EARTH ~

Joe Hill, January 14, 1914 (age 34)

JOE HILLSTROM by WOODY GUTHRIE


On January Tenth Nineteen Fourteen
Two men fixed some masks of red handkerchiefs
Walked into the Temple and South Street Store
Laid Morrison and his son dead on the floor.
Before he died Merlin Morrison
Reached under his counter and pulled his gun
The fellows tried to run back out the door again
Morrison put a bullet in one of the men.
Just three days later you arrested me
At the Eselius home on Seventeenth South Street
Just because I've got a fresh bullet hole
You claim that I killed the Morrisons in their store.
I was courting a woman and had a fight with a man
He fired a pistol that lodged in me
Old Prosecutor Leatherwood can beat out his brains
But I'm not going to tell you this lady's name.
Take away these attorneys you picked for me
My own lawyer now I'm going to be
It's because I'm a union organizer in the copper mines
You've got me on your killing floor to die.
My labor friends sent Judge Hilton and Christensen
To prove I did not kill the Morrisons
But I cannot drag my lady's honor down
I can't tell where I got my gunshot wound.
It was in June you convicted me
You said I was guilty in the worst degree
I don't want your pardon, but an honest trial,
If I can't get a fair trial I will die.
President Wilson wired the Governor Spry
Saying please don't let Joe Hillstrom die
Several thousand letters and telegrams
Piled up on the governor's desk from workers hands.
The governor wired to Wilson, Nothing I can do,
The Pardon Board and Supreme Court, too,
Both did uphold the frame up trial
They all want to see me walk my last long mile.
The death watch is set, it's November Eighteenth,
My comrades are marching up and down the streets
Of all of the cities and the towns around
They can sing Joe Hillstrom never let them down.
The Nineteenth Day of November is here
A frosty old morning with winter in the air
Two telegrams that I got to send
To Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Bill Haywood.
It's a hundred miles to the Wyoming line
Could you arrange to have my body hauled
Past that old state line before you bury me at all
I just don't want to be found dead here in Utah.
Hey, Gurley Flynn, I wrote you a song
To the dove of peace. It's coming along.
I lived like a rebel, like a rebel I die.
Forget me. Organize these copper mines.
They march me now out to the baseball park
Tie me down in a chair, and the Doctor marks my heart
With a little white rag against this black robe
Goodbye Joe Hillstrom you done a pretty good job.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn joined the New York City local 179 of the I. W. W. in 1906 (at age 16) and soon became the foremost woman organizer in the I.W.W.. She subsequently joined the American Communist Party and was serving as an officer until her death in 1964. By Joe Hill's own admission, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the inspiration for his song "The Rebel Girl."

In May 1915, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn visited Joe Hill in jail for one hour; although this remained their only meeting, they corresponded frequently.
Just prior to his execution, Hill sent two telegrams to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:

Composed new song last week, with music, dedicated to the 'Dove of Peace.' It's coming. And now, good-bye, Gurley dear, I have lived like a rebel and I shall die like a rebel.

Dear Friend Gurley:
I have been saying Goodbye so much now that it is becoming monotonous but I just cannot help to send you a few more lines because you have been more to me than a fellow worker. You have been an inspiration and when I composed the Rebel Girl you was right there and helped me all the time. As you furnished the idea I will now that I am gone give you all the credit for that song, and be sure to locate a few more Rebel Girls like yourself, because they are needed and needed badly.... With a warm handshake across the continent and a last fond Goodbye to all I remain

Yours as Ever
Joe Hill


~


William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners, chaired the sessions at the founding convention of the I. W. W. (June 27, 1905) and soon became one of the most colorful and forceful labor leaders in American history. As general secretary, Haywood was instrumental in raising money for Hill's appeal for a new trial and in organizing the protest against Hill's execution.

On Nov 18, 1915, Joe Hill sent the following telegram to Bill Haywood:

Goodbye Bill: I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning -- organize!
It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah.

Joe Hill

Haywood sent the following farewell telegram:

Goodbye Joe: You will live long in the hearts of the working class. Your songs will be sung wherever the workers toil, urging them to organize.

