Sam Rivers
1923~2011
1923~2011
two today posted 28 Dec 2011
Oklahoma born
sam rivers & woody guthrie
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
AMEN ~
Woody Guthrie playing for commuters
Woody Guthrie playing for commuters
BOUND FOR GLORY AT LAST
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: December 27, 2011 New York Times
TULSA, Okla. — Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated local detractors. In 1999 a wealthy donor’s objections forced the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City to cancel a planned exhibition on Guthrie organized by the Smithsonian Institution. It wasn’t until 2006, nearly four decades after his death, that the Oklahoma Hall of Fame got around to adding him to its ranks.
Al Aumuller/Woody Guthrie Archives.
Woody Guthrie, around 1943.
Bradly Brown/Woody Guthrie Archives.
A watercolor and a typed lyric sheet in a 1952 notebook, part of a rich trove of personal material that makes up the Guthrie archives.
Shane Brown for The New York Times
Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon, Woody Guthrie's sister.
Shane Brown for The New York Times
Guthrie's hometown, Okemah, Okla., did not honor him until lately: today the town has a statue, above, and an annual festival.
Shane Brown for The New York Times
The festival includes performances at the Crystal theater.
Shane Brown for The New York Times
An old paper company building in Tulsa is being made into a Woody Guthrie archives and study center.
But as places from California to the New York island get ready to celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth, in 2012, Oklahoma is finally ready to welcome him home. The George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce this week that it is buying the Guthrie archives from his children and building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.
“Oklahoma was like his mother,” said his daughter Nora Guthrie, throwing back her tangle of gray curls as she reached out in an embrace. “Now he’s back in his mother’s arms.”
The archive includes the astonishing creative output of Guthrie during his 55 years. There are scores of notebooks and diaries written in his precise handwriting and illustrated with cartoons, watercolors, stickers and clippings; hundreds of letters; 581 artworks; a half-dozen scrapbooks; unpublished short stories, novels and essays; as well as the lyrics to the 3,000 or more songs he scribbled on scraps of paper, gift wrap, napkins, paper bags and place mats. Much of the material has rarely or never been seen in public, including the lyrics to most of the songs. Guthrie could not write musical notation, so the melodies have been lost.
The foundation, which paid $3 million for the archives, is planning a kickoff celebration on March 10, with a conference in conjunction with the University of Tulsa and a concert sponsored by the Grammy Museum featuring his son Arlo Guthrie and other musicians. Although the collection won’t be transferred until 2013, preparations for its arrival are already in motion. Construction workers are clearing out piles of red brick and wire mesh from the loading dock in the northeast end of the old Tulsa Paper Company building, in the Brady District of the city, where the planned Guthrie Center is taking shape. The center is part of an ambitious plan to revitalize the downtown arts community.
Now that the back walls are punched out, workers trucking wheelbarrows of concrete can look across the tracks to the tower built by BOK Financial, which George Kaiser, whose foundation bears his name, presides over as chairman. Forbes magazine ranks Mr. Kaiser as the richest man in Oklahoma and No. 31 on its Forbes 400 list.
Ken Levit, the foundation’s executive director, said he thought of doing something for Guthrie after the Hall of Fame induction. Nowhere in Tulsa, he said, is there even a plaque paying homage to this folk legend, who composed “This Land Is Your Land”; performed with Peter Seeger and Lead Belly; wrote the fictionalized autobiography “Bound for Glory”; and sang at countless strikes and migrant labor protests in the 1930s and ’40s. Mr. Levit began a more than three-year campaign to win the consent of Ms. Guthrie, who had taken custody of the boxes that her mother, Marjorie Guthrie, had stowed away in the basement of her home in Howard Beach, Queens.
Ms. Guthrie, who as one of Guthrie’s youngest children, didn’t really know her father until Huntington’s disease began to rob him of his sanity, movement and speech many years before his death, in 1967, said she only rediscovered the kind of man he once was when she started to page through the boxes about 15 years ago.
“I fell in love through this material with my father,” Ms. Guthrie, 61, a former dancer, said from her office in Mount Kisco, N.Y.
Her older brothers Arlo and Joady were happy to have her take custody of the papers. Of Arlo, she said, “He was filled up with being Woody Guthrie’s son, so he was glad the responsibility moved to me.”
She said the information contained in the archives can clear up misconceptions about her father that she has frequently heard at scholarly conferences and read in articles, including that he didn’t write love songs or sexually provocative lyrics. She has also opened up his notebooks to contemporary musicians like Billy Bragg and Wilco, Jackson Browne, Rob Wasserman, Lou Reed and Tom Morello so that they could compose music to her father’s words.
