The days grow short so size the time!

Stories in the mud, or books that dig it up

I've found two books already I'm gonna call my Delta 'bibles'. If you two have others you know of or come upon, let's post them! Knowing we're going to do this make the history all the more rich, all the more real.

#1 - Worse Than Slavery - Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, by David M. Oshinsky. Nothing I've read ever gave me the 'big view' of how the south continued slavery after "emancipation' like this book. Its not dense or hard. Reads like a story, a horrendous one, but puts so many pieces together. Walter started it when he was here. The next morning said "i went to bed angry, reading that book. I never understood when some older Blacks would say ' you gotta have a good white man' . . .now i know."

#2 - The Land Where the Blues Began, by Alan Lomax. My friend Tracey gave this to me for a birthday some years ago. I've only read bits and pieces. But it's thick with the stories of the roots of the blues. Lomax was a white southerner whose father started recording black folk music in the 1930's. Alan worked with his father who also worked with Zora Neale Hurston.
From the introduction (echos of the 1st book): "The experience of Southern working-class blacks, who created the blues in the postslavery period, was in some ways more bitter than slavery itself . . . . They put their hand to the plow, to the railroad hammer, to the lines of the mule team and in effect built the South. . . . The Delta scene was, perhaps, more savage than that in some other parts of the South."

#3 - Southern Journey, a Return to the Civil Rights Movement, by Tom Dent. Shona lent me this, and it's thick too. The author, a black journalist who grew up in New Orleans, left the south and then returned to live. He was one of the co-founders of the Free Southern Theatre. He spent 9 months traveling through the south to find out "what changes, if any" resulted from the civil rights movment. I'm working on this one now . . . . because that was my question too, when i did my first road trip thru the south.

#4 - There Goes My Everything - White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights 1945-1975 by Jason Sokol . This one i like just for the title! - Here's a clip from the intro:
" Observers in the South during the 1960's believed they had witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. Breslin wrote: You have not lived, in this time when everything is changing, until you see an old black woman with mud on her shoes stand on the street of a Southern city and sing ' we are not afraid . . ' and then turn and look at the face of a cop near her and see the puzzlement and the terrible fear in his eyes. Because he knows, and everybody who has ever seen it knows, that it is over."

Websites

Louisiana's African American Heritage Trail web site:

http://louisianatravel.com/explore/cultural_history/african_american_heritage_trail/


DELTA BLUES.....

OK, here's junior's "Q& A's" . . . . . http://www.deltablues.net/faq.html

Pearl, check out the one about photos. But it's all good. I sent him an email from US , hoping he's alive and kickin.

SOUTHERN SOUL RADIO

http://www.southernsoulradio.com/


kick off your shoes and enjoy, from the southern hole of southern soul!

comin to ya at . . . . .

The Kitchen Table - Where it Starts

We're wrapping up the 'baptism' meeting of this adventure. Walter flew to SF so we could all sit at LJ's kitchen table to get serious. After two days of meeting face to face, emails and phone calls, we've got a working plan. Which is: target date is 2 weeks in early June 2010. Where? the Delta - from Memphis to New Orleans, via Hwy 61, the 'blues highway'. We've made our budget, figured how we gonna save for this, and started our blog! Walter bought a cheap an "APPLE G4" laptop in SF for $350, is happier than a pig in shit, and Pearl has marked her calendar for when we have to check in again, and LJ's started this blog! Are we havin fun or what?
WM & LJ