W. D. Haywood

---

Joe Hill's body was transported to Chicago and cremated on Nov 26, 1915. His ashes (in accordance with his Last Will) were placed in envelopes and distributed to I. W. W. locals in every U.S. state but Utah, to South America, Europe, Asia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. On May 1, 1916, the ashes were released to the wind.

(as reprinted in Gibbs M. Smith, Labor Martyr Joe Hill, New York, NY, 1969)

EARTH ~

Roadside SW




photo © bob arnold

BIRTH ~

Joan Didion and Quintana Roo, 1966

CHAPTER 10


She was born in the first hour of the third day of March, 1966, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. We were told that we could adopt her late the afternoon of the same day, March third, when Blake Watson, the obstetrician who delivered her, called the house at Portuguese Bend in which we then lived, forty-some miles down the coast from Santa Monica. I was taking a shower and burst into tears when John came into the bathroom to report what Blake Watson had said. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” is what he had said. “I need to know if you want her.” The baby’s mother, he had said, was from Tucson. She had been staying with relatives in California for the birth of the baby. An hour later we stood outside the window of the nursery at St. John’s looking at an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features. The beads on her wrist spelled out not her name but “N.I.,” for “No Information,” which was the hospital’s response to any questions that might be asked about a baby being placed for adoption. One of the nurses had tied a pink ribbon in the fierce dark hair. “Not that baby,” John would repeat to her again and again in the years that followed, reenacting the nursery scene, the recommended “choice” narrative, the moment when, of all the babies in the nursery, we picked her. “Not that baby . . . that baby. The baby with the ribbon.”

“Do that baby,” she would repeat in return, a gift to us, an endorsement of our wisdom in opting to follow the recommended choice narrative. The choice narrative is no longer universally favored by professionals of child care, but it was in 1966. “Do it again. Do the baby with the ribbon.”

And later: “Do the part about Dr. Watson calling.” Blake Watson was already a folk figure in this recital.

And then: “Tell the part about the shower.”

Even the shower had become part of the recommended choice narrative.

March 3, 1966.

After we left St. John’s that night we stopped in Beverly Hills to tell John’s brother Nick and his wife, Lenny. Lenny offered to meet me at Saks in the morning to buy a layette. She was taking ice from a crystal bucket, making celebratory drinks. Making celebratory drinks was what we did in our family to mark any unusual, or for that matter any usual, occasion. In retrospect we all drank more than we needed to drink but this did not occur to any of us in 1966. Only when I read my fiction, in which someone was always downstairs making a drink and singing “Big Noise blew in from Winnetka,” did I realize how much we all drank and how little thought we gave to it. Lenny added more ice to my glass and took the crystal bucket to the kitchen for a refill. “Saks because if you spend eighty dollars they throw in the bassinet,” she added as she went.

I took the glass and put it down.

I had not considered the need for a bassinet.

I had not considered the need for a layette.

The baby with the fierce dark hair stayed that night and the next two in the nursery at St. John's and at some point during each of those nights I woke in the house at Portuguese Bend to the same chill, hearing the surf break on the rocks below, dreaming that I had forgotten her, left her asleep in a drawer, gone into town for dinner or a movie and made no provision for the infant who could even then be waking alone and hungry in the drawer in Portuguese Bend.

Dreaming in other words that I had failed.

Been given a baby and failed to keep her safe.

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the “blessing” aspect.

We omit the instant of the sudden chill, the “wait-if,” the free fall into certain failure.

What if I fail to take care of this baby?

What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?