One of those artists, Jonatha Brooke, is starting off the Guthrie Foundation and Grammy Museum’s yearlong centennial celebrations on Jan. 18 at Lincoln Center with a concert of new songs she wrote for the lyrics.
Woody Guthrie’s music has also had added play time this year as Arlo Guthrie, Mr. Seeger, and other musicians have sung his protest songs at Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York and elsewhere.
While this poor folks’ hero and the richest man in Oklahoma might not seem to have much in common, Mr. Kaiser’s foundation, with its $4 billion endowment, is dedicated to helping Tulsa’s most disadvantaged. “I cried for an hour after meeting George Kaiser,” Ms. Guthrie said. “This puts together what I’ve always dreamed of.”
Brian Hosmer, a history professor at the University of Tulsa who is organizing the March conference — ironically titled “Different Shades of Red” — said Guthrie’s legacy is contested in some quarters.
“There is no doubt there will be some voices in opposition to the way Guthrie is being emphasized — Oklahoma is about the reddest state you can have,” Mr. Hosmer explained, referring to its conservatism. “And when Woody Guthrie was a boy, Oklahoma was also the reddest state because we had more socialists elected to public office than any other.”
Guthrie always said he was influenced by the songs he had heard his mother sing in his hometown, Okemah, about an hour’s drive from Tulsa, with a population of 3,000. His radicalism offended local officials, who scorned Guthrie until an Okemah resident, Sharon Jones, decided to do something about it in the late 1990s. One of her cousins, an avid Guthrie fan, came to visit and was shocked there wasn’t a single mention of her idol. So Ms. Jones, who died in 2009, created the Woody Guthrie Coalition, which organized an annual folk festival, called WoodyFest, around his birthday on July 14, as well as a statue, a mural and a memorial. Sensitive to the area’s Baptist beliefs (including Ms. Jones’s), no alcohol was permitted at the celebration until this year.
Dee Jones, Sharon’s husband, explained that Guthrie “was kind of taboo because some influential people in this town thought Woody Guthrie had communist leanings.” But once the community realized that the 3,000 or so attendees brought in business, everyone got behind it, Mr. Jones said.
A couple of blocks from the memorial statue, visitors can run a finger along the fading letters “W-O-O-D-Y” on a fragment of Main Street’s original sidewalk, where the 16-year-old Guthrie signed his name in wet cement in 1928.
Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon, Woody’s 90-year-old sister, always hosts a pancake breakfast during the four-day music festival. A white-haired, elfin woman with a persistent smile and a sharp wit, Ms. Edgmon remembered how her brother was always making music.
“You’d sit down at the dinner table, and there’d be glasses of water, and he’d pick up a fork and play the glasses all around the table,” she said. “If it made music, he played it.”
Reciting snatches of Guthrie’s poetry and songs, Ms. Edgmon said her brother never cared what people thought of him and did not necessarily hold a particular affection for his birthplace. “He didn’t get attached to anything,” she said. “Everywhere was his home.”
Still, after so many years of Oklahomans’ snubbing her brother’s memory, she said the whole family was thrilled he was being honored: “What we were all shooting for,” she said, “was acknowledgment.”
ny times
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~
chapter 1
Which direction
the train
goes rest
down your
head
This book has to do with trains
and people like us all over the world who hop
onto trains. It doesn't really matter how they do it —
hobo, first class, second class, no class — it's the
boarding of the train that counts, and in this book I
write mainly about one particular train journey we
took as a family — Susan my wife and Carson our son
— and the train after train we boarded and skipped off
as we traveled around the perimeter of the United
States. Don't be fooled when the book begins at our
home in Vermont and as quickly situates westward
into New Mexico and California; forgive my wish of
going by memory, it is how it happens on a train, by
a window, the eyes and mind and whole body slips.
