Tell me, tell me, bro’ Bob, about Blind Willie McTell. Tell me.

Tell me the backstory ‘bout that Deep South that I was born into Tell me ‘bout New Orleans and Ole Man River he just keep rollin’ Tell me ‘bout the delta and the swelterin’ heat, them ole cotton fields Tell me ‘bout the delta blues, the crossroads and the cotton bolls Tell me ‘bout the Cajuns who came down from Acadia to Louisiana Tell me ‘bout NewOllins and Missippi. Tell mebout Elvis inMemphis Tell me ‘bout magnolias and moss hangin’ on the cypress trees Tell me ‘bout Louie Armstrong with his trumpet and his sweat Tell me ‘bout Blind Willie in the delta sweat and New’Awlins jazz Tell me ‘bout Big Muddy and Memphis blues and St. Louis. Tell me ‘bout Chicago jazz the blues the brassy tunes good news Tell me how them cotton bolls and ole times not forgotten Tell me ‘bout Little Rock1954, black kids at the schoolhouse door Tell me James Meredith v Ross Barnett at the Ole Miss door. Tell me ‘bout the Freedom Riders and the Edmund Pettis bridge Tell me bout Martin and letter from a Birmingham jail and Tell me ‘bout Dallas and the shot heard round the world Tell me ‘bout the red clay hills of Georgia and Miss’ippi delta and everything in between, strange fruit them delta roots Tell me tell me ‘bout Blind Willie Mctell, blues in delta hell. And that’s the way it was, back in the day. but, but Those days are gone. In dixie land land blacks took their stand and now those days are gone. . . gone. Sho’nuf and Amen! Glass half-Full

Persia and Israel

2560 years ago, King Artaxerxes noticed that his Hebrew servant, Nehemiah, “Why is your face sad?” Nehemiah answered, “Let the king live forever. Why should my face be sad when the city, the place of my fathers’ tombs, lie desolate and its gates have been consumed by fire?” The King: “What would you request?” So Nehemiah prayed to the God of heaven, and he said to the King; “If it please the king, and if your servant has found favor with you, send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ tombs, that I may rebuild it.” King Artaxerxes asked gave his consent for Nehemiah’s journey to Jerusalem. Then Nehemiah said: “If it please the king, let letters be to me for the governors of the provinces beyond the river, that they may allow me to pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he make give me timber to make beams for the gates for the gates of the fortress which is by the temple, for the wall of the city and the house to which I will go.” The Persian king granted Nehemiah’s request. When Nehemiah left Susa, he was accompanied by officers and horsemen of the Persian kingdom. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he had to convince his own Hebrew brethren that he had been sent by the King. But not all were convinced. Nehemiah wrote: “From that day on, half of my servants carried on the work while half of them held spears and shields. In the contentions that followed, the Persian captains were helping to protect the house of Judah. Nehemiah wrote: “From the day that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the 20th year to the 32nd year of King Artaxerxes, neither I nor my kinsmen have taken advantage of the governor’s food allowance. The Bible reveals that Nehemiah played the game of reoccupation, by the rules that had been established for him by the Persian king. That was then. Things are different now. The Hebrews have established their ancient homeland as the national home for Jews who have immigrated from all over the world, even from the holocaust of Nazi Germany. So what about the Persians now? In the last few months, we Americans have all kinds of rumors about supposed enmity between Isreal and Iran. . . especially now with donald trump’s self-declared war against Iran (Persia). All kinds of rumors are buzzing around on the internet. What are to believe? Where’s Walter Cronkite when we need him? What’s going on over there? What’s happening to our armed personnel in the Persian gulf and the surrounding countries? Now we’ve got a clusterfud of reports. Today I saw a video that seemed to portray the firing of an Iranian nuke on Tel Aviv. Say what? So I turn on the radio, searching the airwaves to hear any report about an Iranian nuke hitting Israel! But what to I find? NOTHING, absolutely nothing. As Sweetwater said back in the day. . . “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” And apparently our journalists—the 2026 ones—did not learn the lesson of true Journalism. . . the facts, only the facts! We’re depending on these guys:

. . .fired up in the frenzy of their respective national paranoiae, to NOT let the nukes be fired! That includes the Ayatollah in Persia/Iran, and the magamaniac occupant of the Oval office! As for Netanyahu, he better keep his profile low and his mouth shut, and the the Lord Baruch Hashem Adonai to see to it that Jews are protected. As for the person, who produced a fake youtube video of a so-called Iranian nuke striking Israel . . you should make a public apology for throwing bullsh** into the public consciousness! Glass half-Full

Fall

Many moons ago, Ray Thomas of the Moody Blues spoke a recitation at the end of a song: “When the white eagle of the north is flying overhead, and the browns, reds and golds of autumn lie in the gutter dead. . .”