And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?





from Blue Nights
Joan Didion
(Knopf 2011)

REPUBLIC ~

President Barack Obama showed in his State of the Union speech tonight that he has the ability to be both the greater Democrat and greater Republican. Essentially nixing every Republican in the room, and most were sitting on their hands in childish defiance thinking not applauding sound and often conservative ideas was the proper response. It's amazing to watch what goodness applied by Obama, politicians on the Right just won't give back. It's schoolyard, it's petty, it's just the sort of leadership that will never work and is a sham. Only a gentleman like Obama would hold off reminding the seated group (both parties) they are the lowest of the low for public approval in our nation's history. Many of them should be yanked out of office as a bad warped board, bent nail, tapped out screw. With his dual carriage as a speaker in Democrat & Republican flair, President Obama emptied the room of dead souls and pretty much exposed what is running against him in the 2012 election: snake oil salesmen, fat cats, loud mouths, old fear and staged ideas. Plus a denial mean as war.




photo: doug mills, ny times

COMMANDMENTS ~

Right about now, you need this:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

EARTH ~

MT. EVEREST

After Mt. Everest, the Bronx

Jinpa Sherpa, Mount Everest guide and mini-mart worker.

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: January 20, 2012

The Particulars

NAME Jinpa Sherpa

AGE 38

WHERE HE’S FROM Khumjung, Nepal

WHAT HE IS Mount Everest climbing guide and gas station attendant

TELLING DETAIL The Buddhist monastery in his home village proudly displays a scalp that, according to local lore, belonged to a yeti that befriended a local monk centuries ago.

JINPA SHERPA is unfailingly cheerful and helpful as he rings up your gas and coffee and lottery ticket at the Gulf station mini-mart on Leggett Avenue in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx.

And if you want to scale Mount Everest, he can help you with that, too.

“They are very different jobs; I realize this,” said Mr. Sherpa, 38, who, as his name implies, belongs to that renowned ethnic group of hearty mountain people from eastern Nepal known for their excellence as guides on Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks.

In the mountains, Mr. Sherpa can spend months trekking over glaciers and negotiating ice falls and treacherous crevasses at nosebleed heights. His duties include scrambling ahead up snowy slopes, lugging heavy packs, setting ropes and tents, and heating hot noodles for climbers.

In the Bronx, he is a Sherpa of a different sort: furnishing fast food and daily necessities to truck drivers, warehouse workers and mechanics who seek sustenance from this base camp in the middle of a gritty industrial area.

Mr. Sherpa tends the dozen dispensers at the coffee island, replenishes the pizza under the heat lamp and straightens the shelves and condiment bins — all with the same dedication and care he employs on the mountain when checking his clients’ oxygen tanks and lifelines.

His mountain climber’s neck scarf bears the Tibetan and Nepali flags, and in his right ear is a small gold earring shaped like an ice climber’s pickax. Then there are his good cheer and compact build, for which the Sherpas are known, and the stocky legs that seem made for climbing.

Mr. Sherpa is one of the mountaineering world’s elite guides. He can carry loads at altitudes upward of 20,000 feet without collapsing from lack of oxygen. He has trekked up Mount Everest a dozen times and has reached the summit five times, putting him in rare company. But between guide jobs in the spring and fall, he often travels to the United States to find temporary work.

“For me, it is a way to learn about Western culture, and also make a little money to send my son to school in Katmandu,” he said. “Some of this is the same stuff I do on the mountain.”

Mr. Sherpa stays with Sherpa friends in Queens, where they gather in restaurants in Jackson Heights and enjoy spicy meals and butter tea. He rides three subway trains each morning to the gas station, where he works weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Yes, he says, it is a long way from the top of the world to the bottom of the employment food chain, as the new guy working for meager wages. Customers and co-workers know nothing of his climbing career. Back in Nepal, Mr. Sherpa said, he earns about $4,000 to take climbers on a two-month trip up Mount Everest. Reaching the summit can bring a $1,000 tip.

Mr. Sherpa brought his climbing equipment to the United States and spent a few weeks ice climbing with friends in Massachusetts, and gave free climbing workshops. On weekends, he does a bit of climbing on the rocky outcroppings in Central Park, he said, standing near the Slurpee machine on Wednesday.

He walked outside near the gas pumps and flipped through photographs on his smartphone of himself at snowy heights. Mr. Sherpa grew up in Khumjung, a village roughly 12,000 feet above sea level and not far from Mount Everest. It is known for its mountain guides and its Buddhist monastery. Mr. Sherpa’s father, Mingming Tsering Sherpa, was a professional guide who also made a living by renting the family’s four yaks as transport. Mr. Sherpa attended a school financed by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation.