Before you know what has happened, one journey by
train reminds you of another and there will be a few
of our earlier train rides we rambled together when
we were younger — before there was any Carson to
run up and down the train aisle — when elderly
country people we worked for in Vermont that earned
our wages to pay for these simple yet demanding trips:
how the women of the household would ask, "How is
your bride?" when Susan wasn't there — curious and
concerned, yet intrigued by this girl with California
shine: what in the world was she doing living and
working out of a hut along a river in the woods? Hut
living went on for five years. By then we saved enough
to buy our first train tickets west over the northern
route of America, the very same track we returned to
twenty years later on this latest sojourn. But it was the
return of that first trip, where somehow we rode across
Canada and no big deal — let's go out one way and
come back another — and the wilder the province the
better. The first twenty-four hours out of Vancouver
was the greatest train ride we ever experienced, and
probably ever will. It was a Saturday afternoon when
we left the city in a shocking parade of mourners and
celebrators. It turned out the train we were loading
onto would be the final run of the Canadian Pacific
passenger line, and we were just in time to mix it up
with the party-goers in railroad caps, flags and banners
jumping on board for a few miles just to say they rode
the last train. The coach seats were packed, windows
opened, people cheered along the tracks for the first
few miles, and then without notice we left behind the
camera crew, the audience, and only now and then
would we spot a clump of heralders at track side whistling
out the end of an era. The coach seats emptied off
within the hour to be left to a stoic handful of
railroad nuts, hardcore FRN's (Fucking Rail-
road Nuts), nearly all men, in full railroad dress easy
to be mistaken for Casey Jones himself. A few were
too private to approach — stuck in a long train stare
— while one or two were positively effusive with rail-
road memorabilia, overwhelmed by what exactly lay
ahead into the mountains as we clickity-clacked along
the helm of soaked over British Columbia sawmills
and smaller towns into smaller towns as the train
turned northeast. We awoke hours later to a woman's
voice at the rear of the coach talking to a conductor
about the hotel fire back-aways in Kamloops. She
fingered us with her eyes as she spoke obviously ac-
quainted with the conductor and common to riding
this coach entirely empty, so who were we? When we
awoke again the coach was deserted, not a soul
around and daylight was beginning to light the place.
Not a hint of railroad nostalgia nor any of the getup,
this train was now climbing into the pyramidal peaks
of the Selkirk Range. Out either side of the coach
windows the view was outstanding. While I held
Susan's camera as she tidied her seat, into the coach
walked a short roustabout young Canadian, who see-
ing the camera, wondered how was the picture taking
through the windows. Figuring not bad, I said so;
then under his cardinal red hat I watched his eyes
dash around dusting into some mischief. If we wanted to
snap better pictures we might follow him. Where?
This way to the baggage car — he worked there. Well,
why not, it was that much closer to the locomotive,
and through door after door we piled not seeing
another soul as we followed a new friend we later
found out lived in Medicine Hat and was just a little
bit lonely at his job. In the baggage car he was keeper
of sacks of mail, a few crates and luggage, plus a large
German Shepherd in a cage. When we walked into
the car the Shepherd wagged its tail as the young man
tossed his red hat onto a corner table as if he were
back home. Then he showed us how we could take
better pictures with our camera when he shoved the
boxcar door open five feet and pronounced, "Shoot
away." Suddenly we were holding onto nothing, and
of course the camera was useless. Being as young and
frisky as the kid, I asked if we could slide the door
open all the way. With a shrug to this greater
challenge, the kid said, "Sure, just don't fall out." And
that is how we rode the train through Fraser Canyon,
and in and through and out the famous winding tun-
nel of Kicking Horse Pass — where at the front of the
train coming out of the tunnel can be seen the rear
of the train going in — an engineering marvel that
infested the lives and took the lives of Irish,
French-Canadians, Indians and Chinese working for
a dollar a day through four years of rock blasting and
horrendous casualties. Those railroad buffs we rode
out of Vancouver with knew all about this history, it
was the very reason they attended the last train ride,
going on a memory all their own. Some might have
worked on, or heard stories about the crews that laid
a train track through the Selkirks over a pass that
ranged at right angles resulting in a serpentine route
shaped through avalanches, forest fires and tricky ni-
troglycerine explosions. The Chinese hated working
in the cold. The native Indians believed the route
impassable. For awhile the railroad tried to kid
themselves thinking a 4.5 percent grade was of
service, sort of a temporary line that provided for
exhilarating runaway trains and tragic derailments.
The day we hung onto dear life we were traveling at
45 m.p.h on a 2.2 percent grade behind two diesel
engines that pilot generators plowing electricity into
electric motors on the locomotives' axles. That's how
a train runs. But never again in a baggage car with the
door flung wide a mile above sea level crossing the
Continental Divide, dipping into ample pastures of
wildflowers and small lakes, then gaining current the
forty or so miles to Banff along the shallow freshet of
Bow River, clear as raindrops. We had to yank the
door shut a few times on various stops so our friend
in the red hat wouldn't draw trouble, but now one
mile from Banff we all lean in the opening very used to
the last two hours of open yard travel, absolutely flushed
with the outdoors, and at ease with what we could
later hike into or walk about, though it would never
be anything quite like seeing it from that train.
photo © bob arnold
Which direction
the train
goes rest
down your
head
This book has to do with trains
and people like us all over the world who hop
onto trains. It doesn't really matter how they do it —
hobo, first class, second class, no class — it's the
boarding of the train that counts, and in this book I
write mainly about one particular train journey we
took as a family — Susan my wife and Carson our son
— and the train after train we boarded and skipped off
as we traveled around the perimeter of the United
States. Don't be fooled when the book begins at our
home in Vermont and as quickly situates westward
into New Mexico and California; forgive my wish of
going by memory, it is how it happens on a train, by
a window, the eyes and mind and whole body slips.