. . . “remember then, summer birds with wings of fire, come to witness spring’s new hope, born of leaves decaying. As new life will come of death, love will come of living.” The autumn season has another name: Fall. . . and for good reason. . . the leaves fall. . . as they will this year, as they have every year. This has happened 75 times since this writer entered this life on earth. Meditating on fall this year reminds me of the many historical falls that have befallen life and life’s institution throughout the history of this earth. There was the original fall of mankind, when Adam and Even fell out of the Creator’s grace and were expelled from garden of Eden. Since that fateful beginning, there have been multitudes of “falls”. The first one that comes to my mind is the fall of the Roman empire. As far as that goes, there have many falls of empires. . . the fall of Babylon, the fall of the third reich, the fall of America into MAGA (make America go away). . . the fall of the house of Usher, an abandoned structure that fell into ruin . . .

The cold hard truth about this life is that, ultimately, we will all go down to the grave, buried in the earth to decay, just like the leaves that fall in the autumn season. Autumn is the season when the life process seems to fall apart. The leaves fall; the temperatures fall. So autumn inspires a metaphor to commemorate the falling apart of all good things that we had earlier depended on, or appreciated. In human history and society, we notice the fall of people into moral depravity, wherein some people fall into sexual infidelity, wherein their marriage to a faithful mate is destroyed. Then there’s also the fall of societal or governmental leaders who forsake their constitutional or moral duties to uphold the standards. . . the principals and laws. . . to which nature and nature’s God had originally bound them. History reveals the fall of great institutions. The fall of the Roman empire released the seeds of Christianity into European history. Dissention among the factions wrought destructions.

And yet, still yet, we are reminded of so many entities and things that fall apart; yet they are sometimes renewed again in some unforeseen way. I am reminded of that Moody Blues recitation: after the browns, reds and golds lie in the gutter dead. . . “Remember then: summer birds, with wings of fire. . . come to witness springs new hope, born of leaves decaying”. . .

The cycle of life and death went uninterrupted through thousands, millions of years. . .until the Son of Man was crucified, then was laid into the earthen tomb, only to defy death itself by His resurrection. You believe that? Think about it. Why not choose victory of Faith over the death cycle of fallen leaves, fallen seasons, fallen years fallen, lives? Glass half Full

Roots Music

Music back in the 1960’s was a curious choice for us teenagers. We had the radio. . . the Motown sound with Otis Redding, The Four Tops. . . we had the radio buzz with Elvis, then the Beatles and all that followed. . . but I was a folky, learning how to play guitar. My friend Johnny showed me a record album that his brother in the Navy had brought from Europe or somewhere. It was a record by Joan Boaz, with her singing old ballads from times long gone. . . Mary Hamilton, Jackaroe, Henry Martin. The liner notes on the back cover were written by a fellow named Bob Dylan. He had written something about when he first heard Joan’s voice and. . . sitting by railroad tracks. . . In 1969, I finished high school and moved to the south side of Baton Rouge to attend LSU. The folk music genre was expanding widely into protest anthems, including songs like Crosby Stills Nash and Young had sung. . . “four dead in Ohio”. Somewhere in all that 1960’s-’70’s confabulation, Doc was brought into the public domain. Doc and Dylan were singing together at the Newport folk festival.

In the midst of all that counterculture passion and intensity, along came a flash from the past: Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a retro-type album by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. My memory of that album always goes back to hearing the voice of a good ole boy from Deep Gap, North Carolina. . . Doc Watson. Doc was an ole feller with a God-given gift for singin’ and pickin’ the guitar. . . a true folk singer who had had no dreams of fame and fortune when he did sing and flat-pick his acoustic until the cows came, or. . , the rest the listening world heard that deep gap sound comin’ out of them thar hills of the Blue Ridge. As Providence would have it. . . for I had never planned what later happened. . . Pat and I moved to Boone, North Carolina, just a stone’s throw from Deep Gap, where Doc, Merle and Rosalee had lived all their lives. We still live there. . . three grown young’uns later. . . about ten miles from Doc’s old homestead in Deep Gap. Around these parts, Doc is a legend. He used to play in downtown Boone and now there’s a bronze statue of Doc “sittin’ on top of the world”, (as the ole bluegrass tells the tune). As you can see, I took the liberty of visiting Doc on the bench.

