Frank Beacham's Journal

It's the Story, Stupid

Our society’s storytellers — including musicians, actors, writers, artists, photographers and the backstage people that support their work — are going to have to rethink their places in the future.

How? I have some preliminary thoughts on the question. It’s not meant to be complete by any means, but only a baseline to begin thinking about the future.

What do all artists have in common? We are storytellers — in one form or another. Through our work as “communicators,” we seek to create stories that reflect on the human condition.

Some artists provoke, others make us reflect, some soothe us with beauty while others make us laugh. It’s a real hodgepodge, but in the end it is all storytelling.

Telling stories is an essential human need. It has been with us since the beginning of time — whether painting on the walls of caves, writing on stone tablets or telling stories around a campfire.

What is constantly changing is the technology used for presenting that art. In the pandemic of 1916, people had few ways to communicate. Today, we have the internet. It is not only keeping many of us sane, but offers one of the few ways today for artists to tell their stories to the world. This is a major plus.

But let’s face the hard truth. It is going to be a long time before audiences gather again, even after venues reopen. There will be fear of infection until a vaccine is readily available. Regardless of what the government tells you, it is going to be a very difficult period ahead.

Depending on how artists use the internet will determine the ultimate success...or failure.

For writers, videographers and still photographers, little has changed in the way we distribute our work. Most of us were already using the internet. In the coming days, each of us will use our creative sensibilities to tell stories that will seek to connect with people in crisis.


For musicians, the internet landscape is most interesting. Some big name performers are blowing it — with poor production values and really bad audio and video quality in presenting their work. Viewers will put up with poor technical quality for a very short time...after that all video is judged on its quality.

Many younger, amateur musicians are using the internet far more effectively than successful musicians used to working before live audiences. A shakeup may come from this in music. Video may be the great equalizer before this pandemic is over.

Judy Collins once told me that audiences want her to tell a personal story in performances after she sings a couple of songs. This is because people want to know behind the scenes anecdotes about the music they love. For some successful musicians, perhaps there is more power in stories than songs right now.

For actors, performing on stage isn’t going to happen soon. Who’s going to pay big money to be crammed close to others in a theatre? It will be a hard sell — at least for a while.

Again, it is interesting to see actors informally on video. Many big “stars” are awkward and incredibly uninteresting when out of character. Others are charming and delightful people that we see in a totally new way.

There is an opportunity to reinvent the concept of acting as storytelling. New opportunities are open to aspiring actors during this crisis. One person performances on video may be the future for some actors. Others may find their way to communicate effectively as real people. Creative thinking is needed here.

Some really odd-ball storytelling has already come out of the blue. One, called “Duckgrams,” is from a retired Stanford-trained mechanical engineer named Marty Frost, who lives among the redwoods in Palo Alto, California.

He chronicles ducks in his yard building nests and laying eggs. It may sound silly, but Frost is telling compelling stories with video about the life of ducks. It is compelling and has caught my attention.

As to behind-the-scenes workers who know audio, lighting and stagecraft, there is a growing opportunity to help creative artists set up small scale home video studios.

Streaming media is the future (at least for now) and the rules of good production have not changed.

If I were a lighting designer, I would be using small, inexpensive LED lights to create home studio packages. A lot of entertainers definitely need help with audio and out of work sound operators could help. And surely there are better set backgrounds for video from homes than bookcases and cluttered home offices.

As a community of storytelling artists, the goal always has been to tell good stories from a unique point of view. Those stories may be local, national or global. But they are the “stuff” of all human communication. The need for good stories never goes away.

Humans always adapt to new situations...as the old ways disappear. The art will never change, but the way we deliver it to people is in play. This what we should be thinking about.

A Night of the Blues at Jazz at Lincoln Center

At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Dec. 2 in New York City, Steve Miller, Jimmie Vaughan, Charlie Musselwhite and an amazingly talented backup band performed a night of the blues — featuring the Blues Triangle of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta, Chicago and Texas.

I lost count of the number of great songs the group performed, but they included the blues of Bill Broonzy, Charles Brown, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Elmore James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Albert King, B.B. King, Freddie King, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

As Jimmie Vaughn said, “sometimes I don’t know where the blues ends and rock and roll begins,” which was the point of the concert that clearly demonstrated how important the blues is in contemporary music.

The production was led by Steve Miller, now living in New York City, who is bringing his considerable skills as an entertainer to educating a new generation about the blues and why it matters. Miller played with most of the great blues artists and told story, after story, after story about them. The best way to learn is to hear funny tales about the legends from ones who knew and played with them.

Sharing the stage with Miller was Vaughn, the Texas bluesman, who with his late brother, Stevie Ray Vaughn, influenced a generation of Texas blues musicians. And there was Charlie Musselwhite, who has been touring 50 years since his days with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago in the 1960s. I can’t think of a better blues harp player still alive and performing today.

Shelly Berg owned the Steinway piano for the night, while Mike Flanigin, the Texas Hammond B3 organist, blew the crowd (and musicians) away with his great B3 rifts. Horns, drums, an upright bass backed most songs, with each musician clearly a master of their instrument.

Steve Miller’s goal was to demonstrate how important the blues is to today’s modern jazz and rock. He succeeded brilliantly. He is so good, he should do it on a television show, like in the days when Leonard Bernstein used the airwaves to educate the public about classical music. It was perhaps the best concert I heard all year.

Here are some images of the show. All photos by Frank Beacham

Steve Miller

Charlie Musselwhite

Jimmie Vaughn

All photos by Frank Beacham

Bob Dylan Opens a Week of Thanksgiving Concerts in New York City

Bob Dylan opened a week-long series Thanksgiving concerts at the Beacon Theatre in New York City Monday Night. His opening act was Mavis Staples, who took no prisoners with her enthusiastic performance, which bridged her civil rights marches with Dr. Martin Luther King to the era of Trump.

One thing was very new at a Dylan concert, at least for me. Everyone had to pass through a metal detector — the first time in more than 40 years of attending Dylan concerts that I’ve seen that level of security. Younger people may be used to this security, but to me and some other old timers there, it was a sad commentary on the dark times in which we live i

Photos by Frank Beacham

A Night of Two Kings

On Sept. 6, guitarist Jimmy Vivino, with producer Greg Williamson, created an exceptional Blues Revue for the Blues Foundation at B. B. Kings Club in New York City.

The event featured a who’s who of blues musicians, ranging from legends like Dion, Sam Moore, William Bell and John Sebastian to break-out young stars that won the hearts and souls of the audience.

One could call it the night of two Kings.

“King” Solomon Hicks is only 20 years old, but has been lead guitarist and performer for nine years at the Cotton Club. He already has four albums. Hicks proved he has the right stuff on the stage last night. Vivino discovered him next door at Lucille’s, the small room in B.B. Kings Club.

Remember the name Solomon Hicks. He’s a rare performing talent, as well as a composer, and he burned up the stage last night. He left a major impression of this hard-core New York audience, who talked about him long after his performance.

The other star of the night was Marcus King, a fellow South Carolinian. He grew up in Greenville, 35 miles from my hometown of Honea Path. He played shows as a pre-teen sideman with his father, bluesman Marvin King. He now leads his own Marcus King Band

The Marcus King Band’s current self-named album, released last year, was produced by musician Warren Haynes and written entirely on the road and recorded during a series of sessions at Carriage House Studios in Stamford, Connecticut.

The album also includes a number of the band’s mentors and collaborators, including Derek Trucks (who plays guitar on "Self-Hatred") and Warren Haynes, who in addition to producing the album, added his slide guitar work on "Virginia." The album reached #2 on the Billboard Blues Albums Chart.

Both of these young men are the future of the blues and both proved it’s in good hands last night to an audience they won over big time.

In addition to the new comers, the legends were in full force with names like Dion, Sam Moore and William Bell providing the headliner acts.

Dion has been performing long before most of the audience members were born. He was on the bill at the Winter Dance Party tour when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson died in 1959. He has just recorded an album with Vivino.

Sam Moore, a legend with Sam and Dave, sang a new version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” last night. It’s on his new album and the man brought a level of soul to the song that made it new again.

William Bell, who won a Grammy last year, is one of the last living soul legends. You knew it clearly when he performed the blues classic he wrote with Booker T. Jones, “Born Under a Bad Sign.” They had done the song for Albert King and it was later recorded by dozens of blues musicians.

Notable on the bill was Catherine Russell, the jazz and blues vocalist. Russell was essentially born into the blues. Her father, the late Luis Russell, was Louis Armstrong's long-time musical director, and her mother, the late Carline Ray, held degrees from both Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music and performed with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm during World War II.

Also performing in the revue was Shemekia Copeland, Ruthie Foster, Bob Margolin, Joe Louis Walker, Bill Sims, Eric Krasno, Scott Sharrard and an all-star house band. It was a great night of the blues.

John Sebastian

Jimmy Vivino, Bob Margolin, Dion DiMucci and John Sebastian

Graham Nash: Photographer

Graham Nash has been a photographer longer than a musician. At the recent PhotoExpo in New York City, Nash wore his photographer hat — showing his best images and telling stories about his lifetime of creative pursuits.

Nash was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England in 1942 and grew up in a poor family in Salford. At the time, most of the employment in his town was either in mines or textile mills, but his parents encouraged him to ignore tradition and follow his heart when it came to his future.

When Nash was 10 years old, his father took him to a nearby zoo to demonstrate photography. After taking a picture and going home, Nash’s father covered a window with a blanket, put a blank sheet of paper into a colorless liquid and then held up the paper for his son to watch.

“He said, ‘wait, wait, wait’ as I stared at the blank paper,” Nash recalled. “Then, all of a sudden, the image my father had taken at the zoo appeared on the paper. It was magic! My life changed dramatically that day. It was then I began taking photographs.”

In the time just after World War II, Nash said most young men in his hometown followed in their fathers’ footsteps and worked for a lifetime for a local company. “But my parents never let me fall for that,” he said. “They recognized my creative passions in music and photography and encouraged me to pursue them rather than saying things like ‘get a real job’ or ‘this is not going to last.’”

In the early 1960s, Nash co-founded The Hollies, one of the UK's most successful pop groups, with a school friend, Allan Clarke. From there, he became a professional musician, while continuing to take photographs along the way.

“I’m driven to create,” Nash said. “My girlfriend and I create every day. I'm waiting for Elvis to come back and I'll be waiting with my camera at my side.”

Because he works as a musician and performs in front of thousands of fans, Nash is no stranger to having his image taken by others. But it’s not his personal approach to the medium of photography.

“I’ve had millions of photographs taken of me,” he said. “But every time I sense a camera is on me, I try to act like James Dean or Elvis. I try to put my best side forward, whatever the fuck that is. I don't like those moments. They are totally fake to me. I like to be invisible. I like to take photos of people who have no idea I'm there.”

Those stealthy photos are what drives Nash’s best photographic work. “I'm into surreal moments that happen in life. You have to be bold enough to have your camera and bold enough to press the trigger when the moment happens.”

One example is a 1969 candid shot of Joni Mitchell, then Nash’s live-in girlfriend in Laurel Canyon, while listening her new album, Clouds, which she had just finished recording. Mitchell was concentrating on the recording, while Nash sneaked the image through the back of a hole in a kitchen chair. He took a single shot that helped define Mitchell as an artist.

Another image, made in 1988, was taken at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in Redwood City, California. Young is driving his Jensen sports car on a lonely road toward his house on the ranch grounds. Behind the car is a limousine carrying David Crosby, Steven Stills and Nash, who is standing and shooting from the roof of the limo. It is a solitary image that defined Young’s life at the time.

Though Nash uses his camera to catch life’s unposed moments, he is adamant in his disdain for selfies. “I hate selfies and all this selfie shit that's going on,” Nash said. “It drives me crazy. I don't use my camera as my memory.”

