Here’s an early summer round up from Labor South that includes an account of Memphis-born writer Steve
Stern’s recent visit to Burkes Book Store in Memphis, a glance at anti-union
secrecy in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the South’s Medicaid gap, and finally one
more look back at the late great B.B. King.
(Author Steve Stern reading from his new book, The Pinch, at Burkes Book Store in Memphis)
Finding an “East
European Enclave” in Memphis, Tennessee
Steve Stern, author of The
Book of Mischief (reviewed in Labor
South back in May 2013) and other novels and stories about Jewish life in
Memphis, the Catskills, the Lower East Side in New York, and Europe, stopped by
for a reading and signing of his new book, The
Pinch, at Burkes Book Store in Memphis last week. An overflow crowd
welcomed him, so many fans that the store ran out of copies of his book.
“I can’t believe people are so nice to me in this town,” the
Memphis native said, recalling how as a young man he “shook the dust off this
town” but then later “washed up again on its shores” to do the basic research
on the city’s old Jewish district, the Pinch. For the past 28 years, Stern, 67, has taught creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
“When I first saw it, it was this moonscape,” he said of the
old district just beyond the levees to the Mississippi River along downtown’s
North Main Street that once was home to succeeding waves of Irish, German and
Jewish immigrants. “I learned it was a self-sustained, very vital, East
European enclave with artisans, fishmongers, tailors. Yiddish was the lingua
franca of the street.
The burgeoning writer stumbled upon literary gold. “I guess
my stories were looking for a home.”
Indeed, Stern’s wonderful tales put him in a league with the
great Jewish writers Isaac Babel (whose stories were an inspiration to him),
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Asch, and Sholom Aleichem. Like those writers,
Stern writes of poor shopkeepers and ragmen who live their lives in a world
constantly threatened by the larger world outside that neither understands nor
tolerates them very well.
The Southern Medicaid
Gap
According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation, the Southern
states of Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina are home to 61 percent of
the approximately four million people denied Medicaid coverage in this country.
“And it’s people in the South who are predominantly left out
because Republicans refuse to have anything to do with President Obama,” the
Texas-based Progressive Populist
recently reported.
Anti-union secrecy in
Chattanooga
As the United Auto Workers continues to try speak on behalf
of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., even without official
collective bargaining status, the rival group set up to counter the UAW’s
presence there operates in relative secrecy.
The American Council of Employees, claiming 381 members
compared to the UAW’s 816 members at the plant, boasts of local roots and
independence of outside groups but refuses to reveal its funding sources,
according to the Associated Press. Plus, “the lawyer who recently filed the
group’s overdue disclosures with the U.S. Department of Labor touts his
expertise in `union avoidance,’” the AP reported recently.
The group’s filing only listed about $15,000 in “other
receipts,” according to Mike Cantrell, president of UAW Local 42.
The UAW’s Local 42 receives its funding entirely from the
union’s national office.
B.B. King sang the
music of “poor people”
OXFORD, Miss. – Blues music may be singing the “No Future
Tomorrow” blues once B.B. King hangs up his guitar for good, Alligator Records
founder Bruce Iglauer warned back in 2004.
(To the right above, the hearse carrying the body of B.B. King makes its way down Beale Street in Memphis en route to his burial site in Indianola, Miss.)
Speaking at a “Blues Today” symposium in Oxford, Iglauer,
whose Chicago-based company recorded Hound Dog Taylor and other greats, called
bluesman B.B. King the music’s standard-bearer. “Sooner or later he’s going to
be forced to retire. He’s an icon. When he does, that blues is history. … I’m
very scared about the future.”
To keep the music alive, Iglauer said, blues musicians must
be “nurtured” to be able to connect with contemporary audiences. “If we don’t
nurture the young musicians, we are talking about a museum.”
King, who died last month at the age of 89, got his nurturing
from folks like his cousin, country blues artist Bukka White, and the music he
heard along Beale Street in Memphis back in the 1940s. “I’m a self-taught man,”
King told an audience in Oxford during that same blues symposium. “Every time
I’d hear something I’d learn a little more about it, and I’d play it. It’s like
learning a language.”
In an interview I had with the Mississippi-born blues great
that same year, he said he was optimistic about the music’s future. “There is a
young guy, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Keb Mo, Corey Harris. They don’t play what I
play. I don’t play like Bukka did. I wish I could. What I’m trying to say is
that each generation brings about their own musicians.”
King was right.
Compare the clean, soul-rending notes from his guitar Lucille on “Three O’Clock
Blues” to the raw chords you hear on Bukka White’s “Parchman Farm Blues” in the
1940s or Charley Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues” in the 1920s. King’s lineage may be more evident in Blind
Willie Johnson’s 1927 classic “Dark Was The Night”. Johnson’s every emotion-filled
moan is echoed by his bottleneck guitar.
(Blind Willie Johnson)
It’s all blues, just different kinds of blues, different
generations of musicians with something to say to an audience that knew exactly
what the musicians meant.
The nurturing Iglauer called for can be seen today in places
like the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, where young local musicians get
training that allows them to tap into their region’s rich cultural legacy. The upcoming young blues prodigy Christone
“Kingfish” Ingram is a product of that training.
The blues grew out of a South haunted by poverty, isolation,
racial oppression, old-time religion, and intolerant, oligarchical rule. It was
the music of poor people, a kind of rebellion against those crushing forces.
It’s the same with poor people’s music everywhere in the world—flamenco in
Spain, fado in Portugal, tango in Argentina.
It crosses racial and even class lines, however. Muddy
Waters and Howlin’ Wolf liked to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. Bluegrass
and country greats Bill Monroe, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams all learned
from the blues.
To some, the blues lost much of its poignancy when it left
the backwater South and went commercial in Chicago. In the 1930s, Mississippian
Robert Johnson’s blues laments about “hellhound on my trail” and “me and the
devil … walking side by side” were existential cries of anguish. By the 1960s,
Texas guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins once complained, practically every Chicago
blues song was about a woman.
In many ways, B.B. King straddled those different eras of
blues. From learning at the knee of Bukka White to singing duos with Eric
Clapton, he was a part of blues’ evolution from the music that W.C. Handy heard
at the Tutwiler train station back in 1903 to what the Rolling Stones were
singing in the 1960s and beyond. That’s why he was, in Iglauer’s words, “an
ideal spokesman for his music.”
“I think one of the things about the blues is truth,” King
told me in 2004. “It’s truth without a lot of makeup. If we hear Frank Sinatra,
he paints a beautiful picture. He sings about a girl in a beautiful meadow. He
finally tells her he loves her. That makes the picture. In the blues, the guy
doesn’t know all these beautiful lines. The blues singer just says, `Baby, I
love you!’”
That’s a universal language, and people are going to want to
hear those who speak it well for a long time, whether the words are about
hellhounds, lost love, or loneliness and an empty bed at three o’clock in the
morning.