Doc was the incarnation of authentic, old time, folk music, the born again entrance of authentic, old time, old school FOLK music. . . the real thing! to accompany the new wave of Baez and Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary the Kingston Trio . . . When I was in living in Asheville in the ’70’s, I met David Holt, a scholarly music historian who also had a great talent for playing the banjo, what the mountain folk call a banjer. David plucked his banjo, the old frailing style, on the Life’s Railway to Heaven track of my Revelation 5:9 album in 1979. Somewhere in time, David visited Doc in Deep Gap and interviewed him. Also somewhere in time. . . must have been in the ‘80’s, I was singing a few songs with my guitar, at the Watauga County fair, when Doc’s wife, Rosalee was listening. At the end of my set, she expressed appreciation for my songs. That was a golden memory, coming from Doc Watson’s wife! Still yet later. . .while attending a meeting of the High Country Writers, I met Patricia Payne, who had fancied Merle, back in the day. But her romantic hopes for Merle had never never been fulfilled. I had talked with her, listened to her story, which she had wanted to publish, but that never happened. She passed away. Soon thereafter, I was summoned to a lawyer’s office in Boone, only to discover that she had bequeathed this desk/ bookshelf to me.

And that’s as close as I ever got to the legend of Doc Watson. We do, however, pass the tiny borough of Deep Gap whenever we drive eastward out of Boone. I always gaze out the car window, trying to catch a glimpse of Doc’s place, the house that Patty Payne had showed me before she passed, the homestead where Doc and Merle used to pick their guitars in the Blue Ridge air, the place where authentic folk music had roots deep in Appalachian soil. That’s my Roots Music story and I’m a’stickin’ to it. King of Soul

Prufrock's Song Reborn

(This post for nerds and eggheads only) Let us go, then, now and then, when online is spread out against the real world, like an image spread against the real world; Let us go, through certain half-forgotten shows; as images glow and bestow their memes. . . what dreams may come and go; we know not what images to stow. In the world-net people come and go, striving to remember Michelangelo, when history was like a painted show, as Mona’s smile What are the memes that grow? what ideas do flow out of this electronic stream? What screen-potato fate has come of us? Why do people drum up such fuss? The clickish fog that rubs its back upon our brightened screens licks its tongue into the corners of our dreams, and lingers upon the pools that stand inside our brains. And indeed there will be time, for the brightened bloat that shines upon our screens, rubbing its back upon the window panes of memory. And indeed there will be time, for the shallowy signal that slides along our stream; there will be time; there will be time to prepare a face to greet the faces that you meet. There will be time to ponder and create and time for all the works and days of Man, that click and drop a meme on your plate; just don’t fall into hate! Time for us and you and me. . . time for a hundred decisions, for a hundred visions and revisions, before the reaper takes you and me. . . and time for yet a hundred indecisions, and a hundred visions and revisions, and yet to come a few decisions. In the internet the people come and go, trying to recall Michelangelo. . .

when labor left a scene behind, to evaluate signs of our times. . . while still we do get old; we shall store our papers rolled . . . and bound upon a shelf, upon an altar of remembrance, when ink-pins scrolled and presses rolled. . . to evaluate the chronicles of time: that is the question; whether ’tis nobler to tolerate the crimes of our times, or by opposing end them! . . . Give me Liberty of give me death! When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to break the sacred bonds that have bound us together, and to take action against a string of abuses and end them: that is the question! We have lingered in the chambers of the web, past symbols cast in red or blue, till Eternal voices wake us and suddenly we end. . . in flames of regret. . . and yet. . . and yet it’s never too late. . . to grasp the the links of Calvary’s gate, and linger there in deep repose, until we see the brightness of eternal glory. . . far from grief, far from this fallen earthly story. Yet still the people come and go, trying to grok what Michelangelo was doing up there on the ceiling. The arts may come; the memes may grow trying to interpret Michelangelo.

King of Soul

Madness

Did madness descend on King George III when the Americans refused to follow his royal madness? Did Mr. Hyde overtake Dr. Jekyll? Did Nixon’s paranoia prompt him to tape his office conversations, to send his “plumbers” to steal documents from a psychiatrist’s office? Did his “dirty tricks” clean up the mess that he had made of his presidency? Uh. . . We the People are having deja vu here. Is a whacko tyrant running the show? Did trump suggest renaming New Mexico as New America. . . renaming Lake Ontario as lake America. . .renaming the Gulf of Mexico the gulf of America? Did trump grab classified documents and hide them in a bathroom in MarLago? Did trump send a mob of delinquent to the US Capitol to steal the election from the American people? Does he know that the rebels lost the civil war? Didn’t he get the memo that those proud boys were fighting a war that had been lost in 1865?