Nash collected more than 2,000 prints and they toured the world in museums for years as the Graham Nash Collection. He sold them in a Sotheby’s auction in 1990, setting an auction record at the time for the highest grossing sale of a single private collection of photography. He also was an early pioneer experimenting with digital images and inkjet printing.

Currently, Nash continues to experiment with a range of creative projects in additional to his musical activity performing and writing with Crosby, Stills and Nash.

“I have to get this stuff out of myself so it doesn't drive me crazy,” Nash said. “I’m so pleased to live in a country where I can express myself without fear of retribution. You can't do that in some other countries. Nobody has to listen to you, but at least you can speak your mind.”

Photos of Graham Nash by Frank Beacham

Bob Dylan's Motorcycle Accident — 50 Years Ago!

On July 29, 1966 — 50 years ago — Bob Dylan crashed his 500cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle on a road near where he was living in Woodstock, New York.

The accident ended the “rat race” for Dylan, and allowed him to end his world tour in 1966.

Dylan wouldn’t go on the road again for eight years.

While living in Woodstock after he recovered, Dylan began the informal recording sessions at Big Pink of over 100 songs with the future members of The Band. The songs became the “Basement Tapes.”

Here’s what Dylan wrote about the accident in Chronicles:

“I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”

This photo, made on a snowy day in 2011, is the approximate location on Striebel Road of Dylan’s motorcycle accident.

Striebel Road runs between Route 212 in Bearsville up to the Glasco Turnpike (Byrdcliffe). Albert Grossman, manager for Dylan and The Band, lived on this road.

Photo by Frank Beacham

All Star Concert Celebrates Joan Baez's 75th Birthday

Joan Baez appeared before a sold out audience for her 75th birthday concert on Wednesday night, Jan 27, at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, where she performed with an all star cast of music legends.

On the concert stage was David Bromberg, Jackson Browne, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris, the Indigo Girls, Damien Rice, Paul Simon, Mavis Staples, Richard Thompson and Nano Stern.

The concert was recorded by Thirteen Productions for WNET New York for broadcast on PBS’s Great Performances series.

The show began an 18-city tour, once again partnering with Amnesty International, but this time highlighting America’s racially biased mass incarceration.

Here Joan Baez, Paul Simon and Richard Thompson perform at the concert.

All Photos by Frank Beacham

David Crosby

David Bromberg

Joan Baez and Jackson Browne

Emmy Lou Harris

Paul Simon

Joan Baez and Judy Collins

Mavis Staples

Richard Thompson

Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne, Joan Baez and Emmy Lou Harris

Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl: The Days After Bob Dylan Went Electric

 

By Harvey Brooks

After recording Highway 61 Revisited, I got a call from Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, asking that I come by his Manhattan office to sign some papers and talk. When I got there, Albert wanted to know what I thought of Dylan and was I available for more work. I told him I was available and had become a real Dylan fan since the recording session.

Albert said Bob likes your playing and wants you to play some concerts with him — one at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens on August 28th and the other at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in early September. I quickly signed on and our conversation was over. He said thanks for coming by and ushered me out the door.

Michael Bloomfield, who had played on the album wanted to keep his gig playing the blues with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and passed, as did drummer Bobby Gregg, who was over-committed with studio sessions. Just after the Highway 61 Revisited session, Dylan had heard Robbie Robertson, a guitarist, and Levon Helm, a drummer, in a band called The Hawks at a small club. He was so impressed, he hired them on the spot as the guitar and drum replacements.

About a week later, I got a call from Dylan’s management office to be at the Carroll Music rehearsal studio at 625 West 55th Street to begin preparation for the two concerts.

It was here that I met Robertson and Helm for the first time. They had a Fender Bassman for me at the rehearsal and it was also my amp on stage for the concerts. We began what would be two weeks of intensive rehearsals for the Forest Hills concert.

The new guys totally changed the workings of the band from what we had in the studio. Robbie Robertson and Mike Bloomfield are both very energetic guitar players, but totally different in style. Bloomfield was spontaneous with his parts, while Robertson was stiffer and far more precise.

Where Bobby Gregg was a solid drummer right in the pocket, Levon was always on the edge. It’s always ‘oh, oh, are we gonna make it? Yeah!’ You always made it. But there was always a natural tension with everything Levon did. It’s a style that helped to create the sound of The Band later on. Dylan really related to it.

Because the songs were so strong in their identity, the addition of Robbie and Levon added to what Al and I had originally worked out in the studio. The truth is I never really thought about what the other guys were playing because I was locked into Dylan.

After some rehearsal, we began to relax. But it was tense until we got familiar with each other. Levon and I spent some time hanging out together in the village after rehearsal just talking about what was going on in our lives at that time — the women, the complications, the opportunities, getting high and Dylan’s music, which neither of us knew much about except that we both liked it.

Levon and I were at The Dugout on Bleecker Street eating some steak tidbits and taking it all in. Later, we walked by the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal St. and saw Dylan, Al Kooper and Bobby Neuwirth hanging out. But we opted to continue our conversation and new friendship over a cup of coffee downstairs at the nearby Gaslight Café.

With two weeks of rehearsals behind us, we were ready for the Forest Hills concert. Originally built in 1923 as the home of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, Forest Hills Stadium had hosted the Beatles and Barbara Streisand the year before. The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Frank Sinatra would play there around the time of our concert.

                                                                     Rehearsal photo by Gloria Stavers

August 28 was a typically hot and humid time of the summer, but on this evening the temperature began to drop. It soon became cold and windy. The stage where we were to perform was set back some distance from the stadium itself, which held about 15,000 fans.

Due to the stage lighting, we couldn’t see the audience — only the deep green lawn in front of us. Since Dylan had gone electric a few weeks earlier at Newport, uncertainty about what would happen here — his first live performance since Newport — was running high. The audience was self-righteously hostile and they didn’t hide it.

                                                                                 Photo by Gloria Stavers

The show got off to a surreal start when the crowd learned that the master of ceremonies was “Murray the K” Kaufman, a rock impresario and Top 40 disc jockey. This didn’t sit well with the purist folk music audience there to see Bob Dylan. The audience instantly greeted Kaufman with loud boos and jeers.

Al Kooper and I were standing next to Albert Grossman, who had this Cheshire cat expression on his face like he was enjoying the spectacle surrounding his artist. This moment was the first time I sensed Albert’s sense of humor and his take on the music business. He knew that all audience reaction — good or bad — boosted Bob’s notoriety and uniqueness.

The show began with Bob doing his all acoustic solo set. He opened with She Belongs to Me and did Gates of Eden, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Desolation Row and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. The closing solo was Mr. Tambourine Man. The opening set seemed to calm the crowd.

For me it was like being a Roman Coliseum gladiator waiting in the wings while the crowd held its collective thumb in a middle neutral position. The thumb was pointing up after Bob finished his acoustic set, but as the amps and drums begin to make their appearance on the stage the thumb started to drop.

During the intermission, Dylan cleared the backstage area and called the band into a huddle. “I don’t know what it will be like out there,” he told us. “It’s going to be some kind of carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!”

As the band walked onto the stage, the temperature dropped further and the wind blew harder. We could hear the ominous grumbling of fans waiting to sit in judgment. Though we couldn’t see them, we could feel the tension in the cold night air.

We kicked off with Tombstone Blues to loud jeers and boos, which faded into mixed approval and applause by the end of the song. It was during the fifth song, Maggie’s Farm, that some of the fans jumped out of the seating area and ran across the green grass toward the stage. I only noticed it when I saw numerous security guards tackling folks as they came onto the stage. Bob never missed a beat and the band played on!

I watched Al fall to the stage, as his organ stool was pulled out from under him. Levon held his own as the crowd rushed at him. Bob, Robbie and I were towards the front of the stage. Robbie and I moved closer to Bob, who had a maniacal grin on his face.

When we got to Ballad of A Thin Man, Bob played the intro over and over again until the audience quieted down. I added that move into my book of  “do’s and don’t’s” of on-stage tactics. The concert finally closed with the classic Like a Rolling Stone — drawing cheers from the same audience that had booed us earlier.

The moment the show ended, Bob disappeared. He had left the stadium immediately in his limo leaving us sidemen to fend for ourselves. I left with Kooper, after weaving our way through the crowd, experiencing hot and cold crowd recognition for the first time.

After locating my car, we made our way back to Albert Grossman’s apartment on Manhattan’s lower west side for the after-show party. There we found a smiling Bob Dylan and a very satisfied Grossman.

Soon, we headed to Los Angeles, where our second concert would be held on Sept. 3, 1965 at the Hollywood Bowl. Robbie, Levon and I were told we were flying across the country on a private plane. At first, we were very pleased.

What we weren’t told, however, was the flight was aboard Albert Grossman’s Lockheed Lodestar, a World War II puddle jumper that would take 12 hours and would make three or four stops for fuel. Essentially, we would be keeping the band’s equipment company.

This was my first trip to Los Angeles. I exhaled on landing and took the tour of the LA freeway system as we weaved our way to the Hollywood Sunset Hotel on Sunset Blvd. Al and I were roommates. We stayed just down the hall from Dylan’s suite — arriving two days before the concert.

P.F. Sloan had called Bob to set up a meeting. Sloan had written a tune called the Eve of Destruction, which was a big hit for Barry Maguire. The song was obviously a Dylan imitation. Bob — playing the role of the spider drawing a fly into his complex web — was prepared for a “slice and dice” meeting. I had seen him use the same cutting down-to-size device in tandem with Grossman many times before. Both Bob and Albert enjoyed the edge of a mutual sarcastic banter.  

When I was with Bob, I mostly listened to his conversation since most of what he was saying was dramatically different than what I was used to hearing from others. I was in awe of Bob’s intellectual prowess. For me, playing chess with him years later in Woodstock, was a reminder that life is always a game and we are all still playing.

As we drove up the long driveway to the entrance and then the backstage area of the Hollywood Bowl, I could see the Dylan fans entering the venue. I couldn’t help but notice how different their attire and attitude was than those fans at Forest Hills. The California audience was laid back. They got what we were doing right off the bat.

I was standing next to Bob about to play for a mix of movie stars, folkies and hippies. It was thrilling. I kept my cool and casually took in the surreal view from the stage. At the Hollywood Bowl, there is a moat that separates the audience from the stage area. But I could make out the faces of the first two or three rows, spotting the likes of Gregory Peck, Mel Brooks, Peter Fonda and Johnny Cash watching from below.

We started off with Tombstone Blues, the same as Forest Hills. Except, this time there were smiles and people dancing in the audience. The set was loose, but we all followed Bob and met all the endings together.

Bob started blowing on his C harp — I forget which tune it was — but he couldn’t get the harp to play. Bob asked “Anyone out there got a C harp?” Within seconds, someone in the audience threw a harmonica across the moat that separated the fans from the stage. It landed right at Dylan’s feet. He picked it up and began to play. It was sublime intervention if I ever saw it.

The Hollywood Bowl concert was a major success. Kooper had sped off in the limo with Dylan while I was backstage talking to a young lady named Bobbie who was an actress in LA beach bunny movies and some of her friends. She offered to give me a ride to the hotel, but somehow we took a slight detour and I ended up at the beach in Malibu swimming with her in the moonlight. When I got back to the hotel, the after-concert party had ended.

I had to get to the airport the next day to fly back to New York City to rehearse for a three-week gig in Detroit with vocalist Chico Holiday that I had booked before I met Bob. It was not the best time to leave town for three weeks, but the gig was booked and I was committed.

Later, when I checked in from the Cadillac Square Hotel in Detroit as to when the next rehearsals would start, I was notified by Grossman’s office that the rest of Levon and Robbie’s band, “The Hawks,” would be replacing Al and myself on future shows. That is showbiz.

It turned out that the Hawks, who would soon change their name to The Band, were the perfect fit for Bob Dylan. The rest of the story is rock and roll history.