Mr. Sherpa began climbing Everest at age 12 with his father, but beginning in his late teens, he took eight years away from climbing to study to be a monk. He returned to climbing, which can be a spiritual pursuit itself, he said.

“When I’m climbing, my mind is very clear and happy — it’s like meditation,” he said. “You have to be focused enough to grab a tiny crack in the rock and trust it with your life, or drive your ax into the hardest spot in the ice.”

Mr. Sherpa, who has a five-year work visa, says that when the mountain finally wears out his legs and back, he will hang up his crampons, put the yaks out to pasture and, he hopes, become a full-time New Yorker. Now, however, he has an expedition booked for March, and the Sherpa of Hunts Point will go back to the Himalayas.

photo : Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

E-mail: character@nytimes.com

mteverest.com

EARTH ~

The holiday tree, balsam, held its needles for three weeks in a cold room of the house (in the kitchen library where we keep it unheated through winter). The next two weeks we set the tree, with lights, out in the backyard, going strong. When the needles finally fall off the tough one, we'll then cut the tree up and burn it for warmth. For now it's a pretty warm light through the night.




photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

The day before the snowstorm that was sure to bury us now for good and begin a real winter, I set off on the woodlot trail with chalk in pocket and left behind some signposts, signatures, and friends.

next day ~ snow!

photo © bob arnold

A Hike Before Snowfall With Chalk In Hand
(cat on the trail behind me and true love)

EARTH ~

Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press

Steve Wright of the Seminole County Fire Department, left, and D. M. Shaw of the State Department of Agriculture assessed the tree remains on Monday.

In Flash of Fire, Florida Loses Old Friend

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Published: January 20, 2012, new york times

LONGWOOD, Fla. — Back, way back, before King Tut was born and Alexander the Great roamed his empire, the Senator sprouted in a swamp here in central Florida, one of thousands of its kind.

The tree standing tall in 2004.

Steven D. Barnes/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

The tree, burning and charred on Monday.

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

The 3,500-year-old cypress, the only one in Big Tree Park to catch fire,
was equipped with a lightning rod to protect it from the elements.

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

In this 1920s image, two men gave an indication of the girth of the Senator,
named after Senator M. O. Overstreet, who donated land for a park in 1927.

Florida State Archives, via Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

So on Monday, when word got out that the huge, 3,500-year-old bald cypress had burned and collapsed, people from the area who thought that nothing — not hurricanes, not loggers, not disease — could fell the Senator, sank into disbelief. In a state known for its sprawl and its zeal for pouring concrete, the Senator stood as a testament to nature and ancient history. It was one of the oldest trees in the country and, at 118 feet, one of the tallest east of the Mississippi.

“There is so little of this old history left,” said Lauren Wyckoff, 28, an environmental scientist and self-described tree hugger, who drove to Big Tree Park from nearby Orlando after work to pay her respects. “It’s not just some tree in your backyard. I mean, it’s 3,500 years old; I just picture everything it saw, everything it has been through.”

“I’m crying,” she said, with a laugh, as her eyes reddened. “When I first came here, I had no idea it would be as amazing as it was. No idea it would be as impactful.”

Investigators for the Division of Forestry are still trying to figure out how the tree burned down early Monday morning. Arson remains a possibility, although it had been initially discounted. Two other possible theories are being considered: the tree was struck by lightning long before Monday (maybe as long as two weeks) and slowly smoldered from the inside, or friction from the wind caused it to combust.

Around town, these last two theories were met with skepticism and a touch of derision. The Senator, which was the only tree in the small park to catch fire, was equipped with a lightning rod. And if the tree had been struck by lightning and smoldered for two weeks, residents said, somebody surely would have seen or smelled it. As for friction, that notion drew nothing but smirks.

“Of course, maybe a plane flew over and dropped an ember into the hole,” Rick Waters, 49, who runs Mel’s Family Diner in Sanford, a couple of miles from the tree’s resting place, said with a chuckle. “I think some moron started it, or threw a cigarette down. It’s sick to think somebody would destroy that.”

