are so many others who will tell a better story, but for most of us it’ll be the faintest brush with his greatness we’ll always treasure. And his presence will certainly be missed as we start the blues festival season, and no where more than the King Biscuit in October.
I hope there are few lamenting about a missed opportunity to see a man who probably passed Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule before he was 15. Was there anyone who played more piano than he did? Maybe the Grey Ghost who also died in Austin. Do all the great blues piano players retire in Austin? Ghost played the Continental Club regularly in the early-1990s and he, too, taught those who listened lessons from a long ago past. But some of those musicians left the music business for long stretches only to be rediscovered later in life. They may have played for themselves, family, house parties, etc. but Mr. Perkins never strayed.
Mr. Perkins was born in 1913 in Belzoni, MS, and he grew up in Honey Island. And if you read my last post, his birth year divides the period of time from Reconstruction to the end of WWII (Slavery by Another Name) almost in half. That means the good Lord dropped him in the middle of Jim Crow, literally, the most difficult period for any group in American history. When he says he “grew up hard,” we can’t even imagine. But it’s not where he ended up but where he came from and the journey he took. There will never be another because that time is gone. His journey was through an era that no longer exists, and it forged him in a unique way. Yes, you head down south and there is racism, as there is in many places, that runs in undercurrents, sometimes more overtly, but the incessant injustices, sharecropping, and enslavement have vanished, as it should be. But they were alive and well when young Mr. Perkins was making his way through a cotton field.
And when he had to decide between a plow and a piano (or guitar), he chose the latter. Aren’t we all glad he did.
Douglas A. Blackmon is on tour promoting Slavery by Another Name. A rich look into some of the horrendous and subversive practices that existed after Reconstruction and which created a neoslavery that lasted for decades. If you’re ready for a new book and looking for nonfiction, this is definitely worth checking out. The PBS documentary is coming soon. And one more thing, it won a Pulitzer Prize.
Hey e-book buyers,
Thank you for your purchase, and for your commitment to Where Southern Cross the Dog we are now offering all but two of the CD tracks that accompany hard copy version of the book online. These are FREE downloads. Please click on the Free Tracks tab and download your favorites. We’re still working hard to get the final two tracks loaded, but there was an issue with WordPress and file size. Don’t worry, though, I have the right man on the job. We’ll try and get them up soon.
Thanks
If you like reading, you’ll like watching these authors talk about their craft.
And check out the FaceBook page and “Like.”
Enjoy.
Providing the link to Warwick Sabin’s writeup in the Oxford American…one of the best blues festivals in the country held in the crucible that spawned the blues.
Quick update…a Kindle version is now available on Amazon and other e-versions are on the way. Amazon is quicker than most.
We’re also working to load the CD tracks onto my web site, all of them, for free…we’ll see what technical challenges will try and dissuade us. Nothing certain yet.
Happy Holidays
When I was living in Thailand in the early ’70s, or sometime in high school, I can’t remember exactly when, my classmates started using a phrase that was new to our slang vernacular but that we hoped was very different from anything our parents spoke. Of course, no one knew its origin, but we immediately understood what it meant by its context, and we seized it as our own.
After we went our separate ways, the years rolled by and the phrase slipped away as we matured and new expressions substituted for the old. That is, until I picked up a copy of Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land, a wonderful book chronicling the black migration north and looking closely at Clarksdale, MS and Chicago. As I read the book as research for my own, I stumbled upon the phrase which I immediately recognized as the one we had used years before. Never knowing where the phrase originated, only what it meant, I was astounded to learn that it had gotten its start, but where else, in a cotton field.
During the cotton harvesting process, before machines took over, workers were provided sacks which they slung over their shoulder and in which they placed the cotton. Now if you’ve ever picked any cotton, even just a bit from a field outside Helena, AR where the owner stopped and chastised you for picking the money off the stalk and you told her how beautiful it was and she softened a bit, then you know that picking just the fibers can be a challenge. If you’re not careful, it’s possible to pull off parts of the dried plant as well.
Now when someone was done and had filled their sack, they’d take it to be weighed and then they were paid based on the weight. However, the cotton was not always inspected thoroughly, so it’s possible the payment was based not only the cotton but on the weight of stems, leaves, etc. that had been placed in the sack.
When these extraneous items were gathered unintentionally, it was obviously an accident, but when it was done purposely, it was called “gettin’ over” because the worker was finishing, getting the picking over with and going to do something else which was presumed to be more fun. The addition of stems and leaves added weight and volume to the sack but didn’t provide any value once the cotton was extracted. But the phrase also had another connotation that the worker was getting away with something so he was “gettin’ over ” on the foreman. When we used this term as youths, we relished in both of the meanings. If a fellow classmate got out of a test or homework for a reason we deemed weak, we’d say he was gettin’ over. This context was no different than the one which spawned the phrase decades before.
As for how it worked its way into our slang, who knows? But there we were blurting it out oblivious to its beginnings.
Once again African-American culture has produced a phrase, timeless in its application, relevant even today.