                                                                            Photo by Daniel Kramer

Folk City Exhibit Opens with a Party at The Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York held a party on June 16 for the opening of Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, a celebration of the city’s role as the center of the folk music revival from its beginnings in the 1930s and 1940s to its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s.

With a wide array of memorabilia, photos, video and sound recordings, the exhibition documents the music and movement that helped transform Greenwich Village and spread as a major cultural phenomenon.

Folk City remains on view through Sunday, November 29.

Many notables from the folk era were present at the party. Here are some images, all by Frank Beacham.

Fred Hellerman, the last surviving member of The Weavers

Oscar Brand, now 95, sings along with the band

Noel "Paul" Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary sings to the crowd through reflected glass

John Cohen, performer, photographer, filmmaker and jack of all trades checks the audio board

John Hammond Jr., blues performer, with Terri Thal, early folk music manager of Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Danny Kalb and others

Tom Paxton

Dominic Chianese, actor and former emcee at Gerde's Folk City

Orangeburg Massacre Remains Unresolved in South Carolina After 47 Years

Racism is a very ugly thing. In the 1950s and 60s, it was far more overt than it is today. Jim Crow laws were openly defended in the South and those demanding civil rights for all citizens were despised, beaten and arrested.

The federal government — then on-board to stop racism — played catch-up in going to court to address the many violations in every aspect of life. For years, there were glitches in civil rights enforcement all over the nation.

One of those glitches happened in Orangeburg, S.C.. In 1968, a loophole in the Civil Rights Act passed four years earlier led to some delay in forcing All Star Bowling Lanes to admit blacks. With two black colleges in Orangeburg and nowhere else to bowl, the bowling alley became a target for civil rights advocates. The black students at the colleges wanted to bowl there and staged a demonstration.

All this might be forgotten today if this racist act hadn’t led to the brutal massacre of several black students by white highway patrolmen. Even worse, it all led to a cover-up of the shooting that continues today — the 47th anniversary of what is known as “The Orangeburg Massacre.”

A conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire onto the campus of South Carolina State College — killing three black students and wounding 27 others.

All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.

Until the shooting, South Carolina was a southern state that had proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. It was all a façade. Nonviolence was equated with racial harmony in a white community with a paternalistic attitude toward its poorer black citizens. Equal rights were another thing.

To help protect its “progressive” self-image on racial issues, a web of official deceptions was created by South Carolina’s young governor — Robert McNair — and his administration to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg.

The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the college. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense in order to protect themselves from a attacking mob of students.

To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.

Time would prove none of it was true.

At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, upon outside scrutiny, it began to unravel. Then, with his legacy threatened, McNair broke nearly forty years of silence in 2006 in an attempt to put the pieces back together.

Ignoring facts proven over the years in court cases and through the first person accounts of eyewitnesses, McNair used local media and friendly “historians” as a tool to help members of his community lie to themselves about their own history. For the last year of his life, he deliberately fogged and distorted the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.

One man who knows the truth minced no words about what happened in 1968.

“They committed murder. Murder…that’s a harsh thing to say, but they did it,” said Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General in 1968. “The police lost their self control. They just started shooting. It was a slaughter. Double ought buckshot is what you use for deer. It’s meant to kill. One guy emptied his service revolver. That takes a lot of shooting. The (students) are running away. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow!  My God, there’s a murderous intent there. We are lucky more weren’t killed.”

Clark said the student deaths were caused by police criminal acts. “The provocation for the incident was an absurd, provocative display of force,” he said.

Gov. McNair responded to Orangeburg with excessive police power because that was the politically expedient thing to do in 1968, the former attorney general said.  

“Fear, anger, a sense of self-righteousness to justify hating began to be seen as successful politics.” When the tactic backfired, Clark added, state officials fabricated stories that many South Carolinians believe to this day.

After 47 years, the story of the Orangeburg Massacre still simmers, unresolved. It is the chilling saga of the horrors of law enforcement motivated by racism and hatred — and the inability of a Southern state to admit the truth.

The central theme is “mendacity,” the web of lies a community spins in a desperate attempt to maintain it’s self-image and dignity when confronted by its own prejudice. It’s a culture where words are constantly being redefined in order that a people can more comfortably deceive themselves.

Today, that racism still exists in South Carolina, as in other places in the country. It has been dressed up and made more sophisticated by the policies of a Republican-controlled legislature that still refuses to even investigate the massacre.

The sad story is after 47 years, the state of South Carolina will not admit it committed murder in the shootings at Orangeburg.

The complete story of the Orangeburg shooting and its cover-up is the subject of my multimedia e-book, “The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre.” The price is $9.99. (ISBN-9781629218762).

The book is available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook at http://store.vook.com/ and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.

Photo by Bill Barley

It's the 80th Anniversary of the Chiquola Mill Massacre in Honea Path, South Carolina

On the morning of September 6, 1934 — 80 years ago — in the tiny town of Honea Path, South Carolina, friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded.

The bloody riot at the town's cotton mill on that warm Thursday morning shaped the lives of two generations to follow — not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. Fear, threats and intimidation were used to silence the story of the greatest tragedy in the town's history.

This September is the 80th anniversary of the murders at Chiquola Mill in Honea Path. Honea Path will not commemorate the anniversary. It would rather forget the tragedy. The story has been erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it.

An instrument of fear was so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children. It formed a lifelong social contract for the entire community's survival.
 
My name is Frank Beacham. I grew up in Honea Path. My mother was the town's history teacher. My father sold textile supplies. My grandfather, I later learned, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934.

In order that the murders in Honea Path not be forgotten, I have produced this 48-minute audio documentary. You can listen or download it. I hope you will listen. It will be posted during the month of September.

Audio Program

The 80th Anniversary of the Murders in Honea Path

My e-book, a full multimedia account of what happened in Honea Path is titled Mill Town Murder ($9.99) (ISBN-9781629218465). It’s available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook here and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.

45 Years Ago Today: The Apollo 11 Moon Launch

Forty-five years ago today, Apollo 11 was launched at 9:32 a.m. from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the first historic journey to the surface of the moon.

After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19.

As a young reporter, I was at Cape Kennedy to cover the launch. Security in those days was remarkably light and we had access to virtually every part of the Kennedy Space Center.

I photographed the astronauts leaving for the launch pad and was driven by NASA to the Saturn V rocket carrying Apollo 11 during the night. As we waited in line for press credentials, I drank coffee with a young Norman Mailer, who was there to write his novel, “Of a Fire On the Moon.”

The next day, at 1:46 p.m., the lunar module Eagle, manned by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, separated from the command module, where a third astronaut, Michael Collins, remained. Two hours later, the Eagle began its descent to the lunar surface, and at 4:18 p.m. the craft touched down on the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility.

Armstrong immediately radioed to Mission Control in Houston a famous message, "The Eagle has landed." At 10:39 p.m., five hours ahead of the original schedule, Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module. Seventeen minutes later, at 10:56 p.m., Armstrong spoke the following words to millions listening at home: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." A moment later, he stepped off the lunar module's ladder, becoming the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.

Aldrin joined him on the moon's surface at 11:11 p.m., and together they took photographs of the terrain, planted a U.S. flag, ran a few simple scientific tests and spoke with President Richard M. Nixon via Houston. By 1:11 a.m. on July 21, both astronauts were back in the lunar module, and the hatch was closed.

The two men slept that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 p.m. the Eagle began its ascent back to the command module. Among the items left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon — July 1969 A.D. — We came in peace for all mankind."

At 5:35 p.m., Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:51 p.m. on July 24.

There would be five more successful lunar landing missions, and one unplanned lunar swing-by, Apollo 13. The last men to walk on the moon, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission, left the lunar surface on December 14, 1972.

The Apollo program was a costly and labor intensive endeavor, involving an estimated 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists and costing $24 billion (close to $100 billion in today's dollars). The expense was justified by President John F. Kennedy's 1961 mandate to beat the Soviets to the moon, and after the feat was accomplished, ongoing missions lost their viability.

Four hours before liftoff, Neil Armstrong leads the astronauts into the vehicle for the ride to the Apollo 11 launch pad

Buzz Aldren leaves the astronaut quarters for the vehicle to the launch pad

In 1969, “security” was a foreign concept. If you had press credentials — which you could get for the asking — you could go practically anywhere. The times were different then.

That freedom included access to the astronauts and the Apollo 11 rocket before the moon launch in 1969. Between five and six in the morning — before sunrise — the astronauts entered a vehicle for the ride to the rocket on the launch pad. I was so close I could reach out and touch them.

In these shots, Buzz Aldrin leaves the crew building walking to the vehicle. The three astronauts, led by Neil Armstrong, enter the vehicle a couple of minutes later. It was less than four hours before these three men would be on their way to the moon.

The VIP seating area at the Kennedy Space Center. That’s Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon in the middle sitting together to view the launch.

Friends pose by the Saturn 5 that would carry Apollo 11 to the moon at the Kennedy Space Center. From left, Ed Riley, Bob Griffeth and Frank Beacham

After the launch on July 16, 1969, I went to my car to leave the Kennedy Space Center. It hit me as I pulled out that I didn’t have a souvenir of the launch. I looked up and there was a “Moon Parking” sign.

I stopped, grabbed the sign and put in the trunk of my car. I still have that sign to this day.

(With the exception of the "friends" image, all photos by Frank Beacham)

After 102 Years, Woody Guthrie's Impact Still As Vital As Ever

Woody Guthrie, the great American troubadour, is as revelant as ever in his 102th year.

Guthrie was a singer-songwriter and folk musician whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists” displayed on his guitar.

His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, Bob Childers and Tom Paxton have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence.

Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression when Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned their traditional folk and blues songs, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour." Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States Communist groups, though he was seemingly not a member of any.

Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. Guthrie died from complications of Huntington's disease, a progressive genetic neurological disorder. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.

Guthrie was born in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate soon to be elected President of the United States.

The young Guthrie seemed to have a natural affinity for music and easily learned to play a harmonica by ear. He began to use his musical skills around town, playing a song for a sandwich or coins. Guthrie easily learned old ballads and traditional English & Scots songs from the parents of friends. Although he did not excel as a student (he dropped out of high school in his fourth year and did not graduate), his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics. Friends recall his reading constantly.

At age 19, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children, Gwendolyn, Sue and Bill. With the advent of the Dust Bowl era, Guthrie joined the thousands of Okies who were migrating to California looking for work. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by these working class people.

During the late part of that decade, he achieved fame with radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial "hillbilly" music and traditional folk music. Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family. While appearing on the commercial radio station KFVD, owned by a populist-minded New Deal Democrat Frank W. Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that would eventually appear on Dust Bowl Ballads.

It was at KFVD that Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about Thomas Mooney, believed by many to be a wrongly convicted man who was, at the time, a leftist cause célèbre. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including Will Geer (who, in turn, introduced Guthrie to John Steinbeck).

Robbin remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the Communist circles in Southern California. Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party," he was never a member of the Party.

He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while not subject to party discipline.

Will Geer invited Guthrie to visit New York. Arriving in city, Guthrie, known as "the Oklahoma cowboy," was embraced by its leftist folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in Geer's apartment. Guthrie made his first recordings—several hours of conversation and songs recorded by the folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress—as well as an album, Dust Bowl Ballads, for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey.

Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for "God Bless America," he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land," in February 1940; it was subtitled "God Blessed America for Me."

The melody is adapted from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother." This was best known as "When The World's On Fire," sung by the country group The Carter Family. Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y."

In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by The John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folksinger Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends. Later, Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.

Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on CBS's radio program Back Where I Come From and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the leftwing musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem.