Before you know what has happened, one journey by
train reminds you of another and there will be a few
of our earlier train rides we rambled together when
we were younger — before there was any Carson to
run up and down the train aisle — when elderly
country people we worked for in Vermont that earned
our wages to pay for these simple yet demanding trips:
how the women of the household would ask, "How is
your bride?" when Susan wasn't there — curious and
concerned, yet intrigued by this girl with California
shine: what in the world was she doing living and
working out of a hut along a river in the woods? Hut
living went on for five years. By then we saved enough
to buy our first train tickets west over the northern
route of America, the very same track we returned to
twenty years later on this latest sojourn. But it was the
return of that first trip, where somehow we rode across
Canada and no big deal — let's go out one way and
come back another — and the wilder the province the
better. The first twenty-four hours out of Vancouver
was the greatest train ride we ever experienced, and
probably ever will. It was a Saturday afternoon when
we left the city in a shocking parade of mourners and
celebrators. It turned out the train we were loading
onto would be the final run of the Canadian Pacific
passenger line, and we were just in time to mix it up
with the party-goers in railroad caps, flags and banners
jumping on board for a few miles just to say they rode
the last train. The coach seats were packed, windows
opened, people cheered along the tracks for the first
few miles, and then without notice we left behind the
camera crew, the audience, and only now and then
would we spot a clump of heralders at track side whistling
out the end of an era. The coach seats emptied off
within the hour to be left to a stoic handful of
railroad nuts, hardcore FRN's (Fucking Rail-
road Nuts), nearly all men, in full railroad dress easy
to be mistaken for Casey Jones himself. A few were
too private to approach — stuck in a long train stare
— while one or two were positively effusive with rail-
road memorabilia, overwhelmed by what exactly lay
ahead into the mountains as we clickity-clacked along
the helm of soaked over British Columbia sawmills
and smaller towns into smaller towns as the train
turned northeast. We awoke hours later to a woman's
voice at the rear of the coach talking to a conductor
about the hotel fire back-aways in Kamloops. She
fingered us with her eyes as she spoke obviously ac-
quainted with the conductor and common to riding
this coach entirely empty, so who were we? When we
awoke again the coach was deserted, not a soul
around and daylight was beginning to light the place.
Not a hint of railroad nostalgia nor any of the getup,
this train was now climbing into the pyramidal peaks
of the Selkirk Range. Out either side of the coach
windows the view was outstanding. While I held
Susan's camera as she tidied her seat, into the coach
walked a short roustabout young Canadian, who see-
ing the camera, wondered how was the picture taking
through the windows. Figuring not bad, I said so;
then under his cardinal red hat I watched his eyes
dash around dusting into some mischief. If we wanted to
snap better pictures we might follow him. Where?
This way to the baggage car — he worked there. Well,
why not, it was that much closer to the locomotive,
and through door after door we piled not seeing
another soul as we followed a new friend we later
found out lived in Medicine Hat and was just a little
bit lonely at his job. In the baggage car he was keeper
of sacks of mail, a few crates and luggage, plus a large
German Shepherd in a cage. When we walked into
the car the Shepherd wagged its tail as the young man
tossed his red hat onto a corner table as if he were
back home. Then he showed us how we could take
better pictures with our camera when he shoved the
boxcar door open five feet and pronounced, "Shoot
away." Suddenly we were holding onto nothing, and
of course the camera was useless. Being as young and
frisky as the kid, I asked if we could slide the door
open all the way. With a shrug to this greater
challenge, the kid said, "Sure, just don't fall out." And
that is how we rode the train through Fraser Canyon,
and in and through and out the famous winding tun-
nel of Kicking Horse Pass — where at the front of the
train coming out of the tunnel can be seen the rear
of the train going in — an engineering marvel that
infested the lives and took the lives of Irish,
French-Canadians, Indians and Chinese working for
a dollar a day through four years of rock blasting and
horrendous casualties. Those railroad buffs we rode
out of Vancouver with knew all about this history, it
was the very reason they attended the last train ride,
going on a memory all their own. Some might have
worked on, or heard stories about the crews that laid
a train track through the Selkirks over a pass that
ranged at right angles resulting in a serpentine route
shaped through avalanches, forest fires and tricky ni-
troglycerine explosions. The Chinese hated working
in the cold. The native Indians believed the route
impassable. For awhile the railroad tried to kid
themselves thinking a 4.5 percent grade was of
service, sort of a temporary line that provided for
exhilarating runaway trains and tragic derailments.
