Entry: Del's World Sunday, October 14, 2007



DEL'S WORLD
 
Del loved jazz and folk music. Science fiction. Mixed with booze and narcotics.
 
I have been asked if I've ever thought of turning this blog into a book, but the problem is this is written in the form of a blog- and you have to be able to follow links.
 
This is especially true today.
 
Though racism may have ruled around the country, in New York City this was not the case. Especially in the Village. The Village was an oasis in America. While experimentation and spontaneity frightened most Americans, the Village was built on it. Del heard the word Beat, and he knew the word from his carny days. It meant a person who was beat down, on the downs. But in the Village Beat was a rhythm, was a rebel, was a riff that emerged while no one was watching. It was words following music and it was hip. Hipper than thou.
 
To the masses it was Maynard G. Krebbs on Dobie Gillis. It was Beat NIK as in Sput NIK - there was something vaguely communist about this much freedom.
 
The Village was asking political questions no one dared ask, it was chicks that would live with and have sex with you, long before hippies made it a national pastime. It was nights of poetry, stoned and nodding out to jazz riffs so cool- well, this cool:
 
Miles Davis and John Coltrane
 
Miles Davis cool and collected measuring each note while Coltrane walked, no strolled into uncharted territory. Miles wasn't his shadow as much as his co-conspirator. Carefully measuring each note and laying down a beat so Coltrane could soar. It was rooms full of smoke, drinks and drugs and waking up to find you had just been somewhere without benefit of luggage.
 
It was Thelonius Monk. The tragic junkie. A German film group shot him for a documentary while he was being evicted from his home. He mistakenly thought they would help him with the rent. No chance. Not with these kind of images of America mistreating its artists.
Yet he played until the cops arrested him for heroin found in his pad. No one since has played like him. 
 
Pete Seeger. Del hated the new rock and roll. This hybrid of redneck segregationist county and poor black music. But he dug folk because it dealt with issues and today and with the sound of yesterday. Pete would praise the Soviet Union and hate McCarthy and sing the songs of America's struggle- the struggle of labor.
 
Peter, Paul and Mary. Were they The Monkees of folk? Del actually auditioned to be a member of the group, put together to be a modern take on The Weavers, a famous folk act. Mary was the Village- the hundreds of pretty girls who would argue politics all night and still be creative and knew the past and the present and dreamed of a future when they wouldn't be called an old maid for not getting married before they were 21. Mary and the hundreds of Mary's like her didn't know it, but they were living a dream most American women wouldn't have until years later.
 
They may have been pre-fabricated, but oddly they are one of the few folks acts that actually lasted. They still record and tour!
 
Chet Baker. Saint Chet. There was more pain in one note of Chet's music than in most blues. Hear him sing My Funny Valentine and he pulls your heart out by the root and takes it around the corner. He was as stoned as his audience, but he was just trying to hide the pain.
 
Billie Holiday. She lived three lives in one, and they were all lives you wouldn't want. Heroin may have been the least of her problems. But hear her sing and you heard the experiences of every black woman that had ever lived. They called her Lady Day. But she was the Queen.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
 
Forbidden Planet. Science fiction rocked in the 1950's and no audience was ready for the re-telling of Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST on a different planet but here it was. And it had a sound. The sound of the Theremin, a musical instrument that played air! It was the impossibly beautiful 17 year old Anne Francis and the coolest robot that ever was, Robbie. He could manufacture booze! A film so cool that it's still cool and still holds up.
 
The Day The Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie will live forever as will Gort- the second coolest robot that ever was. The squares thought they were going to see a robot rampage movie, imagine their surprise when they got a message pleading for hope and dignity- in a world that had long ago given up both.
 
Science fiction was everywhere, horror was huge and even b-movies warned us of science and fear out of control.  
 
Even on the radio. Few had TV's but radio held our imagination above all. The audience couldn't see the actors or the story unfold, but they could imagine it. Imagination is the image/nation!
 
Radio had Dimension X and X Minus 1 and the science fiction writers were the best there was. Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and many more who would become household names. Radio was also the familiar, decades of Jack Benny and Amos 'n Andy and Burns and Allen because America liked the familiar.
 
But Del liked the New, and he wanted to find a way to merge the coolness of a Miles solo with the words of a Kerouac- in comedy.
 
The beat, the beat, the beat........
 
   7 comments

Jean
October 14, 2007   08:25 PM PDT
 

What a chapter. The jazz videos are great, and the last link with old time radio shows should keep me bust for weeks!

Chet Baker was great.
Hans
October 14, 2007   08:57 PM PDT
 

Like the chapter on booze (click on my name), this chapter on the Village captures a forgotten part of America.

I've probably seen FORBIDDEN PLANET over 100 times since I was a kid and could watch it 100 more. Love that film.

It seems like Del and you were attracted since childhood to outsiders. Del ran away and joined the carny and had to learn a new slang, you did the same with the hippies.

Maybe that's why you two got along so long without an argument, and were able to work together. He may have seen you as a kindred spirit.

Thanks for the radio show links, too. I've already found loads of shows I want to try!