In November 1941, Seeger introduced Guthrie to his friend the poet Charles Olson, then a junior editor at the fledgling magazine Common Ground. The meeting led to Guthrie writing the article Ear Players in the Spring 1942 issue of the magazine. The article marked Guthrie's debut as a published writer in the mainstream media.

In September 1940, Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program, Pipe Smoking Time. Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary, who was living in Texas. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West.

The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said "I have to set ['sic'] real hard to think of being a dad." Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.

In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved the family north to Washington state on the promise of a job. While writing songs for a documentary, Guthrie toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. He said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise," which appeared to inspire him creatively. In one month Guthrie wrote 26 songs, including three of his most famous: "Roll On Columbia," "Pastures of Plenty" and "Grand Coulee Dam." The surviving songs were released as Columbia River Songs.

At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children. Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage.

Following the conclusion of his work in Washington State, Guthrie corresponded with Pete Seeger about Seeger's newly formed folk-protest group, the Almanac Singers. Guthrie returned to New York with plans to tour the country as a member of the group. The singers originally worked out of a loft in New York City hosting regular concerts called "hootenannys," a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels. The singers eventually outgrew the space and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village.

Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanac Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that World War II was a capitalist fraud. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the 'core' members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays.

In keeping with common socialist ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannys were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of "Union Maid," members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals.

In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working-class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody ... And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance," a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say.

Guthrie was a prolific writer, penning thousands of pages of unpublished poems and prose, many written while living in New York City. After a recording session with Alan Lomax, Lomax suggested Guthrie write an autobiography. Lomax thought Guthrie's descriptions of growing up were some of the best accounts he had read of American childhood.

During this time Guthrie met Marjorie Mazia, a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the prestigious Martha Graham Dance School, where she was assisting Sophie Maslow with her piece Folksay.

Based on the folklore and poetry collected by Carl Sandburg, Folksay included the adaptation of some of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads for the dance. Guthrie continued to write songs and began work on his autobiography. The end product, Bound for Glory, was completed with the patient editing assistance of Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943.

It is vividly told in the artist's down-home dialect, with the flair and imagery of a true storyteller. Library Journal complained about the "too careful reproduction of illiterate speech." But Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in the New York Times, paid the author a fine tribute: "Someday people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world.” A film adaptation of Bound for Glory was released in 1976.

In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land." Over the next few years, he recorded "Worried Man Blues," along with hundreds of other songs. These recordings would later be released by Folkways and Stinson Records, which had joint distribution rights. The Folkways recordings are available (through the Smithsonian Institute online shop); the most complete series of these sessions, culled from dates with Asch, is titled The Asch Recordings.

Guthrie served in the Merchant Marine during the war. In 1945, his association with Communism made him ineligible for further service in the Merchant Marine, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie and Marjorie were married. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island and over time had four children. One of their children, Cathy, died as a result of a fire at age four, sending Guthrie into a serious depression. Their other children were Joady, Nora and Arlo. Arlo followed in his father's footsteps as a singer-songwriter. During this period, Guthrie wrote and recorded Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')," written when Arlo was about nine years old.

The years living on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive periods as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by Guthrie's daughter, Nora. Several of the manuscripts contain scribblings by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie offspring.

During this time Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie and was inspired by his idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Because of Guthrie's suffering Huntington's disease, Dylan and Guthrie's son Arlo later claimed they learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott.

When asked about Arlo's claim, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from Lead Belly."

By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia), but in 1952, it was finally determined that he was suffering from Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother.

Guthrie, increasingly unable to control his muscles, was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966, and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center until his death.

When Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie and whose early folk career was largely inspired by him, learned that Guthrie was hospitalized in Brooklyn, he was determined to meet his idol. By this time, Guthrie was said to have his "good days" and "bad days."

On the good days, Dylan would sing songs to him, and at the beginning Guthrie seemed to warm to Dylan. When the bad days came, Guthrie would berate Dylan. Reportedly on Dylan's last visit, Guthrie did not recognize him.

At the end of his life, Guthrie was largely alone except for family. Because of the progression of Huntington's, he was difficult to be around. Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated, because of a lack of information about the disease. He died on Oct. 3, 1967 at age 55.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people was inspired by folk singers including Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. The American Folk Revival was beginning to take place, focused on the issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and free speech movement.

Terri Thal — Bob Dylan's First Manager — is 75 Years Old

Terri Thal —manager, promoter and friend of some of the seminal folk musicians of the 1960s — is 75 years old. (June 4)

When the artists were just starting their careers, Thal managed Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan (for a little less than a year), Tom Paxton (for about a year), Danny Kalb, Paul Geremia, Mark Ross, Maggie and Terre Roche, the Holy Modal Rounders and others.

After the late 60s, the folk music world shifted to rock. Thal changed too, switching to work for not-for-profit organizations in the early 1970s, most recently as executive director of a maternal-child health agency. Now, she is a consultant to not-for-profits, a writer and speaker, mostly about the 1960s folk music world.

She publicizes old-friend folksingers, recommends musicians to clubs and concert producers and designs programs that integrate folk music, history and local culture. She also protects land and water in Rockland County, where she lives.

Thal was born in Brooklyn. Her interest in folk music came partly from an American Studies honors seminar she took at Brooklyn College with historian John Hope Franklin that integrated historic events, music and literature.

Combining her interests, Thal’s political work during the late 1950s and the 1960s included “getting performers to appear at benefit concerts ─ or at civil rights rallies and anti-Vietman invasion efforts — for SNCC, CORE, the National Civil Liberties Committee and a lot of other organizations.”

“I brought a lot of issues to public attention, including the plight of people who had been released from prison; we held the first Impeach Nixon rally; and we helped a lot of people get needed services. I’m proud of that.”

In the early 1970s, she lived with Paul Solomon Orentlich, a sculptor and actor who had worked at the Kettle of Fish, the bar next to the Gaslight; and who earlier, had been part of People’s Artists, where he had developed musical arrangements for Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie. After 27 years with Thal, Orentlich died of sudden heart failure.

Three years after Orentlich died, Thal and Martus Granirer, a land and water-saving advocate, moved in together. To her surprise, she learned that years before, as a photographer in the late 1950s, Ganirer had designed the cover of Dave Van Ronk’s first record album.

Van Ronk and Thal had hated it; Granirer had meant it as a spoof of other folk album covers of the time.

Terri Thal (left) with Suze Rotolo and guitarist Barry Kornfeld in Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, New York City, in 2009

Photos by Frank Beacham

The Dylanologists: The Book Tour Begins

David Kinney, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the new book, The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob, kicked off his book tour last night in New York City.

Kinney appeared at The Half King’s Monday night reading series. The Half King is a bar and restaurant owned by Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm.

In The Dylanologists, Kinney introduces readers to a vibrant underground: diggers searching for unheard tapes and lost manuscripts, researchers obsessing over the facts of Dylan's life and career, writers working to decode the unyieldingly mysterious songs, collectors snapping up prized artifacts (including Dylan's high chair and the house he grew up in), travelers caravanning from concert to concert.

It's an affectionate mania, but as far as Dylan is concerned, a mania nonetheless. Over the years, he has been frightened, annoyed and perplexed by fans who try to peel back his layers. Intensely private and fiercely combative, Dylan makes one thing plain: He does not wish to be known.

At the reading were several subjects from the book, as well as notable Dylan fans and experts. Clinton Heylin, the English author who has written extensively about popular music and the work of Bob Dylan, was there.

Heylin has published a full-length biography, Dylan: Behind the Shades (1991), a detailed analysis of every song by Dylan in two volumes: Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Vol. 1: 1957-73 (2009), and Still On The Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Vol. 2: 1974-2008 (2010).

Clinton Heylin

Honoring a Long Overdue Southern Hero

April 11, 2014 was a historic day in Charleston, South Carolina. A monument was unveiled for a man whose brave actions involving civil rights 67 years ago caused him to be ostracized and run out of his home state of South Carolina.

Historically in Charleston, it has been a special kind of hell for black people. As slaves, blacks were publicly whipped, branded and hanged. Later, they were discriminated against on so many levels one couldn’t count them. Things are still far from truly equal.

In the late 1940s, before the rest of the nation started to fight for civil rights, this man — a federal judge who was the son of a Confederate soldier and presided in the city where the Civil War began — took some extraordinarily brave actions on the bench.

U.S. District Judge Waites Waring ruled in 1947 that South Carolina’s all-white Democratic primary was unconstitutional, and later, well before the U.S. Supreme Court got around to agreeing with him, that racial segregation in the schools was inherently unequal.

Waring's controversial opinions made him a pariah in the segregated South. A cross was burned in his yard, bricks were thrown through his windows and he received numerous death threats.

Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of Charleston called Judge Waring “a monster” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The judge was shunned by his own relatives, forced to resign from his clubs and even from his own church, and finally from the federal bench. He and his wife fled to New York City for their personal safety.

In South Carolina, punishment for such “sins” is silence. The white people of Charleston made Judge Waring disappear. Largely forgotten in Charleston for more than five decades, Waring is finally being remembered today for the role he played in school desegregation.

A statue of Waring will be dedicated today at the federal courthouse where he heard his cases. Also, a historical marker about the Clarendon County, South Carolina case he presided over was recently placed outside the courthouse.

Waring's 1951 dissent in the Clarendon case was largely followed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education outlawing segregated public schools. The Brown ruling came after the appeal of the South Carolina case was combined with similar cases from Kansas, Delaware and the District of Columbia.

Waring was the first judge since the U.S. Supreme Court 1896’s decision in Plessey vs. Ferguson establishing separate but equal in race relations as the law of the land to write an opinion challenging the doctrine.

Waring wrote that beyond unequal facilities "segregation in education can never produce equality" and called it "an evil that must be eradicated." The Clarendon County case, he wrote, demanded a "strike at the cause of the infection and not merely at the symptoms of the disease."

When Waring and two other federal judges heard the Clarendon case in Charleston in 1951 — a case in which future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued for the plaintiffs — hundreds of blacks lined up outside the courthouse hoping to get seats, although there wasn't room for all.

"They had come there on pilgrimage," Waring recalled in an interview at Columbia University some years later. "It's awfully heartening when you get poor, illiterate, ignorant people to suddenly sniff a little breath of freedom."

After Judge Waring arrived in New York City, he befriended the late CBS journalist Charles Kuralt. The judge was asked by Kuralt how he had come so far, considering his Southern background, to make such a brave ruling.

“Being a judge,” Waring told Kuralt, “I gradually became judicious.”

Kuralt, in his book “Charles Kuralt’s America,” said the next time Waring returned to Charleston was to be buried. Kuralt was at the funeral as a reporter on January 17, 1969.

“I remember no more than six or eight white faces in the crowd; white Charlestonians, including most members of his family, stayed home that day to show their contempt for him. Hundreds of black people stood there shoulder to shoulder to show their respect.”

Kuralt called Waring in his book “an unsung American hero.” And that he was.

South Carolina has changed in many ways since Judge Waring made his famous rulings. But it is far too soon to say that racism there is behind us. It has just taken on a different form in a harsh political establishment that is virtually all far rightwing Republicans.

But at least the silence has ended and Judge Waring got a public appreciation for his bravery and good works. In a political environment like the one in South Carolina, that’s a miracle in itself.

With thanks to the Associated Press and Charles Kuralt!

Outrage: Confederate Devotee Elected to Head College of Charleston

A very sad story occurred this weekend at the College of Charleston. Glenn McConnell, a Confederate civil war devotee and proponent of flying the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina Statehouse, has been named the president of the historic college.

Located in Charleston, S.C, the College of Charleston was founded in 1770 and chartered in 1785, making it the oldest college or university in South Carolina, the 13th oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the oldest municipal college in the country.

The founders of the college include three future signers of the Declaration of Independence (Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton and Thomas Heyward) and three future signers of the United States Constitution (John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney).

It is said that the college was founded to "encourage and institute youth in the several branches of liberal education." Extraordinarily, the man who is taking over the leadership is not even an educator, much less a liberal.