The day we hung onto dear life we were traveling at
45 m.p.h on a 2.2 percent grade behind two diesel
engines that pilot generators plowing electricity into
electric motors on the locomotives' axles. That's how
a train runs. But never again in a baggage car with the
door flung wide a mile above sea level crossing the
Continental Divide, dipping into ample pastures of
wildflowers and small lakes, then gaining current the
forty or so miles to Banff along the shallow freshet of
Bow River, clear as raindrops. We had to yank the
door shut a few times on various stops so our friend
in the red hat wouldn't draw trouble, but now one
mile from Banff we all lean in the opening very used to
the last two hours of open yard travel, absolutely flushed
with the outdoors, and at ease with what we could
later hike into or walk about, though it would never
be anything quite like seeing it from that train.
~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)
(Coyote Books, 1995)
photo © bob arnold
Monday, December 26, 2011
PAY ATTENTION ~
Keeping Students From the Polls
Published: December 26, 2011
Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote.
Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.
Seven states have already passed strict laws requiring a government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote, which many students don’t have, and 27 others are considering such measures. Many of those laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting.
It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.
Republicans usually don’t want to acknowledge that their purpose is to turn away voters, especially when race is involved, so they invented an explanation, claiming that stricter ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. In fact, there is almost no voter fraud in America to prevent.
William O’Brien, the speaker of the New Hampshire State House, told a Tea Party group earlier this year that students are “foolish” and tend to “vote their feelings” because they lack life experience. “Voting as a liberal,” he said, “that’s what kids do.” And that’s why, he said, he supported measures to prohibit students from voting from their college addresses and to end same-day registration. New Hampshire Republicans even tried to pass a bill that would have kept students who previously lived elsewhere from voting in the state; fortunately, the measure failed, as did the others Mr. O’Brien favored.
Many students have taken advantage of Election Day registration laws, which is one reason Maine Republicans passed a law eliminating the practice. Voters restored it last month, but Republican lawmakers there are already trying new ways to restrict voting. The secretary of state said he was investigating students who are registered to vote in the state but pay out-of-state tuition.
Wisconsin once made it easy for students to vote, making it one of the leading states in turnout of younger voters in 2004 and 2008. When Republicans swept into power there last year, they undid all of that, imposing requirements that invalidated the use of virtually all college ID cards in voter registration. Colleges are scrambling to change their cards to add signatures and expiration dates, but it’s not clear whether the state will let them.
Imposing these restrictions to win an election will embitter a generation of students in its first encounter with the machinery of democracy.
~ Editorial by Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor for The New York Times.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
ROCKWELL KENT ~
Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent was a graphic designer, illustrator (Shakespeare, Melville, his own books and a myriad more) painter, explorer, author, humanitarian, social activist who traveled to and lived in many climates of the world. He was also a builder: building homes for himself and his mother (later owned by a Wyeth family) on Monhegan Island, Maine. We traveled there in 1980 to find each one — practical, handsome. His last homestead was in the northern Adirondacks of New York State. When Kent died, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States." This cursory summing-up of an American life has been superseded by richer, more accurate accounts of the scope of the artist's influential life as a painter and writer. Reappraisals of the artist's life and work have been mounted, most recently by the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art in the summer of 2005. We spent one whole day there for that, earning ourselves a towing away of our pickup truck! Kent died in 1971 at age 88.
Rockwell Kent was a graphic designer, illustrator (Shakespeare, Melville, his own books and a myriad more) painter, explorer, author, humanitarian, social activist who traveled to and lived in many climates of the world. He was also a builder: building homes for himself and his mother (later owned by a Wyeth family) on Monhegan Island, Maine. We traveled there in 1980 to find each one — practical, handsome. His last homestead was in the northern Adirondacks of New York State. When Kent died, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States." This cursory summing-up of an American life has been superseded by richer, more accurate accounts of the scope of the artist's influential life as a painter and writer. Reappraisals of the artist's life and work have been mounted, most recently by the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art in the summer of 2005. We spent one whole day there for that, earning ourselves a towing away of our pickup truck! Kent died in 1971 at age 88.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
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