I don't really know much about jazz, but that Miles and Coltrane clip is great.
Adam
October 14, 2007   09:28 PM PDT
 

I just realized that Billie Holliday song is about lynching! Was that actually played on the radio?
Mike
October 14, 2007   09:40 PM PDT
 
"Strange Fruit": the story of a song
By Peter Daniels (excerpts follow)

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

“Strange Fruit,” the haunting song about lynching in America that was written more than 60 years ago, was first recorded by the famed jazz singer Billie Holiday in 1939. Since then it has been recorded by some three dozen other performers, including black folk singer Josh White, the great jazz artists Abbey Lincoln, Carmen McRae and Nina Simone, pop performers Sting and UB40, operatic soprano Shirley Verrett, and contemporary vocalists Tori Amos and Cassandra Wilson.

The almost iconic status of this unusual song—not in the folk-song tradition, not quite jazz—was reflected in the inclusion of a segment of Holiday’s rendition of it in Ken Burns’ flawed but nonetheless comprehensive “Jazz” history broadcast on public television last year. The song has also been the subject, within the last couple of years, of a new book as well as a film documentary.

“Strange Fruit” has been called the original protest song. It is simple, spare but effective poetry.

Nevertheless, few of the millions who have heard “Strange Fruit” are aware of its genesis and history. It was written in the mid-1930s by a New York City public school teacher, Abel Meeropol, who was at that time a member of the American Communist Party, and who later became better known as the adoptive father of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish couple who were executed in 1953 for the alleged crime of giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

For decades the story has circulated, given credence by Billie Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (co-written by William Dufty), that the song was written specifically for Holiday, or even that she had a hand in writing it herself. Meeropol credited Holiday for her unique and influential version of the song, but he insisted on setting the record straight when Lady Sings the Blues appeared in the 1950s.

The poem was written in the 1930s, after Meeropol saw a gruesome photo of a Southern lynching, and long before he met Holiday. At the time he was teaching at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx. “Strange Fruit” was first printed as “Bitter Fruit” in the January 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, the publication of the Teachers Union, in which the Communist Party then played a dominant role.

Writing under the pen name of Lewis Allan, the names of his two children who were stillborn, Meeropol set the poem to music on his own. For the first two years after it was written, the song was performed in political circles, at meetings, benefits and house parties. In early 1939, however, Billie Holiday was performing in the newly-opened nightclub Café Society in lower Manhattan. Meeropol got the song to Barney Josephson, the owner of the club, and asked if Holiday would sing it. By some accounts, Holiday was at first not particularly impressed by the lyrics and perhaps not fully aware of the meaning of the song. Her rendition, however, made an enormous impression. She began performing it nightly, and then recorded it in April of that year.

Getting the song on record was not easy. Columbia Records, Holiday’s regular label, refused to touch it. It was Commodore Records, a small outfit run by Milton Gabler, which released the song.

“Strange Fruit” was played only rarely on the radio. This was a period in which the segregationist Southern Dixiecrats played a leading role in the Democratic Party as well as the Roosevelt administration. It would take a mass movement to finally dismantle the apartheid system that played a key role in setting the stage for lynchings. There were, by conservative estimates, at least 4,000 lynchings in the half century before 1940, the vast majority in the South, with most of the victims black. There was little outcry over these pogrom-like activities. Socialists and communists were in the forefront of the struggle against lynchings.

Despite this political atmosphere, and the virtual banning of the song from the radio, at one point it was number 16 on the pop charts.

Meeropol himself is best known, aside from “Strange Fruit,” for “The House I Live In,” a complacent hymn to American brotherhood that he wrote with Earl Robinson and that was turned into a short film with Frank Sinatra in 1945. “The House I Live In” also shows the talent of its creators

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/feb2002/frut-f08_prn.shtml
Dag
October 15, 2007   10:48 AM PDT
 

When I first saw this page I thought I could read it in a few minutes but realized after watching the jazz and folk videos I had already invested almost a half hour- and I still haven't got to the sci fi vids or radio shows yet!

Are there other websites or blogs that are like this? I sure haven't found one. My Space and Friendster are filled with mindless chatter and loads of fake friends (one difference between the 60's and now was a 15 year old could articulate more than "I like this band" and was usually politically aware- the blogs I've seen are wastes of bandwidth.) Like a teen girl writing in her diary before she loses her virginity, not too interesting.

That you have taken the blog concept and turned it into this is amazing. Writing a biography with links has to be a first.

Plus I like your insights. There are very few insights into pop culture and subcultures that are meant for mass audiences- this is also important as to why your blog has appeal. From the notes left for you from others I realize many people don't have much contact with what the jazz scene was like, the folk scene, the hippie scene.

So if this blog does nothing else (and I personally think it does a lot more) it provides not just social commentary, but is probably turning on many people to sights, sounds and understandings they haven't had before.

I forwarded some of the chapters to friends who at first thought me following someone's life story on a blog was funny. After they read the chapters, we emailed each other on what you had raised.

They aren't laughing now.

Keep up the great work.



Mike
October 15, 2007   04:38 PM PDT
 

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

If you would like to see a very rare cool jazz film, and you have On Demand on cable, check out Patrick "The Prisoner" McGoohan in ALL NIGHT LONG.

It is a re-telling of OTHELLO in a 1961 jazz club. Because the film features inter-racial romance, it was not released here.

Really great music and a very cool soundtrack. It is up October 2007 ON DEMAND.
Jeremiadist
October 16, 2007   01:38 PM PDT
 
Another great post - I love your mix of dual biography, history, and links. Quest for Slack is one place I return to religiously, and (unlike almost everything else) never feels like a waste of time, and absolutely never leaves me with the junk-food feeling of so much web surfing.

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