The revered tree wasn’t just old; it was huge. At nearly 18 feet in diameter, it was so large it would take a passel of children holding hands to surround it.

Named for Senator M. O. Overstreet, who donated the land to Seminole County to use as a park in 1927, the Senator has long been a landmark for Floridians. It survived the logging epidemic, which claimed many of the giant trees that once stood in the county. (The Senator may have been spared because it was hollow, a condition that occurred as the tree aged.) It endured centuries of nasty hurricanes, including one in 1925 that lopped off 40 feet from the top.

Back then, four decades before Disney World rose from swampland, the towering bald cypress was the star attraction in these parts. Visitors arrived on horse and buggy and then jumped from log to log to get a close-up glimpse of the tree.

“You could see it from pretty much everywhere around here” it was so tall, said Joseph R. Abel, the director of the Leisure Services Department in Seminole County.

Now children are brought here on field trips to gawk skyward and imagine what Florida was like back when it was nothing but forest and swamp and Indians were its only inhabitants. Families have always come to snap photos, and nature-lovers arrived on pilgrimages.

What remains now is a trunk, split in half, and a charred shard of wood that shoots 30 feet into the air. The remnants of the tree lie split, on their sides, black and sooty. Outside the gates of the park sits a little tribute of flowers with a sign reading “Rest in Peace Senator.” The park is closed for now as investigators determine what caused the fire.

But the new Florida had long been a too-quick walk away from the Senator. Traffic whizzes by in front of the park and fast-food joints sit right up the street. And though the tree was revered by some, competition from modern life had dwarfed its appeal a good while back.

There are not many awe-inspiring things left, Ms. Wyckoff said. “It was crazy, insane, you can’t imagine how large it was,” she said.

Yet only 40 feet from the Senator looms an understudy: Lady Liberty, now the park’s tallest cypress. It is 89 feet tall and not nearly as imposing, but in this time of transitory celebrity, its moment has arrived.

EARTH ~

Etta James

(1938 ~ 2012 )

Ah, what a harsh week for R & B — to lose two master acts & lives days apart — Johnny Otis and Etta James, old friends, and that they now bunk bed the obituary file for the New York Times and The Guardian (U.K.) all we can say is let the music roll.

Everyone, including me, loves early Etta James on the Chess label, unbeatable. I'm choosing a song here from one of her last recordings, when she'd been to hell and back and was still creating gems of blues and soul and straight talk like no one else.

"Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12."





Minnesota Fats





quote: ny times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/arts/music/etta-james-singer-dies-at-73.html?hp

VERMONT SPEAK ~

We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy

Unless we can reverse the supreme court's dreadful Citizens United decision, US politics will become a plutocrats' plaything

• 
  Bernie Sanders

David Koch and Charles G Koch: the US supreme court's Citizens United decision has enabled the industrialists to fund conservative groups to the tune of $200m already in this electoral cycle. Photograph: Getty

The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.

Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.

What's next … a corporate right to vote?

Don't laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America's next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.

The US Constitution has served us very well, but when the supreme court says, for purposes of the first amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger.

I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem. But something more needs to be done – something more fundamental and indisputable, something that cannot be turned on its head by a rightwing supreme court.

That is why I have introduced a resolution in the Senate (introduced by Representative Ted Deutch in the House) calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that says simply and straightforwardly what everyone – except five members of the United States supreme court – understands: corporations are not people with constitutional rights equal to flesh-and-blood human beings. Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions – the law of the land for the last century – or dump unlimited sums of money into our elections. And Congress and states have broad power to regulate all election spending.

I did not introduce this lightly. In fact, I have never sought to amend the Constitution before. The US Constitution is an extraordinary document that, in my view, should not be amended often. In light of the supreme court's Citizens United decision, however, I see no alternative. The ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy. It has further tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.

At a time when corporations have more than $2tn in cash in their bank accounts, make record-breaking profits and swarm Washington with their lobbyists 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the highest court in the land to suggest that there is just not enough corporate "speech" in our system defies the bounds of reason and sanity. The ruling already has led to plans, for example, by industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch to steer more than $200m – potentially much more – to conservative groups ahead of election day 2012. Karl Rove has similar designs.

Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?

I believe that the Citizens United decision will go down as one of the worst in our country's history – and one that demands an amendment to our Constitution in order to restore sovereign power to the people, as our nation's founders intended.

If we do not reverse it and the culture of corporate dominance over our elections that it has exacerbated, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests have on our campaigns and our democracy.

Bernie Sanders

guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012

EARTH ~

The great Johnny Otis holding his son, the equally great, Shuggie

“Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “The music isn’t just the notes, it’s the culture — the way Grandma cooked, the way Grandpa told stories, the way the kids walked and talked.”

~ Johnny Otis (1921-2012)

Johnny Otis, 'Godfather of Rhythm and Blues', Dies at 90

Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, songwriter, impresario, disc jockey and talent scout often called “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died on Tuesday at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Terry Gould.

Leading a band in the late 1940s that combined the high musical standards of big-band jazz with the raw urgency of gospel music and the blues, Mr. Otis played a key role in creating a new sound for a new audience of young urban blacks, a sound that within a few years would form the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.

With his uncanny ear for talent, he helped steer a long list of performers to stardom, among them Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Esther Phillips and Big Mama Thornton — whose hit recording of “Hound Dog,” made in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley’s, was produced by Mr. Otis and featured him on drums.

Ms. James spoke for many of her fellow performers when, at Mr. Otis’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, she referred to him as her “guru.” (He received similar honors from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and the Blues Foundation.)

Mr. Otis’s contributions were not limited to music. He was also a political activist, a preacher, an artist, an author and even, late in life, an organic farmer. But music was always his first love, and it was in music that he left his most lasting mark.

Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, a fact that as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and considered himself, he said, “black by persuasion.”

“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”

As a musician — he played piano and vibraphone in addition to drums — Mr. Otis can be heard on Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love,” Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” and other seminal rhythm-and-blues records, as well as jazz records by Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet. As a bandleader and occasional vocalist, he had a string of rhythm-and-blues hits in the early 1950s and a Top 10 pop hit in 1958 with his composition “Willie and the Hand Jive,” later covered by Eric Clapton and others. His many other compositions included “Every Beat of My Heart,” a Top 10 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1961.

As a disc jockey (he was on the radio from the 1950s into the 21st century and also had his own Los Angeles television show from 1954 to 1961), he helped bring black vernacular music into the American mainstream.

Johnny Otis was born John Alexander Veliotes on Dec. 28, 1921, in Vallejo, Calif., the son of Greek immigrants who ran a grocery,. He grew up in a predominantly black area of Berkeley.

Mr. Otis began his career as a drummer in 1939. In 1945 he formed a 16-piece band and recorded his first hit, “Harlem Nocturne.”

As big bands fell out of fashion, Mr. Otis stripped the ensemble down to just a few horns and a rhythm section and stepped to the forefront of the emerging rhythm-and-blues scene. In 1948 he and a partner opened an R&B nightclub, the Barrelhouse, in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Otis had 15 singles on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues Top 40, including “Double Crossing Blues,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks. On the strength of that success, he crisscrossed the country with his California Rhythm and Blues Caravan, featuring singers like Esther Phillips, billed as Little Esther — whom he had discovered at a talent contest at his nightclub — and Hank Ballard, who a decade later would record the original version of “The Twist,” the song that ushered in a national dance craze.

Around this same time Mr. Otis became a D.J. on the Los Angeles radio station KFOX. He was an immediate success, and soon had his own local television show as well. Beginning in the 1970s he was heard on Pacifica radio stations in California, where his weekly show remained until 2005.

Hundreds of Mr. Otis’s radio and television shows are archived at Indiana University. In addition, he is the subject of a coming documentary film, “Every Beat of My Heart: The Johnny Otis Story,” directed by Bruce Schmiechen, and a biography, “Midnight at the Barrelhouse,” written by George Lipsitz and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.