Glenn McConnell was the president of the state Senate until he was elevated to the lieutenant governor’s office due to a resignation. He was never elected to the position. He will arrive on campus with opposition of the faculty, students and community leaders opposed to his support of highly controversial Confederate Civil War causes and his lack of academic experience.

McConnell once operated a civil war memorabilia store in Charleston and sold products with names like Dixie Dew bottled water, and hot dogs with names like The Dixie Dog, The Union Dog, The Mason Dixon Dog and The Good 'Ol Rebel Dog.

As a state senator has led the charge in preserving the Confederate submarine, the H.L. Hunley, shepherding millions of dollars to the preservation project. "The Hunley is more than a submarine," McConnell has said. "It is a message that continues to tell us that duty, honor and valor will endure forever."

McConnell fought to keep the Confederate flag flying of the South Carolina Statehouse and was instrumental in getting the flag moved to an even more prominent spot on the statehouse grounds. The controversial flag still flies today.

“We will teach generations to come about the honor of these people and if they are going to choose the road of trying to stereotype us as racists and as hate mongers, then we are forever divided,” he once said.

McConnell is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, wears civil war uniforms and plays war games with enactors.

Protests came from Charleston-area NAACP leaders and students while trustees met last week to consider McConnell.

The faculty, fearing the school would lose its 244-year identity as liberal arts school under an economic-development mandate, passed a resolution asking for a president with a university background.

In his letter to the presidential search committee, McConnell wrote that he has fundraising and economic development experience.

“While I do not have a teaching background, I have over the course of my life gained varied experiences that help qualify me for this challenge,” he wrote. He cited efforts to raise money to recover and restore the confederate submarine.

How the College of Charleston could appoint a man like McConnell to its top job is beyond belief. I imagine the school will lose many students and many who might have attended the historic college will change their plans. His appointment is a disgrace to higher education.

It is another sad story about how misguided and incompetent many in positions of authority in South Carolina have become. They are clearly in the process of destroying their greatest institutions.

Pat Weaver: The Visionary Who Created NBC's Tonight and TODAY Shows

Now, Jimmy Fallon has taken the reins of NBC’s Tonight Show, the longest, currently running television entertainment program in the United States.

The Tonight Show began in 1954, with Steve Allen as its first host. Then came Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and now Jimmy Fallon.

With all the hoopla about the Fallon version of Tonight, few know how the show was created. I was very lucky, because the man who created both Tonight and the TODAY Show, was a former teacher.

It was April 1, 1987 when I first entered a classroom in Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA to begin a 10-week lecture class called "Home Communication and Entertainment in the 20th Century." I was excited about the class because of the inside knowledge of the teacher. He was no academic, but a media visionary who had practically invented network television programming as we know it.

In the coming weeks, I would find Sylvester "Pat" Weaver a charming, friendly, accessible man. He was also stunningly eloquent and firmly grounded in a set of beliefs about the public obligations of television that would be ridiculed today by industry executives as idealistic and economically unsound. 

Yet, as the former chairman and president of NBC when television came of age in the 1950s, this executive had — from the TODAY Show to the Tonight Show — almost single-handedly created the program genres that dominate network schedules to this day.

After an incredible life of innovation, Pat Weaver died at the age of 93 at his Santa Barbara, CA home on March 15, 2002. In his case, it's a vast understatement to say that his legacy lives on.

In addition to creating the morning and evening television formats that every network still embraces, Weaver developed the "magazine format" for advertisers, a concept that shifted control of early television programming from the sponsors to the networks. When Weaver joined NBC in 1949, radio was the dominant mass medium and TV was still considered a luxury in most American homes. 

As had been the practice in network radio, early TV programming was produced and controlled by advertisers. "Most people don't realize that the networks were really just facilities and had nothing to do with programming at the time," Weaver told us. Vowing to change the practice, he devised the idea that NBC should produce its own programs and then sell commercial  time in segments to multiple advertisers.

As a radio veteran who had previously worn the hats of writer, producer, director, announcer and reporter, Weaver felt comfortable guiding NBC into the television era. If he'd done nothing else, his taste in talent and programming alone would have made his career.

It was Pat Weaver who introduced American TV audiences to Bob Hope, Danny Thomas, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Fred Allen and Jimmy Durante.

Weaver also created the concept of the TV "spectacular" or "special," as it was later called. He introduced Producer's Showcase, a program vehicle to introduce new talent to American audiences. Among the landmark live broadcasts under his watch were a production of Peter Pan with Mary Martin and Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera commissioned for television.

Weaver's programming track record remains unparalleled, including such television classics as the still-running Meet the Press in news (it began on radio) to Your Show of Shows, an entertainment giant starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris with a writing staff that included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart.

To students of the history of television, Pat Weaver will be remembered as one of the medium's pioneers. Yet, in his later years, Weaver viewed his television legacy with great disappointment. He believed that television had an obligation to expand the minds of its audience.

Though a consummate showman and no highbrow, Weaver saw television's public service obligation as one to educate and entertain with a high level of artistry. For this, he was seen as a visionary who was sometimes too far ahead of his broadcasting colleagues.

Take, for example, the TODAY Show, the morning broadcast that Weaver created with host Dave Garroway in 1952 to lure listeners away from morning radio. The original idea was to introduce the audience to the best and brightest of American thinkers. Writers, artists, scientists and the country's intelligentsia would use the leisurely morning time slot to expose the emerging television audience to new, cutting-edge ideas.

Originally, the Tonight Show (first titled Broadway Open House), he told our class, was created to expose Americans to the finest talent in the nation's artistic capital, New York City. Weaver wanted to take live cameras into Broadway theatres, opera houses, dance halls and nightclubs to introduce NBC's audiences to performers and creative works that were new and undiscovered.  

In essence, Pat Weaver wanted NBC's morning and late night programming to expose the common man to the best in American arts and culture. "It's very disappointing," he said. "There's occasional good things on, but there's no consistent arts programming." 

The TODAY show, he lamented, had become a series of quick segments to hawk books, movies and new products. Tonight was little more than a vehicle for topical comedy. Weaver's disdain for his grown-up program creations was palpable.

It should come as no surprise that a man, who in 1954 was described by New Yorker magazine as television's "most unrelenting thinker and most vocal theorist," would make enemies among the corporate bean counters. After eight years at NBC, Weaver was forced to relinquish  control to Robert Sarnoff, the son of Gen. David Sarnoff (nicknamed "General Fangs" by Weaver), the head of RCA. Weaver left the network in 1956.

Weaver's vision for TV's future followed him after his NBC days. In the early 1960s, he became a pay television pioneer by heading STV (Subscription Television) in Los Angeles. The venture, which would offer movies and arts programming on a subscription basis, failed. Not because audiences didn't want it, but because media competitors used the courts and political system to block it.

Today, when I hear a young television executive thumb his nose at the idea of serving the public interest due to "the competitive realities of the marketplace," I think of Pat Weaver. The memorable ten weeks I spent in his classroom taught me that one can pioneer a profitable media business while at the same time  serving the higher interests of the community. The trick, Weaver knew so well, is not becoming blinded by greed.

Oh, a footnote for the inquiring minds among you. Yes, Pat Weaver was the father of the actress Sigourney Weaver. And yes, she did show up to sit in on her father's class at UCLA. Nice lady…a trait that must run in the family.

The Death of Pete Seeger

I knew this day would eventually come, but it’s still hard to believe that Pete Seeger is no longer with us. He has been everywhere—for so long—that he had almost become a permanent part of my life.

For about 50 years, I’ve probably seen him hundreds of times in concert and at various events. He connected to so many people and had personal values that I treasured. He was far more than just a folk singer. He was a moral force that always seemed to make the right choices in life.

Before I was even born, Pete was a fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s. He had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.

Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, but Pete did the noble thing. He would not hide...or cooperate with the politicians. The government thought they had shut him up, but as a banjo teacher, he quietly helped spawn an entire generation of folk singers that actually changed the world.

In the 1960s, Pete re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture and environmental causes. He did it all.

He wrote or co-wrote so many great songs including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers) and "Turn, Turn, Turn!" These songs have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world.

Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many others) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. It happened soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.

I was so lucky that I got to see a reunion of the Weavers at Carnegie Hall. That was living history at its finest hour. I interviewed Pete, reveled in his singing through the years and attended his 90th birthday party at Madison Square Garden. Like I said, he was everywhere.

Yet, through all the adulation he received, Pete was a normal guy—truly a man of the people. All the fame never went to his head. People just aren’t made like Pete Seeger anymore. It was a privilege to be alive at the same time as this great man and to learn from his towering example.

The 30th Anniversary of Apple's Macintosh

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.

I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.

The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.

The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.

The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.

I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.

When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.

This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.

Suze Rotolo Was Born 70 Years Ago Today

Suze Rotolo was born 70 years ago today.

Rotolo was an artist, but was best known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend from 1961 to 1964 and a strong influence on his music. Rotolo is the woman walking with him on the cover of his album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, a photograph by the CBS studio photographer, Don Hunstein.

In her book, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Rotolo described her time with Dylan and other figures in the folk music and bohemian scene in Greenwich Village, New York. She discussed her upbringing as a "red diaper" baby—a child of radicals during the McCarthy Era. As an artist, she specialized in artists' books and taught at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Rotolo, of Italian-American descent, was born at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, New York, and raised in Sunnyside, Queens. Her parents were Joachim and Mary (née Pezzati) Rotolo, who were members of the American Communist Party. In July 1961, she graduated from Bryant High School.

At about the time she met Dylan, Rotolo began working full-time as a political activist in the office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the anti-nuclear group SANE. She and her sister Carla had also entered the Greenwich Village folk scene.

Rotolo first met Dylan at a Riverside Church folk concert in July 1961. They were introduced by Carla, who at that time was working as an assistant to folklorist Alan Lomax.

Describing their meeting in his memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan wrote: "Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard... Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness – a Rodin sculpture come to life.”

It was not until they met that Dylan's writing began to address issues such as the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war. They started living together in early 1962, much to the disapproval of her family. As Dylan's fame grew, Rotolo found the relationship increasingly stressful.

She wrote: "Bob was charismatic: he was a beacon, a lighthouse, he was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself. I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed. I was unable to find solid ground. I was on quicksand and very vulnerable.”

Rotolo left New York in June 1962, with her mother, to spend six months studying art at the University of Perugia in Italy. She was known there as Justine Rotolo, having used an invented middle name to register as "S. Justine Rotolo.”

Dylan's separation from his girlfriend has been credited as the inspiration behind several of his finest love songs, including "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," "One Too Many Mornings" and "Boots of Spanish Leather."

Rotolo's political views were widely regarded as having influenced Dylan's topical songwriting. Dylan also credited her with interesting him in the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who heavily influenced his writing style.

The influence of Bertolt Brecht on Dylan's songwriting has also been acknowledged by Dylan as stemming from Rotolo's participation in Brechtian theater during their relationship.

In Chronicles, Dylan describes the impact of the song "Pirate Jenny" while attending a Brecht show on which Rotolo worked. Dylan's interest in painting can also be traced back to his relationship with Rotolo.

Rotolo emphasized her shared values with Dylan in an interview with author Robbie Woliver: "People say I was an influence on him, but we influenced each other. His interests were filtered through me and my interests, like the books I had, were filtered through him... It was always sincere on his part. The guy saw things. He had an incredible ability to see and sponge—there was a genius in that. The ability to create out of everything that's flying around. To synthesize it. To put it in words and music."

Rotolo became pregnant in 1963 by Dylan and had an abortion. Their relationship failed to survive the abortion, Dylan's affair with Joan Baez and the hostility of the Rotolo family. Suze moved into her sister's apartment in August 1963. She and Dylan broke up in 1964, in circumstances which Dylan described in his "Ballad in Plain D.”

