MLK

[Photograph by Grey Villet, from the Life Photo Archive. The telegraphic description that accompanies the photograph: “Martin Luther King Trial Montgomery Alabama Integration.” On February 21, 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. was one of ninety-three people indicted on charges of leading an illegal boycott of Montgomery buses. On March 19, his trial began.]

The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.

From “The Power of Nonviolence,” an address at the University of California at Berkeley, June 4, 1957.

Hooker ’n Heat

John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, Hooker ’n Heat. Liberty Records, 1971.

John Lee Hooker, guitar and vocal
Alan Wilson, guitar, harmonica, piano
Henry Vestine, guitar
Antonio de la Barreda, bass
Fito de la Parra, drums

Messin’ with the Hook : The Feelin’ Is Gone : Send Me Your Pillow : Sittin’ Here Thinkin’ : Meet Me in the Bottom : Alimonia Blues : Driftin’ Blues : You Talk Too Much : Burnin’ Hell (w/Bernard Besman) : Bottle Up and Go : The World Today : I Got My Eyes on You : Whiskey and Wimmen’ : Just You and Me : Let's Make It : Peavine : Boogie Chillen No. 2

Recorded May 1970. All songs by John Lee Hooker except as noted.

Hooker ’n Heat came out on January 15, 1971, forty years ago today. Still in print, it holds up as well as ever. To my ears, it’s the best record John Lee Hooker made. It might be Canned Heat’s best too, despite the performing absence of lead singer Bob Hite, heard here only in bits of studio chatter and one hearty cheer.

Anyone who thinks of blues music as formally rigid — three chords, twelve bars — has never listened to John Lee Hooker, whose music is typically monochordal and most often without evenly measured choruses. Hooker’s approach, known as “the boogie,” is sometimes characterized as “primitive” (or worse, “primal”), but its fluid sense of time makes much blues performance sound pedestrian and predictable by comparison. Listen to any number of Hooker recordings from the 1950s and ’60s, and you’ll hear a musician at odds with his supporting cast, players who cannot bear to abandon the proper three-chord, twelve-bar form. At times it’s as if two records are playing.

What makes Hooker ’n Heat immediately stand out from so much of Hooker’s work is that Canned Heat follows the leader, with genuine empathy. As good as the solo performances here are (I’d pick “The Feelin’ Is Gone” and “Send Me Your Pillow”), the high points of Hooker ’n Heat come in Hooker’s duets with Alan Wilson and in performances with the full (or nearly full) band. The greatest of the Hooker-Wilson duets is “Burnin’ Hell,” which begins with a variation on a couplet from Son House’s “My Black Mama” (1930). Here’s House:

Yes, ’tain’t no heaven and ’tain’t no burnin’ hell,

Said where I’m goin’ when I die can’t nobody tell.

And Hooker:

Everybody talkin’ about it, burnin’ hell,
Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell,
Where I die, where I go, can’t nobody tell.

“Burnin’ Hell” builds in intensity, as the singer goes down to the church-house to ask Deacon Jones to pray for him. The singer prays all night, and his insistence that there is no hell begins to sound like a desperate plea not to be sent there: “Ain’t gonna burn in, ain’t gonna burn in, burnin’ hell.” The Hooker-Wilson connection here is uncanny: Wilson, on harmonica, anticipating and responding at every turn, shaping this performance into a piece of existential drama. “I dig this kid’s harmonica,” Hooker says before this tune begins. “I don’t know how he follow me, but he do.” “Burnin’ Hell” has an intensity rare in Hooker’s music, rare in Wilson’s music, rare in anyone’s music.

With the band on board, Hooker hits what he calls “that groovy spot,” with great support from Henry Vestine, Antonio de la Barreda, and Fito de la Parra (who, like Wilson, are attentive to every shifting current). There are many great moments: Hooker’s sermonette in “Whiskey and Wimmen’,” his drop to his lowest (and lewdest) vocal register in “Just You and Me,” the way Wilson’s harmonica mimics Hooker’s guitar and voice in “Let’s Make It,” Hooker’s frenzied lament in “Peavine,” where he repeats the word gone fifteen times.

The best comes last, “Boogie Chillen No. 2,” eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds of it, with strong guitar solos by Henry Vestine and a brilliant harmonica solo by Wilson (with a switch of instruments midway to get to some low notes otherwise unavailable). Here too the Hooker-Wilson connection is clear: during Vestine’s first solo, Hooker says, “You hear that cat? On the harmonica? Let the cat hear you,” as if inviting a club audience to applaud. (Vestine then wraps things up.) And as the performance nears its end, Hooker shouts:

Alan! You feel good, and you feel good,
Just like I thought that you would now.

It was not to be. Alan Wilson died (by his own hand perhaps) a few months after these performances were recorded. Thus the murky, somber album cover. Every musician on Hooker ’n Heat is now gone, save for Fito de la Parra, leading Canned Heat to this day.

[Bob Hite, Fito de la Parra, Henry Vestine, John Lee Hooker, Antonio de la Barreda. A photograph of Alan Wilson hangs on the wall.]

Related posts
Alan Wilson
Canned Heat (Live in east-central Illinois)

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“[I]f your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: ‘If you type two spaces after a period, you’re doing it wrong.’”