While he never stopped making music as long as his health allowed, Mr. Otis focused much of his attention in the 1960s on politics and the civil rights movement. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly and served on the staff of Mervyn M. Dymally, a Democratic assemblyman who later became a United States congressman and California’s first black lieutenant governor. Mr. Otis’s first book, “Listen to the Lambs” (1968), was largely a reflection on the political and social significance of the 1965 Watts riots.

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Otis branched out still further when he was ordained as a minister and opened the nondenominational Landmark Community Church in Los Angeles. While he acknowledged that some people attended just “to see what Reverend Hand Jive was talking about,” he took his position seriously and in his decade as pastor was actively involved in feeding the homeless and other charitable work.

In the early 1990s, he moved to the small northern California agricultural town of Sebastopol and became an organic farmer, a career detour that he said was motivated by his concern for the environment. For several years he made and sold his own brand of organic apple juice. The store he opened to sell the produce that he and his son Nick grew doubled as a nightclub where he and his band performed.

Later that decade Mr. Otis published three more books: “Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue” (1993), a memoir of his musical life; “Colors and Chords” (1995), a collection of his paintings, sculptures, wood carvings and cartoons (his interest in art had begun when he started sketching cartoons on his tour bus in the 1950s for the amusement of his band); and “Red Beans & Rice and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Recipes” (1997), a cookbook.

Mr. Otis continued to record and perform into the 21st century. His bands often included members of his family: his son John Jr., known as Shuggie, is a celebrated guitarist who played with him for many years, and another son, Nick, was his longtime drummer. Two of his grandsons, Lucky and Eric Otis, also played guitar with him. In addition to his sons, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Phyllis Walker; two daughters, Janice and Laura Johnson; nine grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.

Long after he was a force on the rhythm-and-blues charts, Mr. Otis was a familiar presence at blues and even jazz festivals. What people wanted to call his music, he said, was of no concern to him.

“Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “The music isn’t just the notes, it’s the culture — the way Grandma cooked, the way Grandpa told stories, the way the kids walked and talked.”

By IHSAN TAYLOR Published: January 19, 2012, Peter Keepnews contributed reporting, New York Times

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Young family Susan, Bob & Carson dudded up once upon a time for a train ride.

In dome car
w/Carson eyes
riding the train
top winding the
hill curves of
dark woods
surrounding
CUMBERLAND
according
to the mural
lifted above
the town



Chapter 10

Mountain train ride.