Twenty years later, he apologized for the song, saying: "I must have been a real schmuck to write that. I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I've written, maybe I could have left that alone."

Rotolo traveled to Cuba in June 1964, with a group, although it was (and remains) unlawful for United States citizens to do so. She was quoted as saying, in regard to opponents of Fidel Castro that, "These gusanos [worms] are not suppressed. There can be open criticism of the regime. As long as they keep it to talk they are tolerated, as long as there is no sabotage."

Rotolo married Italian Enzo Bartoccioli, a film editor who works for the United Nations, in 1967. Together they had one son, Luca, who is a guitarist in New York.

In New York, Rotolo worked as an illustrator and painter, before concentrating on creating book art, making book-like objects which incorporated found art.

Remaining politically active, Rotolo joined the street-theater group Billionaires for Bush and protested at the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan.

Rotolo evaded discussing her relationship with Dylan for decades. In July 2004, she was interviewed in a documentary produced by New York PBS Channel 13 and The New York Daily News; in November 2004, she made an unannounced appearance at the Experience Music Project, on a panel discussing Dylan's early days in Greenwich Village.

She and her husband also were involved in putting on a memorial event for Dave van Ronk after the singer's death in 2002. Rotolo made an appearance in Martin Scorsese's documentary film, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, focusing on Dylan's early career (1961–66), which played on the American Masters series on U.S. public television in September 2005.

She was also interviewed nationally in 2008 by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air to promote her book, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, which was published by Broadway Books on May 13, 2008.

Rotolo recounted her attempts not to be overshadowed by her relationship with Dylan. She discussed her need to pursue her artistic creativity and to retain her political integrity, concluding: "The sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it. The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell."

Rotolo died of lung cancer at her home in New York City's NoHo district on February 25, 2011 at age 67.

In the photo, Suze Rotolo in Washington Square Park, 2009.

Photo by Frank Beacham

Peter Asher Takes His Audience Down Memory Lane

When I was in high school in 1964, I went to a British invasion show that featured Peter and Gordon and the David Clark Five. It was heaven.

Then, in 2005, I went to a tribute show at B.B. Kings Club in New York City for Mike Smith, the paralyzed former lead singer and keyboard player for the David Clark Five. On the bill was the first reunion of Peter and Gordon together in 37 years. Also there were The Zombies, Denny Laine and Billy J. Kramer.


Peter Asher and Gordon Waller had gone their separate ways, but reunited this night for Smith. That first night they were back together, I sat and talked with them until 5 am in the morning in the bar at B.B. Kings. What luck to see them again, talk with them and share great memories. They had so much fun they performed a few more times together, until Waller’s death in 2009.


Peter Asher did a recent tribute show at the Cutting Room in New York City to Peter and Gordon and his long career in the music business. For me, it was a wonderful walk down memory lane.

While attending the independent Westminster School as a boy, Asher first met fellow pupil Gordon Waller, and they began playing and singing together as a duo in coffee bars. In 1962, they began working formally as Peter and Gordon. Their biggest hit was the 1964 Paul McCartney song "A World Without Love."


Asher was the older brother of actress and businesswoman, Jane Asher, and radio actress, Clare Asher. Jane Asher was, in the mid-1960s, the girlfriend of Paul McCartney. Through this connection, Asher and Waller were often given unrecorded Lennon-McCartney songs to perform. For a while they lived under the same roof.


Asher called on old friend Denny Laine, an original member of The Moody Blues, to sing the group’s first hit "Go Now" from 1964. Laine later became a member of Wings with Paul McCartney from 1971 to 1981. There are many dots to connect in Asher’s story.

Peter Asher went on to become a well known A&R man and record producer (first to the Beatle’s Apple Records) working with many of the top names in the business. His one-man show looking back at the 1960’s is a delight. He even sings duets with Waller, from video tapes made of their reunion performances.


It was pure magic to have a musical group extend almost 60 years—from my high school days until now. But Peter and Gordon were no ordinary group and their legacy lives on. It is really remarkable.

Seeing Different

At PhotoExpo in New York City, I stopped at the Nikon booth to hear a presentation by Lynn Goldsmith, a photographer, film director and recording artist. Her work has appeared on the covers and in publications in many countries for the past 35 years. She has done over 100 album covers. In addition to her editorial work, Goldsmith has also focused on fine art photography with conceptual images.

Goldsmith is known for her portraits of rock and rolls biggest icons. She chronicled Bruce Springsteen’s passage to glory, the Rolling Stones’ legendary stadium tours, Michael Jackson’s staggering ascent and the brooding force of Bob Marley. Culture heroes like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith became frequent subjects for her lens, as she joined the community of artists whose songs shaped our era. The range of her work is staggering.

But on this day she showed the first published image she ever made at 16-years-old. In 1964, her father took her to the Doral Hotel on Miami Beach—the day the Beatles visited. Goldsmith said she was not as impressed with the Beatles as with the patterned carpeting in the Doral lobby. When she looked down, she noticed the Beatles’ shoes—shoes that reminded her of something she had seen worn by James Brown.

“I refused to photograph their faces because I was a devoted Rolling Stones fan,” Goldsmith recalled. “It would have been a betrayal.”

So this is the picture she took. The shoes of the four Beatles on the carpet in the Doral. Her eyes saw the scene differently from anyone else that day.

This image was an early sign she would become a great rock and roll photographer.

A Simple Twist of Fate

I was in the tenth grade of high school when I ventured one Saturday to the local radio station, WHPB, in nearby Belton, South Carolina. It was a few minutes drive from my home in Honea Path and I drove my old 1942 Willys army jeep to the station parking lot.

Being the weekend, there was only one person there—the on-air DJ—who was doing his shift. Through the glass control room window facing the outer lobby, he motioned me inside.

I introduced myself. He was a friendly fellow and introduced himself as Charlie Moore. It was a quiet time at the studio and he engaged me in conversation.  I told him I was in high school and wanted to work in radio part-time. “How do I get a job here?,” I asked.

Learn the ropes, Charlie responded. Then he handed me the opportunity of a lifetime. I was welcome to hang out and watch what he did. Maybe if I picked enough skills, I could get hired at the station. That’s all I needed to hear.

Every weekend in the following weeks I joined Charlie Moore on his shift. I learned a few things about him that I used to my advantage. When he wasn’t working at the radio station, Charlie was on the road singing bluegrass music. Musicians made little money performing in those days and Charlie needed the salary from the radio job, as well as the station’s studio facilities to record his music.

I also noted that Charlie was always tired and was taking amphetamine pills. I soon learned that if I could run the audio board and play the records, it would allow Charlie to lie on the couch and catch catnaps between records. I had found my entree.

I became so proficient at letting Charlie sleep that I would often wake him just before he had to go on the air.  I’d hold a microphone over him while he lay on the couch, and he’d introduce the next record.

I quickly won a friend in Charlie Moore, who appreciated a young kid doing all the dirty work while letting him catch a few winks. As I gained more skills, Charlie had me run the audio board and record his music in the studio. Whether the station management knew or didn’t know about these recordings, I’ll never know. But on weekends, when no one else was around, the studio would suddenly fill with bluegrass musicians.


In the studio at WHPB, we had a classic RCA 44B ribbon microphone in a small studio connected to an RCA board and Roberts and Magnacord reel-to-reel tape recorders. It was a similar set-up in that era to the Sun or Stax Studios where some great music was being recorded only a few hours away. Performers could stand all around the big microphone and sing. I recorded hours of mono recordings of Charlie and his band members.

It would be forty years later before I would learn that many of those players were members of Bill Monroe’s great band, the Blue Grass Boys, and the tapes were made into recordings that are still played on jukeboxes to this day. Charlie Moore told me very little.

I had completely lost touch with Charlie Moore and when I began to look into his life. I was surprised at what I didn’t know. When we worked together, I knew nothing of his major musical and songwriting talent. I knew him only in the context of the radio station.

Searching on the Internet, I discovered that Travers Chandler, a professional bluegrass musician whose band, Avery County, is based in the Asheville, North Carolina area, has written about Charlie Moore. In fact, Travers Chandler revers Charlie, crediting him as a major influence in his own career. I called Travers to ask about Charlie.

“When I heard him sing on Truck Drivers Queen, I knew I wanted to be a bluegrass entertainer, but even more importantly I wanted to SING like Charlie Moore,” Travers told me. In fact, Traver’s band, Avery County, was named as a tribute after a Charlie Moore album by the same name. Travers never knew Charlie personally, but his father did. They were drinking buddies.

When I worked with Charlie Moore at WHPB, he was in his late 20s. Only a year or two earlier, he had teamed with Bill Napier, a former member of the Clinch Mountain Boys. Moore and Napier signed a recording contract with King Records and began performing on television in Greenville and Spartanburg S.C., and in Panama City, Florida.

I remember watching Charlie on television early in the morning before going to school. It was hard for me to grasp his grueling life and his constant working schedule. He would be up at 5 a.m. to do the TV show and then out in the evening to play personal appearances. On weekends, he would work at WHPB. At least I better understand why he was always tired and taking those pills.

Charlie never introduced me to the musicians I recorded, but there’s a good chance I also recorded he and Bill Napier. “I know there were lots of people who recorded in Belton at WHPB who were members of Bill Monroe's band. Many essential recordings of legends were made in places like Belton, and at little radio stations in Virginia and North Carolina,” Travers told me.


“I know that Carl Story recorded some there in the 1960s and there’s a good chance that you recorded a bunch of stuff there that ended up on vinyl that people seek out today. I have to believe that Charlie had a hand in it, because Charlie and Carl were tight at one time,” Travers continued.

“You didn't know then what you were part of. It was legendary. At that time, musicians were starving to death. The tapes recorded at the radio stations would be sent to the record labels the artists were working with and they would be pressed and released. Typically as 45s. A lot of times, it was just a wink and nod with the stations. Sometimes the stations were fine with it.”

At the time a lot of bands were working out of radio stations. In the late 50s and early 60s, bluegrass music almost perished. If an artist was making a record, it was on a shoestring budget type deal where little or no money was provided for recording or expenses or anything else.
 
Travers told me that even Bill Monroe didn't make much money in those days. “Bill was a stubborn man. He had a painful childhood. He was guarded in everything he did. He didn't trust anybody. And he was not a businessman. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1960s that he trusted someone enough to be his manager did he make any money. 

“As to his band, back in those days it was a lot of swap and go. In the early 60s, somebody would leave the Stanley Brothers and go to work with Charlie and Bill Napier. Then they’d go work for Monroe or Stanley, then they’d get tired of that and come back. That’s just the way it was.”

Charlie Moore was close friends with Carter Stanley, one of the Stanley Brothers. “Carter was Charlie’s idol. Charlie wanted to be just like Carter. Both went out the same way.  Carter drank himself to death at 41. Charlie drank himself to death at 44,” Travers said. “When Charlie and Bill Napier broke up in about 1968, Charlie went to radio full time and became an MC at bluegrass shows and festivals. Charlie remained tight with everybody. He was friends with Ralph Stanley.”

Travers said he talked with Ralph Stanley about Charlie. “Ralph said my brother and Charlie Moore were the two greatest songwriters I've ever seen.”

Ironically, the great James Brown, who was also on King Records, ran the audio board for Charlie and Bill Napier in the Cincinnati, Ohio studio in the early days.

“Charlie would arrive at King and have to record 12 songs and wouldn't have any material,” Travers said. “Charlie was worn out. There was a coffee shop across the street and Charlie and Bill would go over there, sit down, and Charlie would write songs on a napkin.  In an hour or so, he'd have 10 or 12 songs and they'd go the studio and work with the band.  Bill Napier would come up with the melody and then they’d cut the record.”