A better Notational Velocity icon

[Before and after.]

If you, like me, like the Mac app Notational Velocity but cannot abide its icon, a substitute Evernote icon from iconaholic.com is a great alternative.

Eberhard Faber Ruby Erasers

“There is one for every purpose”: Eberhard Faber Ruby Erasers, a photograph by Christian Montone.

Thanks to Bent Sørensen, whose Ordinary finds is full of good things.

The word and the world

As you probably know, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been in the news, as a professor and publisher have joined to produce an expurgated text of the novel in which the word slave replaces another word, 219 times. Three thoughts:

1. It’s been done before. In April 1963, the Philadelphia Board of Education removed Mark Twain’s novel from the city’s schools, substituting an adaptation with muted violence, simplified speech, and the elimination of “all derogatory references to Negroes.” And in 1984, middle-school administrator John H. Wallace published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adapted, with that word and the word hell removed. I’ve seen no reference to these previous expurgations in news coverage.

2. Changing the word does little to change the categories that structure Huck Finn’s thinking, which are those of the world in which Huck has been raised. When, for instance, Jim bests Huck in an argument about whether it is natural for people to speak different languages, Huck explains that he chose not to continue the debate: “I see it warn’t no use wasting words — you can’t learn a [          ] to argue.” The joke is on Huck. You may fill in the blank with the less offensive noun of your choice, but no substitution changes Huck’s mind, which assumes (always) Jim’s inferiority.

3. None of which is to say that the language of Twain’s novel poses no complications or causes no pain. But the more urgent complications and pain of Huck Finn lie, I think, elsewhere: in Huck’s deformed conscience (he believes of course that in helping Jim he is doing wrong) and in Tom Sawyer and Huck’s absurd, dangerous, not-funny humiliation of Jim in Arkansas, a humiliation in which Jim is thoroughly complicit.

I’ve taught Adventures of Huckleberry Finn any number of times, and each time, I’ve resolved never to teach it again. (Thus far I’ve kept my resolution.) As a piece of American myth-making, as a meditation on the varieties of human freedom, Huck Finn is crucial. And there is no easy, uplifting lesson to take away from it. The image many readers have of the novel — Huck and Jim drifting along the Mississippi, just getting along with each other, just two people, free of an oppressive culture — is undercut by the novel itself, in which Huck and Jim drift further and further from the prospect of Jim’s freedom, their raft filled with the baggage of their culture.

[I learned years ago of previous expurgations from Peaches Henry’s essay “The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry Finn”, in Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, ed. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious Davis (1992).]

Trouble trouble

What to do when the Pop-O-Matic die doesn’t quite come to rest on one side? The rules offer no guidance. But Wikipedia offers a reasonable solution:

If the die in the “Pop-O-Matic” container has not clearly landed on a number, then the player who popped it can tap the “Pop-O-Matic,” but may not re-pop while the die is in limbo. The player can flick the board, but should not flick so hard that the board is moved.

Yes, we are speaking of Trouble. Elaine, Ben, and I hit upon the same solution last night.

I know that there are more important things in the world to be thinking about (and I am). But for an hour or so last night, nothing was more important than playing Trouble.

Readers of a certain age will remember this commercial.

“Famous Roast Beef Suppers”

From Yankee, a report on the “Famous Roast Beef Suppers” (yes, in quotation marks) of Hartland, Vermont — as frequented by J.D. Salinger.

Fargo, 1940

From NPR, the story behind one of the greatest Ellington recordings — Fargo, North Dakota; November 7, 1940 — as told by audio engineer Jack Towers, who recorded the night’s proceedings with his friend Dick Burris.

The Fargo performance is available in The Duke Box (Storyville Records).

Zimmer on Strunk and White

Ben Zimmer, who writes the “On Language” column for the New York Times, answers an interviewer’s question:

Q. Your colleague Geoff Pullum, at Language Log, has made it his personal goal to tear down Strunk and White. What’s wrong with The Elements of Style?

A. Pullum has been debunking the argument that this is the one book people should be using as guide to language. I find Strunk and White had a tenuous grasp on grammar. Many of their smaller rules are wrong, such as the blanket rule against using the passive voice.

Their larger rules are something you could never disagree with: “Omit needless words.” If you knew which words were needless, you would not need the advice.

Strunk and White offer no blanket rule against the passive voice, as even Pullum acknowledges in his Chronicle of Higher Ed piece on The Elements of Style:

The authors explicitly say they do not mean “that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice,” which is “frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.

And Zimmer’s tired, Pullum-flavored observation about the banality of “Omit needless words” is hardly fair: The Elements of Style presents this principle of composition (as Strunk and White call it, not “rule”) with sixteen examples of how to improve cumbersome phrasing (e.g., “the fact that”) and a demonstration of how six choppy sentences can be revised into one (as I pointed out in a response to Pullum’s Chronicle piece last year).

There are good reasons to find fault with The Elements of Style, but one should be sure that it’s The Elements of Style one is criticizing — the thing itself, not some rumor.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective) (Do Strunk and White ban adjectives and adverbs?)
The Elements of Style, one more time (My appraisal)