A friend today goes to the railyards and keeps time with
the local town train as he did as a kid. Looks like a kid
when he talks about the trains, photographs he has
taken up in the hill-towns of the zoom surprise train
and its engine lamp appearing out of tunnels. He can
tell you if anything is different, a split second is off
schedule, and when looking at a newspaper photo-
graph of a wreck just yesterday at a Florida grade
crossing — a venue of big truck stuck on the tracks,
state police flagging madness, dispatch calls and sud-
denly everything is out of whack because they said the
train wasn't due but here comes trouble around the
bend blaring a horn that you better watch out and
seventy people will be hurt — my friend can point
into the accident stew and pick out one engine,
the truck body dragged three hundred yards, keeled over
baggage car, tilted sleeping coach, upright one-foot-
on-one-foot-off dining car and back at the RR crossing
the rest of the train in civil shape wondering: what in
the hell happened up ahead? My friend clips out
these photographs, fills a scrapbook. He and his wife
enjoy their train journeys in America, but more often
than not they now fly out and train home, or fly to
someplace with a train somewhere in the itinerary.
There are short train trips everywhere. We have taken
a few in Vermont, Massachusetts, New York State and
Colorado; the latter aboard the Durango and
Silverton Narrow-Gauge, when late October snow was
already steep across the mountains. You travel beside
the Animas River trickling as we go as easily this
tourist train, but nicely stuffed together out in the
open cars, bundled for the weather: teenagers, locals,
Europeans gasping and all of us red face weather
feeling magnificent as the train hairpins on cliffs
while negotiating a canyon passage. To think this goes
on every day for about half a year. I wonder if the
mountain blonde hair, braided, young woman who
appeared lesser dressed from one of the indoor coach
seats, to maybe join us wackos out here for a mo-
ment for the startling real view — is she part of the
train? — she wore a long dress that I have no memory
of because of two buttons plucked open at her neck
and an obvious pet iguana hugged her right there.
She told a few of us she had to go back inside because
the iguana was shivering. You just have to believe
how beautiful she was, and how normal this is, at least
at one time, in the mountain west. Going back inside
she missed entirely a forty-five mile journey reeking
of belched smoke and cinders from the time-worn
steam train painted classical black added to a model
of coaches laced in yellow trim over a forest green
splendid as the forests we coil through. You can take
a highway from Durango and meet your party on the
train in Silverton if you want to, or ride inside the
coaches if you like, but if I had a choice I'd want to
be outdoors on this canopy carriage stinking of rail-
road muss brightening your lungs looking down into
the Animas River, shortened from its original "Rio de
Las Animas Perdidas" — A River of Lost Souls — and
christ, aren't we! stepping down feeling rail-weary
onto the dirt streets of Silverton, ever mining town
jagged of agates along the gravel bars, so high up in
San Juan County there isn't one acre of farmland
anywhere to be found. We're so high up that when
Susan tries on a ring found in one of the nests of curio
shops, it won't budge. The amused silversmith
declares her fingers have thickened with the altitude
— buy it and it will fit better in Durango, and it did.
But get away from those shops, they are every-
where you go and how easily just to walk around the
back-skirts of Silverton: dog barks in one alley boarded up
fence high for privacy from neighbors and gawkers
and upwards the blue sky is everywhere. We found
the town library and we think there is a grade school
behind it by the swings and a playground scuffed out,
near a mountain side dropping to its back door with
a Christ figure up there — not too tall, both hands
palm open and appearing to look at anyone who looks
at him — but turning around we see he really looks
down into and blessing over the canyon trail. The
silver miners went into and came back home on this
trail. Today it is a sightseers' promenade over a skinny
old rail bed, but still a canyon. Where eagle flies,
snow blows, water flows, and so can you if you let it.
Now ten years later I talk with my friend about the
narrow gauge, a train he also rode and since four
hundred passengers can fit on the train just imagine
how many may join this thought — because you see,
and don't ask me why — the descent is just as
expressive and commanding as the ascent. A good
train ride always gets you coming and going.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

photo peggy carey, courtesy © susan & bob arnold

EARTH ~

Naomi Shihab Nye

Biography of an Armenian Schoolgirl


I have lived in the room of stone where voices become
bones buried under us long ago. Where you dig
for centuries uncovering the same sweet dust.


My hands dream crescent-shaped cakes,
trapped moons on a narrow veined earth.
All day I am studying my hands—I am giving them new things to hold.


Travel, I say. They become boats.
Go—the bird squirms to detach from the arm.
Across the courtyards, a radio rises up and explodes.


What is the history of Europe to us if we cannot choose our own husbands?
Yesterday my father met with the widower, the man with no hair.
How will I sleep with him, I who have never slept away from my mother?


Once I bought bread from the vendor with the humped back.
I carried it home singing, I thought the days had doors in them
that would swing open in front of me.


Now I copy the alphabets of three languages,
imagining the loops in my Arabic letters are eyes.
What you do when you are tired of what you see,


what happens to the gray body when it is laid in the earth,
these are the subjects which concern me. But they teach algebra.
They pull our hair back and examine our nails.


Every afternoon, predictable passage of sun across a wall.
I would fly out of here. Travel, I say.
I would go so far away my life would be a small thing behind me.


They teach physics, chemistry. I throw my book out the window,
watch the pages scatter like swings.
I stitch the professor's jacket to the back of his chair.


There is something else we were born for.
I almost remember it. While I write, a ghost writes on the same tablet,
achieves a different sum.


~ Naomi Shihab Nye
from Words Under the Words
(Far Corner Books, 1995)

photo: Bob Hate

EARTH ~

between my fingers

three acorns

like buttons

painted

faces

&

their

colored

caps




quite

warm

photo © bob arnold

I painted these years ago and found again, as bright as ever