Charles Farley
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Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Singers of All Time

1/9/2023

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Bobby “Blue” Bland​

Bobby “Blue” Bland didn’t earn his nickname lightly. Listen to how he opens his 1959 classic “I’ll Take Care of You” — “I know you’ve been hurt . . . by someone else/I can tell by the way . . . you carry yourself,” every pause infused with a lifetime of observation and regret; it’s a vocal masterclass. Bland’s catalog teems with similarly perfect readings, from his unearthly moan to his bird-like squeal; everybody from Otis Redding to Van Morrison to Bonnie Raitt has learned from him. “It’s a one-of-a-kind voice,” said Gregg Allman. “I wonder how many people tore up their throats trying to imitate that shout.” —M.M.



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Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler

12/29/2022

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I haven't blogged for awhile, but an event occurred a few days ago that is so musically momentous that I just have to break my silence.  Walter "Wolfman" Washington died last Thursday, December 22, just two days after his 79th birthday.
The Wolfman epitomized New Orleans.  He loved to eat, he loved to drink, and he loved to create the music that is the Big Easy:  a scrumptious gumbo of raucous, horn-driven R&B, blues, funk, soul, zydeco, Cajun, and everything in between.  If Washington couldn't make you smile and move your feet, and most other parts of your body as well, then you belonged in a St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 burial vault.
He was one of the last remaining remnants  of the original 20th century New Orleans sound, having been influenced by legends like Allen Toussaint, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, the Meters, and the Neville Brothers, and having played with, during his long 60-year career, Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas, and Johnny Adams.
The first time I saw him was at a club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1980s, where he was on a bill with an aging Jimmy Rogers, the great guitarist with the Muddy Waters band back in the 1950s.  And, as distinguished as Rogers still was, it was Washington who stole the show that night with his kickass band, the Roadmasters.
Later, I caught him and the Roadmasters at their usual Saturday night haunt, the Maple Leaf Bar, in the Carrollton neighborhood of Uptown New Orleans.  After his first set, I stopped him as he was headed out to Oak Street for a smoke and told him how much I enjoyed his most recent album, Sada, that included the pretty title song that was written for his newborn daughter of the same name.  Walter broke into a big toothy grin, that likely accounted for his nickname, and hugged and thanked me.  Now, if you've ever been to the Maple Leaf on a Saturday night with Walter "Wolfman" Washington playing, you know the star is bound to quickly work up a prodigious sweat. In which he heartily drenched me with his bearlike embrace.
Then, in 1993 (I think), I was somehow put in charge of hiring a band for Geac's customer party at the American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans.  Guess who I hired?  Yep, and you should have seen those librarians get down!
Still later, I couldn't resist heading down to New Orleans several times in October to attend the annual Crescent City Blues & BBQ Fest.  Not so much to catch the headliners, like Shemekia Copeland, Tab Benoit, Bobby Rush, Mem Shannon, and Henry Gray, among others, but to hear the Wolfman himself.  Just one more time.

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Lincoln County Fair   Fayetteville, TN

9/21/2022

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There are many bad things about the South:  Rightwing Politics, Racism, and Summer Heat, for example.  But there are many good things too:  Beautiful Scenery (from mountains to beaches), Mild Climate (most of the year), Friendly People (most of them), Soul Food (yum!), and County Fairs:
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Carnival Rides
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On the Midway
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The Torres Family Circus
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Harness Racing
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Racetrack Grandstand
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Gambling is illegal in Tennessee.  So what are all these folks lined up for?
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Favorite Fair Lunch
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Banned Books

9/18/2022

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Sights and Sounds of Clarksdale

8/15/2022

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Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Festival

8/9/2022

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2022 SUNFLOWER RIVER BLUES & GOSPEL FESTIVAL LINEUP Thursday, August 11, 2022 Grits, Greens & BBQ VIP
7:00pm-7:45pm Stan Street & Jaxx Nassar
8:00pm-8:45pm Sean "Bad" Apple
9:00pm-9:45pm Terry "Big T" Williams

Friday, August 12, 2022 Main Stage
7:00pm-7:45pm Delta Blues Museum Band
8:00pm-8:45pm Heather Crosse: Heavy Suga & The Sweet Tones
9:00pm-9:45pm Lucious Spiller
10:00pm-10:45pm Anthony "Big A" Sherrod
11:00pm-12:15am James "Super Chickan" Johnson