In the mid 1970s, Charlie continued to struggle in the U.S. but began to find a following in Europe in places like Belgium, France and Holland. His luck, however, ran out. He began drinking heavily and looked old and frail by his early 40s. Charlie became ill on the way to a show in West Virginia. Taken to a hospital, he went into a coma. He died on Christmas Eve, 1979.

Ironically, Charlie Moore gave me an entry into an industry that became my life’s work, but I never knew his story until I hit my 60s. I only knew him as an incredibly nice guy who took the time to help a kid. Little did I know that he was a brilliant songwriter and musician and would leave behind stacks of unrecorded songs.

Bluegrass musician Jimmy Martin told Travers Chandler that Charlie Moore was one of the greatest singers ever in bluegrass and country music. Charlie could have been a country star in the 1960s, Martin said, but he refused to stray from what called his old time “hillbilly” music.

“Charlie almost came along at the wrong time,” Travis noted. “There was money to be made in those days. But he was always a step behind. It was a hard luck career.”

My work at WHPB won me a South Carolina State Broadcasters Association scholarship to the University of South Carolina. It was my ticket out of the tiny town of Honea Path. After I left in 1966, I never spoke to Charlie Moore again. It took nearly 43 years for me to learn his story.

The only known live performance footage of Charlie Moore.

           

Possibility Junkie, a New Musical That Targets the Artistic Process

We live in an era of magnified perceptions. For many Americans not in the glorified, hyper-wealthy one percent, this is a time of diminished possibilities and loss of hope. David Ippolito and Gretchen Cryer precisely target those perceptions in a magnificent new play, Possibility Junkie. They hit a slam dunk home run!

Possibility Junkie is a timely look at how we frame our lives and our definition of success in a culture where corporate media and propaganda portrayed as “news” is bombarding us from every direction with constant lies—usually based on fear. It’s tough to create a fulfilling life in an environment where everyone around you worships money and judges every endeavor by how much of a profit it generates.

Yet, that’s what artists do, creating their work while at the same time reflecting a mirror on the foibles of the cultural condition around them. David Ippolito, the central character in this play, is an independent singer-songwriter who has gained a huge following as a troubadour in Central Park for the past 20 years. David is the real deal and this is his inspiring story. I have known David for a decade, watched his work develop and witnessed his struggles in trying to live an honest, artistic life.

There are two key lines in the play. The first is “Keep Hope Alive” and the second is the title, “Possibility Junkie.” Both came from the late Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles and many other bands to America in the 1960s. Bernstein found David singing in Central Park 15 years ago and they became friends. Sid died at age 95 last August 21. 

In the play, Bernstein’s character is “Burn,” an elderly wise man played beautifully by Rob Barnes, a veteran Broadway actor and singer. Barnes was in the original Broadway casts of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Having known Sid as well, I can attest that Barnes carries much of Bernstein in his character.

 

Rob Barnes and David Ippolito

The plot of Possibility Junkie centers around a right wing commentator on FAX News (loosely based on FOX, though it’s hard me to even call it “news.”) David does a song about him in Central Park and a fan records it on video. The video is put on YouTube and goes viral. The FAX commentator, Sean Kilroy (played by Joel H. Jones), gets angry and tries to do David in.

He uses his stunningly attractive assistant, Ainsley Louis (played by Jillian Louis), to spy on David and secretly video tape him, trying to get any kind dirt possible. David falls for Ainsley, a walking, singing bombshell, only to find himself and his friend, Burn, betrayed by her ambitions to get her own TV show.

Jillian Louis and Joel H. Jones

Possibility Junkie is an inspiring musical with songs not just written for this play, but written for over 20 years from the heart by David Ippolito. It all melds together in what I don’t lightly call Ippolito’s masterpiece. His “The Last Protest Song” toward the end brought tears to my eyes. With this play, David has now transitioned from being a talented singer and songwriter to being a creator of musical theatre. This is an ideal new format for him.

The expert hand of Gretchen Cryer is also evident in this production. An earlier theatrical presentation by David was too loose and talky, with David ad-libbing each night. That’s gone in this production, no doubt the work of Cryer in co-writing the book and directing the production. Cryer, the mother of television actor Jon Cryer, co-wrote the classic, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On The Road. She has David acting loose, but he’s far more precise in his presentation this time.

In fact, there wasn’t a weak player in this excellent cast of actors and singers—featuring in addition to Ippolito and Barnes—J.C. Hall (a terrific hip-hop artist), Joel H. Jones, Jillian Louis, Teresa Reynolds and Vanessa Theus. Music direction was by Mike Murray, with some musicians—especially mandolin player Chris Tedesco—joining the cast dancing on the main stage while playing.

Heather Wolensky’s set design was also unique, featuring actual moving image backdrops of where David plays in Central Park. The various video segments plugged into the play seamlessly. It was “virtual set” technology well used in the story. The choreography by David Eggers is also excellent.

A story that Sid Bernstein once told me came ringing back as I watched Possibility Junkie in a packed house on its opening night. Noting that he had found the Beatles in Liverpool in the 1960s, Sid said he hoped one day he could give Liverpool a gift from America. That gift, he told me, would be David Ippolito. “David’s got it,” Sid said, “and they would love him over there.”

Sid never got the chance to promote David in Liverpool, but the man—who also brought The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, The Moody Blues and The Kinks to the United States—had an insanely good eye for talent.

Possibility Junkie runs through Oct. 20 at the Theatre for the New City at 155 First Ave in New York City.

 

David Ippolito with the real Sid Bernstein

Photo by Frank Beacham

New Multimedia e-Books Reveal Little Known South Carolina Stories on the “Shag,” “Beach Music,” Racial Violence and Textile Labor Strife

A series of three new multimedia e-Books that focus on three little known historical events that helped define South Carolina in the last century are now available. All three were written by Frank Beacham.

The three separate eBooks, published by Vook in New York City, combine video, audio, photographs and text in a new kind of storytelling that work on a range if e-Book readers and personal computers (iPad, Kindle, Nook, Macintosh and PC). This state-of-the-art storytelling technology is available across platforms the first time this year.

The first e-Book, Charlie’s Place, examines the remarkable interracial collaboration in the segregated post-World War II years that led to the creation of South Carolina’s official state music (beach music) and dance (the shag).

The second e-Book, The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre, deals with the nearly 50-year legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre. The story centers on the killing of black college students in 1968 at South Carolina State College and the state’s continuing cover-up of the facts surrounding the shootings.

The third e-Book, Mill Town Murder, is  the author’s personal story of his grandfather’s involvement in the killing of seven mill workers in his hometown of Honea Path during the Textile Strike of 1934.

“Powerful forces have shaped and defined a sanitized version of Southern history,” said author Frank Beacham, now a New York City-based writer and media producer. “These eBooks, born of the frustration of learning more about my own history growing up in South Carolina, became an attempt to meet these distortions head-on by exploring my memories and answering some lingering questions.

“For years I have been collecting video, audio and photographs relating to these stories,” Beacham continued. “Now, for the first time, the technology exists to put all these elements together in a compelling way to tell their stories in a fuller way.”

The result of the Beacham’s work are three compelling new multimedia e-Books that destroy carefully constructed myths to reveal three extraordinary events that many influential Southerners would just as soon forget.

In addition to the three new multimedia e-Books, a new third print edition of Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder by Frank Beacham (ISBN:1591131871, Price: $15.00) has been released. The new edition of the print book contains all the updates for the three stories found in the individual multimedia e-Books without the audio, video and photographs. It can be purchased or ordered through major retail book outlets or online at: http://www.booklocker.com/books/939.html/.

In Charlie’s Place, Beacham tells the true story of the Ku Klux Klan's violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues.

He describes how a handful of adventurous young black & white dancers—with the help of a fearless black nightclub owner—risked life and limb in an era of racial segregation to create a bold new dance and an enduring Southern musical legacy. For the first time, the reader can see and hear these dance pioneers tell the story in their own words.

Included in the new multimedia edition are audio and video interviews and clips with such notables as Jerry Wexler, John R, Hoss Allen, Marion Carter, Leon Williams, George Lineberry, Harry Driver, Chicken Hicks, Bill Pinkney, Clarice Reavis, Bill Wingate, Billy Jeffers, Maurice Williams and Clifford Curry. There are also dozens of photographs included in the publication.

The new eBook and print versions also contain newly updated material from FBI records that offer far greater detail to the story than in previous editions.

The story evolved from a series of recorded interviews by the Beacham with many of the key figures credited with the creation of South Carolina’s state dance, the shag, and the state’s music, a sub-genre of rhythm and blues now called Carolina “beach music.”

In a vivid and newly detailed description, Beacham reconstructs the violent armed assault in 1950 by the Ku Klux Klan in an attempt to shut down “Charlie’s Place,” an influential Myrtle Beach night club where white and black dancers shared the dance floor and helped create what is now called the shag. The violence sprang from the aftermath of one of the state’s most openly racist political  campaigns, the 1950 U.S. Senate election between Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston.

“Young black and white South Carolinians—in a time of segregation—put their lives on the line to defy the state’s white establishment and create a genuine musical  legacy,” said Beacham. “An irony is that South Carolina’s government officials made the shag and beach music the official dance and music of the state without even understanding or noting it’s remarkable historical significance.”

Over the years, Beacham said, the state’s music and dance has almost completely been co-opted by Southern whites, leaving a new generation of blacks unaware of the cultural phenomenon they helped create. “It is sad that many young blacks in South Carolina have rejected beach music and the shag because they think the music has white-only roots. Years of racism and a lack of education have helped erase one of South Carolina’s most notable creative accomplishments,” Beacham said.

An act of racism in a small college town leads to peaceful protest by frustrated black students. The governor, elected on a platform of racial moderation, responds with a vast show of armed force.  Each side misreads the other, escalating the conflict.  Then, in a peak of emotional frenzy, nine white highway patrolmen open fire on the students. In less than ten seconds, the campus turns into a bloodbath.

Over four days in early February, 1968, this scenario played out in Orangeburg. On the final day, three black students were killed and 27 others wounded when the lawmen sprayed deadly buckshot onto the campus of South Carolina State College.  Most of the students, in retreat at the time, were shot from the rear—some in the back, others in the soles of their feet. None carried weapons.

The killings occurred in a southern state heralded for its record of nonviolence during the civil rights era. In attempt to preserve its carefully-cultivated image of racial harmony, a web of official deceptions was created to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg. The state's young governor, Robert E. McNair, claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense—to protect themselves from an attacking mob of students.

At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, it unraveled. Now, after nearly 50 years, the story of Orangeburg continues to simmer unresolved in a twilight zone of blame and denial. Author Frank Beacham, a young reporter at WIS-TV in Columbia at the time of the shooting in 1968, re-examines “a story whose significance  I totally missed at the time.”

Beacham asks why, after so many years, does an aggressive effort continue in South Carolina to hide and distort the role of former Gov. McNair and his white state police in the 1968 killing of three black college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina.  He found the answers—many on video and audio in this new eBook—disturbing.

The e-Book contains interviews with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, former Gov. Robert McNair, Cleveland Sellers, Jordan Simmons, Gladys Simmons-Suddeth, Nat Abraham, Rhett Jackson, Former Gov. John West, George Dean, the first black S.C. National Guardsman, Fred Mott, Rep. Bakari Sellers and survivors of the Orangeburg shooting.

“The Orangeburg Massacre is a complex Southern epic that contains the essential elements of the best of Shakespeare’s plays,” Beacham noted. “The continuing silence in the aftermath of the killing is perhaps one of the most revealing and important historical stories of modern South Carolina and very deep dive into the basics of Southern culture.”



On the morning of September 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, South Carolina, friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded.

The bloody riot at the town's cotton mill on that warm Thursday morning shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. Fear, threats and intimidation were used to silence the story of the greatest tragedy in the town's history.