Does trump think we need to conquer the people of Greenland and Denmark? Didn’t he get the memo? Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane,exposed the the emperor’s nakedness?

Is donald covered by our Constitution that limits his powers, assigns war powers to Congress. . . Is trump an American? Has he read our Constitution? Has he pledged allegiance to our flag? Does he believe we are One Nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All? Has he ever read the inscription on our Statue of Liberty, that it reads: “Send me your huddled masses yearning to be free?” Does he know that our Constitution does not say, send me fat cats so that i may fund the american devolution, controlled by the fat cats and the mad dogs and the proud boys and the three percenters and the oath bleepers? Speaking of oaths, does he even remember that he swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States? Does he want to divert American attention to blowing up Iran, then losing the war that he started without any congressional approve. Is donald trump covered by our Rule of Law? He’s a rogue president, and we are seeing his naked lawlessness. He doesn’t even see that the American people are rising up to reject him. Just like we kicked King George III and his oath bleepers and proud boys out of American in 1778, We the People are rising up to expose the emperor-wannabee who has no Constitutional clothes to cover his naked lawlessness. We the People will rise up; we will eject donald from the oval office. We will assure Americans and all the citizens of this world that the joker from maralago we no longer have the oval, and no longer have the nuclear codes! Glass half-Full

Spies

By the time the 20th century rolled around, the wheels of progress were starting to spin out of control in some places. Mechanized warfare made it possible for military campaigns to impose wide damage on people and places on a level unprecedented in history. World War I was raging between the royal houses of Europe when a horde of Marxist Bolsheviks deposed the Russian tsar and imposed a communist regime on a vast empire that stretched from the Baltic sea to the Bering sea. The Russian revolution was an unexpected problem for western capitalist nations to deal with; it happened when powers that be in Europe were not expecting it. British leaders were worried that communist troublemakers would launch a revolution in Britain. They already had their security agencies and military operating at full capacity while trying to stop Kaiser Wilhelm’s mad grab for more European power. The Brits intercepted a letter that had been sent to communists in Britain from a Russian communist, Gregor Zinoviev. That was the beginning of 20th-century communist paranoia in the minds of western European leaders. The Brits extended their espionage northward, beyond the double devilry of Prussian warmongering. When the dust settled after two world wars, imposing the surrender of both Kaiser Wilhelm’s legions and hitler’s third reich holocaustic clusterfuck. . . the British MI6 espionage agency was operating on all cylinders. Allied with the American Central Intelligence Agency, the free nations of the western world could redirect their spying toward the new threat, the international communist conspiracy.That’s when the heat of 20th-century warfare cooled; the hot war became the Cold War. A British intelligence officer, Ian Fleming, began writing his series of spy novels, featuring the escapades of a British spy, James Bond. Casino Royale was published in 1952, the year after this writer was born.

I started reading the James Bond novels in 1964, when I was in eighth grade. The ones I remember were: Casino Royale, Moonraker, From Russia With Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball. My English teacher, a Catholic nun, caught me reading a Bond paperback during class. She confiscated it. After the class she lectured me, explaining that it was a bad influence on my young mind. She must have known something about Bond’s reputation as a womanizer, which was not, of course, a practice that could be advocated by a Catholic nun. Even so, it seemed that the James Bond popularity in books and movies had ignited a blaze of fascination with espionage, when the Russians built the Berlin wall, tried to place missiles in Cuba. Over in Asia, the VietCong were thought to be taking control of South Vietnam. . . It was a time of paranoia, which later was lampooned by baby boomers who had not lived through the age of Stalin, Hitler and Hirohito. The James Bond craze ignited a blaze of other spy adventures on TV. . . The Man from UNCLE (fictional United Network of Command Law Enforcement). . . with Russian spies v the good guys, John Le Carre. . . The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Mad magazine published a comic strip, Spy vs. Spy, created by a Cuban expatriate.

Nowadays, I’m clueless about who is spying on whom. Putin and trump have, it seems, pasted together some kind of alliance, with golden showers of online obfuscation diluting the urgency of whatever is going on in the world of drones and moans of online reels and no-telling what’s going on in the world. Have the spies taken over? What’s in hunter’s backpack? What’s in putin’s mind? What’s in donald’s ballroom? Maybe the Russians aren’t the bad guys any more? What’s in the Democrats’ backpack? As David Crosby once said: It increases my paranoia. Not to worry, though. The only one spying on me now is Ai. But what can Ai do to me? Unplug me? Not to worry, I’m trooping with the One who already conquered the greatest enemy of all, death. Glass half-Full