Saturday August 13, 2022 Acoustic Stage (at the VIP Tent)
10:00am-10:45am Pat Thomas
11:00am-11:45am Mississippi Marshall
12:00 noon-12:45pm Honey Bee (Ms. Australia Jones)
1:00pm-1:45pm Kenny Brown
2:00pm-2:45pm Howlin' Madd Bill Perry & Shy Perry
3:00pm-3:45pm Bill Abel
4:00pm-4:45pm Little Willie Farmer
5:00pm-5:45pm Terry "Harmonica" Bean

Saturday August 13, 2022 Main Stage
6:00pm-6:45pm Brad Moneymaker Band
7:00pm-7:45pm Mark"Mule Man" Massey
8:00pm-8:45pm Jimbo Mathus
8:45pm-9:00pm Awards
9:00pm-9:45pm Terry "Big T" Williams
10:00pm-10:45pm Mr. Sam
11:00pm-12:00am L J Echols

Sunday, August 14, 2022 Gospel Stage
3:00pm-3:30pm G-Hope Mass Choir
3:45pm-4:15pm The Sensational Travelers
4:45pm-5:15pm The Spiritual Soldiers
5:30pm-6:00pm The Myles Family
6:15pm-6:45pm The Well Brothers
7:00pm-8:00pm Pastor Marcus Newson and The Newson Singers
8:15pm-9:30pm The Return of the Spiritual QC's (Son of the Late Lee Williams- C.C. Williams)
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Bill Russell

8/1/2022

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To me, the most important part of winning is joy.  You can win without joy, but winning that's joyless is like eating in a four-star restaurant when you're not hungry.  Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight, that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.

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My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.
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South to America

7/20/2022

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Just finished reading Imani Perry's latest book, South to America:  A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.  Perry is the author of four other books and is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.  In other words, she is a scholar, an academician, and an intellectual.  Her writing is dense and often profound, so this is no easy beach read.  What it is, is a serious attempt by a very smart Black woman, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago with activist parents, to come to grips with her heritage and how American race relations have shaped her and our country.
And Perry comes at her subject from so many angles it slowly becomes a revelation of how we as a nation find ourselves today.  So if there is anyone who believes that systematic racism no longer exists, they need to read this book.  Part history, part polemic, part pilgrimage, part personal history, South to America is a stirring story of race in America and how deeply it affects us all:
"Isn't that what we want, that irrepressible hope?  Maybe it isn't just an American mythos.  Maybe it's an American wonder.  After all, from the bottom, from the depths, from the fields, from the ashes, hope just keeps on rising and radiating off sweat-glowing skin in Southern heat."

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Mavis Staples

7/5/2022

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So, I wrote earlier about Mavis Staples's sparkling performance at the opening of Huntsville's new Orion Amphitheater in May.  It's good to see that Staples is still going strong at 82, touring widely, and featured in a glowing profile by Pulitzer Prize winning author David Remnick in this week's (July 4, 2022) issue of The New Yorker, where Remnick has served as editor since 1998.
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Since Staples has been performing first with her family, as the Staple Singers, when she was just a child, and then later as a solo artist, as her family members died, the article cuts a broad swath through modern American music, from the blues, to gospel, rhythm and blues, rock, and what we now call Americana.  Remnick, as we have come to expect, provides an intriguing, succinct picture of the period and Staples's important position in it, with several amusing anecdotes along the way, like this one:
Dylan arrived in New York in January, 1961, when he was nineteen.  As he was building his reputation on the folk scene in Greenwich Village, he ran into the Staple Singers at a music festival in the city, and an acquaintance introduced them.  "Bob said, 'I know the Staple Singers!'" Staples recalled.  "He said, 'Pops, he has a velvety voice, but Mavis gets rough sometimes.'  And then he quoted that verse in 'Sit Down Servant.'"
"I didn't know no white boy knew our stuff!" Pops said.
As the sixties wore on, the Staple Singers broadened their repertoire.  Pops, who was in equal measure idealistic and shrewd, saw a growing appetite, among white listeners as well as Black, for his message songs.  He even had the group record some of Dylan's songs, including "Masters of War" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."  Dylan developed what Staples calls a case of "puppy love."  On a cafeteria line before a performance, Dylan turned to Pops and said, "Pops, I want to marry Mavis."
"Well, don't you tell me, tell Mavis," Pops said.
Staples delights in talking about it:  "He was a cute little boy, little blue eyes, curly hair.  He and Pervis got to be tight.  They'd sit out on the stoop, drink wine."
She describes their relationship as "courting," with some "smooching" here and there.  But, when I asked if they almost got married, she smiled and said, "Nobody almost gets married."
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After all she has been through, all her immediate family now gone, at 82, Staples asked God why she was still alive.  "The only reason I could see is to sing my songs," she said.  And so, thank God, she does!
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Defy this Supreme Court

