Waltzing through the twilight of empire: a reflection on culture, music, history and politics from the 13th Ward in New Orleans.
Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson passed away on Tuesday May 29, 2012 at a hospital in Winston-Salem, NC. He was 89 years old. This simply breaks my Southern heart. There are few people in this world that were both as talented and genuinely humble as Doc.
I remember working as a lighting tech at a show he was performing at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC in the summer of 2008. At one point, Doc was in a picking circle backstage with Riley Vargus and a number of other friends and acquaintances. Every single person on that job site - the grips, the lighting techs, the caterers, everyone - stopped working and just stood in silent awe, struck by the graceful power of his words and chords. They broke the mold when they made this man.
Read about Doc’s music and life here.
Thank you, Doc.
The Internet Defense League
The Internet can always use more heroes and Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, and Fight for the Future have formed the Internet Defense League to make it so.
Public enemy number one: ACTA and CISPA style legislation that seems to sprout like mushrooms these days.
Via Forbes:
Ohanian describes the project, which they plan to officially launch next month, as a “Bat-Signal for the Internet.” Any website owner can sign up on the group’s website to add a bit of code to his or her site–or receive that code by email at the time of a certain campaign–that can be triggered in the case of a political crisis like SOPA, adding an activist call-to-action to all the sites involved, such as a widget or banner asking users to sign petitions, call lawmakers, or boycott companies.
“People who wish to be tapped can see, oh look, the Bat-Signal is up. Time to do something,” says Ohanian. “Whatever website you own, this is a way for you to be notified if something comes up and take some basic actions…If we aggregate everyone that’s doing it, the numbers start exploding.”
Developers are encouraged to join the League. GitHub is here, a Google Group here and Tracker is here.
Love that Alexis Ohanian has jumped into online activism with both feet. It may be an even bigger gift to the Web than Reddit was.
I just joined, and you can too!
Johnny Adams 1969 classic, “In a Moment of Weakness.”
primus gig poster
Happy birthday to country songwriter and Kentucky’s native son, Tom T. Hall. Here he sings his own song “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died,” with guitar played in the style of Jimmy Rodgers. There’s also a nice intro that explains the origins of the song.
photo via: liner notes to “People Take Warning: Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs, 1913-1938” (Tompkins Square)
Railroad Bill’s corpse, laid out for public display after being killed by a posse of private railroad “detectives” and Alabama law enforcement around 1896. The man holding the rifle is Constable J. L. McGowan, who was credited with delivering the fatal shot. This photo was circulated as a souvenir, available for 50 cents, at the time of the killing.
Though his true identity remains contested, it’s generally accepted that “Railroad Bill” was Morris Slater, a convict-lease laborer that was rented from the state of Alabama by a Florida turpentine extractor and had escaped after killing a lawman in 1893. Then, in early 1895, an armed trainhopper fired on a group railroad workers that were attempting to detain him. After hijacking a railroad car, he ran off into the woods, setting off a manhunt that tracked him to Bay Minette, AL, where, when cornered at Bay Minette, the man slew Baldwin County Sheriff James H. Stewart and fled back to Florida. Then, on July 4, 1895, Railroad Bill celebrated his independence by preserving it, when cornered outside of Bluff Springs, FL, he shot and killed Sheriff E. S. McMillan and once again escaped into the woods of North Florida.
Over the following year, as Railroad Bill continued to evade capture, he developed a sort of “Robin Hood” persona for distributing goods stolen off the L&N train line to impoverished Southern African-Americans and undercutting local merchants. Many began to attribute supernatural powers to the fugitive, saying that his elusiveness was do to his ability to shapeshift. Meanwhile, southern African-American communities paid dearly for the exploits of the outlaw. Reports of unfortunate men, who were misidentified as Railroad Bill and murdered by local posses, poured in from Alabama, Texas, Florida, Mississippi and Georgia. Railroad Bill was finally caught in March of the following year, when a gang of bounty hunters gunned him down in a general store in the depot town of Atmore, AL. According to some reports, he was shot as he quietly sat upon a barrel eating cheese and crackers. According to others, he was killed in a heated firefight. After Bill’s death, which occurred in a time period infamous for carnivalesque public lynchings, his body was taken on tour to Pensacola and Montgomery, where spectators paid 25 cents each to view the corpse. His final resting place is unknown.
In the years following Bill’s death, two parallel legacies developed. On one hand, to the southern White community, he was a symbol of the threat that African-Americans would play to the white supremacist political order, should they be left to their own devices. But among Black bluesmen and balladeers, he was an symbol of resistance similar to Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd in later years.
Listen to Etta Baker’s version of “Railroad Bill,” and hear more songs and stories from America’s great steel highways, on this week’s American Routes.
I think it is particularly interesting that Southern Black communities began attributing traits of Elegua & John the Conqueror (particularly the ability to shape-shift) to Railroad Bill as his reputation grew.
Ralph Stanley & Tom T. Hall are among the Southern songsters that didn’t quite make the cut for this week’s show. Also, we want to wish a happy birthday to Tom, who turned 75 today.
Such a beautiful song.
