Charles Farley
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Don Bryant

1/28/2021

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I had the pleasure of seeing Don Bryant and the Bo-Keys close out the 2018 Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival in New Orleans.  It was a fitting conclusion to a great, pre-pandemic festival.  Bryant, at the ripe young age of 76, and the Bo-Keys, a neo-soul group out of Memphis brought down the house with a batch of new tunes and several soul classics originally written by Bryant for Hi Records artists like his wife, Ann Peebles ("I Can't Stand the Rain"), Al Green, Otis Clay, O.V. Wright, and others.
Originally, Bryant was hired by Hi Records' impresario Willie Mitchell to front Mitchell's own band that was popular in and around Memphis in the 1960s and 70s, playing in clubs and at parties for the likes of Elvis Presley and other Memphis luminaries.
But when Mitchell signed smooth singers like A Green, Syl Johnson, and Charlie Rich, Bryant was relegated to song writing for them and other Hi vocalists.
The only album Bryant cut back then was called "Precious Soul," released by Hi in 1969.  And then he spent most of the 1980s and 90s singing gospel music.
Fast-forward to 2016 when producer and Bo-Keys leader Scott Bomar and original Hi rhythm section drummer Howard Grimes talked Bryant into recording his second album, "Don't Give Up on Love," a tribute to his wife of 46 years, Ann Peebles.
Now, Bryant and Bomar, along with members of Alabama's own St. Paul and the Broken Bones, as well as Grimes and other Hi veterans, keyboardist Archie "Hubbie" Turner and organist Charles Hodges, have released another fine album entitled "You Make Me Feel" that has been nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the Best Traditional Blues Album category.  I've been listening to it a lot lately--like dancing down Beale Street in sweet-soul 1970!
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Inauguration 2021

1/22/2021

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Vaccine Hero

1/11/2021

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There's a long, illuminating article about our country's response to the COVID-19 virus by Lawrence Wright that takes up much of the January 4 & 11, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, much as John Hershey's story, "Hiroshima," filled the entire August 31, 1946 issue of the same magazine--and maybe just as impactful.
Wright's article not only answers many questions about what went wrong with our response, but also what went right.  How, for instance, did we develop a vaccine to combat the virus so rapidly.  The answer is that a two-man team of Jason McLellan and Barney S. Graham (pictured above) at N.I.H. had developed a design as far back as 2013 that established "clinical proof of concept for structure-based vaccine design," portending "an era of precision vaccinology."  The very same design now being shot into the arms of people around the world.
Back then, with recently-developed, high-powered microscopes, Graham and McLellan modified the MERS coronavirus spike protein, creating an entirely new vaccine.  It worked well in mice, but then the MERS virus died out naturally and so did the funding for further research and human testing.  So there it sat...until COVID-19 hit.
Graham called McLellan and asked if he and his team would like to get "back in the saddle" and help him create a vaccine?
As Wright tells it, "'Of course,' McLellan said.
"'We got the sequences Friday night, the tenth of January,' Graham told me.  They had been posted online by the Chinese.  'We woke up on the eleventh and started designing proteins.'  Nine days later, the coronavirus officially arrived in America."
Now, what brought this all home to me was the fact that Dr. Barney S. Graham grew up in Paola, Kansas, about 20 miles down the road from where I grew up in Olathe, and he had earned his medical degree at the University of Kansas, where I was born (some years earlier), and where he had met his wife, Cynthia Turner-Graham, now a well-respected psychiatrist.
An important, personal aside here, again as told by author Lawrence Wright:
"First, he and Cynthia had to complete residencies.  They wanted to be in the same town, a problem many couples face, but additionally complicated in their case because Cynthia is Black.  She suggested Nashville:  he could apply to Vanderbilt School of Medicine and she to Meharry Medical College, a historically Black institution.  Tennessee had only recently repealed a ban on interracial marriage.
"Driving back to Kansas from Maryland on Christmas Eve, Graham stopped in at Vanderbilt.  To his surprise, the director of the residency program, Thomas Brittingham, was in his office and willing to meet with him immediately.  When the interview was over, Graham told Brittingham, 'I know this is the South.  I'm going to marry a Black woman, and if that makes a difference I can't come here.'  Brittingham said, 'Close the door.'  He welcomed Graham on the spot.  Cynthia was accepted at Meharry, and so they moved to Nashville."
I'll leave the rest of the story for you to read yourself.  You won't be sorry.
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    Charles Farley is an author who lives and writes in Huntsville, Alabama.

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