6/29/2022

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Smuggle abortion pills to women in Texas

By Tom Moran | Star-Ledger Editorial Board
In 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade was decided, 130,000 American women obtained illegal or self-induced abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. They risked infections, bleeding, and sterility. Some of them died.
We are not going back to that, no matter what this radical Supreme Court says, because the landscape has changed. There are pills now that can safely do the job, and now account for more than half of all abortions. That changes things.
But what is to be done about states, like Texas, that are building the legal machinery to prosecute those who help Texan women obtain these pills, often after online consultations? Are women in Texas, especially poor women, headed back to 1972?
The answer must be no. These laws need to be broken, come what may. This Court has lost its legitimacy and must be defied, outright. If that means people of conscience need to smuggle pills into red states, to knock down the walls this Court has helped to build, then so be it.
Crossing this threshold can be justified only on rare occasions in a democracy. The rule of law can’t survive long if citizens can casually pick and choose which laws they want to obey. And in a democracy, where citizens are vested with powers to peacefully challenge unjust laws, the burden is higher.
But the discussion doesn’t end there.
What if a majority imposes an unjust law on a minority, as in Southern states during the Civil Rights Movement? Defiance is justified not only on moral grounds, but as a political tactic. The defiance of unjust laws awoke the conscience of decent people and led this country to higher ground.
How about the draft laws during the Vietnam War? Was Muhammad Ali wrong when he refused to take part in that unjust killing, even at the cost of imprisonment?
Or consider the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required that marshals in Northern states help return escaped slaves and set fines for anyone who harbored an escaped slave. Was defiance not a moral imperative?
The question of exactly when lawbreaking is justified is as old as Socrates and has no easy answer. But each instance above shows that it’s not a simple matter of asserting that we must obey the law at all times, even in a democracy like ours.
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In this case, defiance is justified by the unfair tactics Republicans used to build this Supreme Court majority, along with the radical nature of this decision, and the urgency facing woman in states like Texas.
Start with the Senate’s refusal to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, justified by the bizarre reasoning that presidents should not be allowed to make an appointing during their final year in office. When President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, the rules somehow changed and the GOP Senate confirmed her two weeks before the election.
History will mark that hypocrisy and bad faith, an act that gave this radical Court the final vote it needed to overturn Roe.
That sin was compounded by the radical nature of the decision drafted by Justice Samuel Alito. This was an unrestrained partisan power play by the Court’s 5-vote majority, which showed a disregard for precedent that was offensive even to the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who dissented.
Alito framed his ruling as a win for democracy, since abortion laws will now be settled by states through a democratic process, rather than by judicial fiat through the 14th Amendment. But by moving this to the political arena, he erases the Constitutional protection for abortion, and opens a path for this Court to continue its rampage by striking down other protections that rely on the same amendment.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argues that the Court should free states to revive bans on birth control and gay marriage, based on the same logic. So much for precedent. So much for restraint.
Adding to this insult is the Court’s defiance of public opinion, based not on a higher call to justice, but on the archaic idea that we should look to 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted, to discern its meaning today. That was a time when women couldn’t vote, yet this Court relies on the sensibilities of that half-democracy to rewrite the rules that should apply in 2022. It’s a bizarre and dangerous standard to justify rolling back established Constitutional rights.
States today are scrambling to draft new laws on abortion, including bans on the use of medications and their transport across state borders. It will take time to sort out.
But in the end, one way or another, we need to rescue women who need abortions and have the misfortune to live in a state that denies that right. If that means breaking the law, and smuggling these pills at scale, so be it.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook

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    Charles Farley is an author who lives and writes in Huntsville, Alabama.

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