For 60 years, the story of a mass killing in a small town was successfully erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it.  An instrument of fear—so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children—formed a lifelong social contract for entire community's survival.
 
Ironically, Honea Path’s secret was finally revealed in a way the architects of its original cover-up could have never imagined: a video documentary made by three socially-conscious New York City filmmakers who unraveled the secret after rummaging through old letters from townspeople to President Franklin Roosevelt.

Yet, even after the truth was exposed in 1995, the story took another strange twist. South Carolina's intensely pro-business establishment, still heavily influenced by the region's textile industry, tried to suppress the documentary, first by banning it from broadcast on its state-supported television system and then by making it difficult for people to see in public places.

Author Frank Beacham grew up in Honea Path. His mother was the town's history teacher. His grandfather, he was to learn, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934.  Yet, only in his 46th year did he finally learn the deeper secrets that haunted Honea Path and the painful truth about his own family and the destructive series of events that distorted the perceptions he held of his childhood home.

In this compelling story, we hear the last living shooting victim, Williams Andrew Smith, tell Beacham that his grandfather lied about being at the mill when the violence occurred. In fact, Smith said, Dan Beacham was standing over him as he lay bleeding on the ground. An aunt, Hazel Beacham, confronts the writer about supporting the men his grandfather fought against, and we hear Beacham’s compelling appearance on a local radio station that turned the town around to support a memorial for the workers.

Mill Town Murder introduces a song about the shooting, Honea Path, by Matthew Grimm and features other interviews with Fred Moore,Tom Johnson, Sue Cannon Hill, Lydie Pinson, Mack Duncan and Jesse Mae Holder.

In this compelling story, we hear the last living shooting victim tell Beacham that his grandfather lied about being at the mill when the violence occurred. He, in fact, the man said, was standing over him as he lay bleeding on the ground. An aunt confronts the writer in audio about supporting the men his grandfather fought against, and we hear Beacham’s appearance on a local radio station that turned the town around to support a memorial for the workers.

“Each of these stories confronted me in different stages of my life. After carefully researching each story, I came to realize that each continues to live and remain fiercely unresolved for a reason,” said Beacham. “Elaborate efforts have been made to distort and misrepresent each story and to omit it from the state’s official history. Perhaps the reason for this, I found, is because these stories share cultural attributes that go back to the antebellum South: stubbornness, pride, honor and denial.”

The e-Books, priced at $9.99 each, are available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook at http://store.vook.com/ and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.

The Death of the Washington Post

When the news of the sale of the Washington Post was announced yesterday, I got a knot in my stomach. It was nail in the coffin of the brand of journalism I used to work in and so admired.

In 1974, I went to work as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek Television, which was owned by the Washington Post. This was the period just after the Watergate scandal, in which Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had an integral role in bringing about the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Unlike newspapers and other news outlets today, Graham’s new organizations supported real, hard hitting reporting. When Woodward and Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Post editor Ben Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets would touch the story.

As a result, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history. It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

As an act of intimidation, the Nixon administration also set its Federal Communications Commission onto the Post’s broadcast properties. Graham was under severe pressure in those years and she rose to that pressure.

On my first day at work at the Post’s WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, I was surprised to get a phone call from Katherine Graham. She welcomed me and acknowledged the pressure we were under at the time. But her real message was clear. “If you receive pressure from anyone—anyone at all—not to do your job, I want you to call me directly,” she said. “That’s very important.” She made me promise to call and gave me her direct number.

I never did call, though the next year at Post-Newsweek I was threatened, sued and called every name in the book. We worked hard and got it right. It was the era of good, tough journalism—long gone today. It was always comforting to know in those days that I was backed by the real iron lady, Katherine Graham.

I suspect that Graham is rolling in her grave today. It was her granddaughter that sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, a man with deep pockets and zero experience in journalism of any kind. For all the talk about maintaining journalistic ethics, that won’t happen with a ruthless businessman as the Post’s owner.

Newspapers are in trouble today not for lack of readers, but due to poor economic deals done through the years by owners more interested in the bottom line than good journalism. A lot of news organizations made a lot of bad investments.

Yes, of course, the technology and outlets have changed, but the demand for good reporting and storytelling is as powerful as ever. That never changes. Sadly, a generation now exists that doesn’t know the difference. It’s a very depressing time.

Those that believe that Bezos will save the Washington Post are wrong. The fact is we’ve lost one of the nation’s great journalistic institutions and the idea of it being revived is almost impossible. The news as we once knew it is long gone.

"The Designated Mourner" Changes Meaning After 13 Years

When I first saw Wallace Shawn’s “The Designated Mourner” in an old dilapidated building on South William Street in New York City in 2000, I was mesmerized on many levels. First, the audience was limited to about 20 people and the whole building was the set. During the intermission, Shawn and the director, Andre Gregory, ate and talked with the audience. In pure Shawn-Gregory fashion, the traditional walls of theatre were broken down. It was one of the great theatrical experiences I ever had in New York.

In 2000, the world was a different place. It was before 9/11 and before the U.S. had become a total, locked down security state. At the time, I felt the play was set in an unidentified third world country somewhere in Latin America.

I carried a lot of personal baggage into the play back then. Perhaps, that was because in my network news days in the late 1970s, I was in a lot of trouble spots in Latin America, including El Salvador during the fighting and Nicaragua when it Gen. Anastasio Somoza was overthrown. I was even arrested by Gen. Manuel Noriega in Panama, so I knew the fear of looking into an Uzi. The Designated Mourner had special meaning for me.

Thirteen years had passed when I saw the new production of The Designated Mourner at the Public Theatre in New York City. Ironically, it was the same cast and same director as in 2000. Wallace Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg and Larry Pine were all in fine form, but Andre Gregory, who directed this version, was not in sight at that performance.

Though the lavish use of words—which still flow over me like a gentle mountain stream—were the same as before, much has changed from 13 years ago. This time, the play seemed to be to more about the United States today rather than a Latin American country. Where before I never thought about the play reflecting our current life at home, this time I was obsessed with it throughout the production.

Since 9/11, so much is different. The cruel acts of third world governments in the last production easily translate to those who hold power in the U.S. today, regardless of political party. Political prisoners, government-sanctioned assassinations, domestic spying and killing those who write objectionable material no longer seems so far fetched here at home.

The audience also has changed. Many didn’t “get” the play and left at intermission. A man next to me said “the words are too dense.” Wallace Shawn has always been an acquired taste, but his language is rich, thoughtful and flows with a magical quality. He is one of the best playwrights working today. Yet, in today’s video-centric culture, his brand of playwriting may be beyond the range of many younger people in the audience. It’s sad, but the evidence was everywhere last night.

Shawn, as the narrator and husband of one of a group of intellectuals who are eventually all killed by the state, searches for a reason for the cruelty that man inflicts on his perceived enemies. He finally gives up, saying:

“After a while I just concluded there wasn’t any hope—an important insight. Was there anything, then, that I could expect to achieve in the coming years. Well, perhaps I could somehow train my mind to focus less compulsively on terrifying images of death and disease. Perhaps I could learn how to pass more easily from one moment to the next, the way the monkey, our ancestor, shifts so easily along from branch to branch as he follows the high road through the forest at night.

“Let me learn how to repose in the quiet shade of a nice square of chocolate, a nice slice of cake. A delicious cup of tea isn’t, perhaps, that hard to come by; the trick to be learned is just not to think of other things when you drink it.”

Going to the theatre in a taxi last night, I noticed a video camera aimed square in my face. It brought home the fact that we are now being recorded everywhere. The government reads our e-mails and even our snail mail. We no longer have any privacy and our freedoms are being eroded at a rapid rate.

So how do those of us who grew up in a more open time handle this vast intrusion of privacy by an all-powerful state? Shawn offers one piece of advice in the last line of the play. Perhaps he’s right—at least it’s a way to preserve our sanity in a losing situation.

“I sat on the beach for a very long time, lost—sunk deep—in the experience of unbelievable physical pleasure, maybe the greatest pleasure we can know on this earth—the sweet, ever-changing caress of an early evening breeze.”

I highly recommend The Designated Mourner. It’s a compelling theatrical event. It demands the total attention of the audience. Don’t expect light entertainment or you’ll be disappointed.

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Bob Dylan's Freewheelin' Alburm

Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan began his rapid emergence as a songwriter. His ascent was so fast and his songs so good that many believe Dylan ranks among the best songwriters who has ever lived.

It was May, 1963, when Dylan’s second album—"The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"—was released by Columbia Records. Unlike his first album, named "Bob Dylan," the emerging artist wrote eleven of the songs, rather than just two.

Freewheelin’ opens with "Blowin' in the Wind," which would become one of the anthems of the 1960s, and an international hit for the folk trio, Peter, Paul & Mary. Then the album added other classics, including "Girl from the North Country," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."

This is the period, as told in Chronicles, that Dylan read 100-year-old newspapers at the New York Public Library. He did this to get a sense of timelessness in his writing as he told stories from newspaper headlines. Dylan's lyrics about civil rights and anxieties about the fear of nuclear warfare have stood the test of time, towering above other material written in that era.

Balancing the topical subjects were love songs, often bitter and accusatory, and songs that contain surreal humor. This was the time when Dylan’s talent broke into the open and flowered for all to see.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan eventually went platinum. In 2003, the album was ranked number 97 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2002, Freewheelin' was one of the first 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

The recording of Freewheelin' took place over the course of a year, from April 1962 to April 1963, and the album was assembled from eight recording sessions in the Columbia Records Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue in New York City.

Clinton Heylin, a Dylan biographer, has connected the blossoming of Dylan’s lyrics along topical and political lines to the fact that he had moved into an apartment on West 4th Street with his girlfriend, the late Suze Rotolo, in January 1962.

Suze Rotolo, 2009 - Photo by Frank Beacham

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Rotolo's family had strong left-wing political commitments; both of her parents were members of the American Communist Party. Dylan acknowledged her influence when he told an interviewer: "Suze was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked out the songs with her."

Dylan's relationship with Rotolo also provided an important emotional dynamic in the composition of the Freewheelin' album. After six months of living with Dylan, Rotolo agreed to her mother's proposal that she travel to Italy to study art. Dylan missed her and wrote long letters to her conveying his hope that she would return soon to New York.

She postponed her return several times, finally coming back in January 1963. Critics have connected the intense love songs expressing longing and loss on Freewheelin' to Dylan’s fraught relationship with Rotolo. In her autobiography, Rotolo explains that musicians' girlfriends were routinely described as "chicks," and she resented being regarded as "a possession of Bob, who was the center of attention.”

The tremendous speed and facility with which Dylan wrote topical songs attracted the attention of other musicians in the New York folk scene. In a radio interview on WBAI in June 1962, Pete Seeger described Dylan as "the most prolific songwriter on the scene" and then asked Dylan how many songs he had written recently.

Dylan replied, "I might go for two weeks without writing these songs. I write a lot of stuff. In fact, I wrote five songs last night but I gave all the papers away in some place called the Bitter End."

Dylan also expressed the impersonal idea that the songs were not his own creation. In an interview with Sing Out! magazine, Dylan said, "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would."

Last night, Bob Porco, grandson of Gerde’s Folk City owner Mike Porco, presented a 50th anniversary tribute to Dylan and his work on Freewheelin’. It was in the last building to house a Gerde’s Folk City, now called the Village Underground.

Terre Roche

Terre Roche opened the show with a powerful "Blowin' in the Wind," followed by Randy Burns with “Girl from the North Country.” Willie Nininger did a crowd pleasing version of “Hard Rain,” while Judy Gorman performed Dylan’s “Masters of War.”

Randy Burns

Other highlights were Samoa Wilson and Ernie Vega’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” Rick Illowite’s “Corrina, Corrina” and an updated and often funny “Talkin’ World War III Blues” by Poez.

Samoa Wilson and Ernie Vega

To hear this package of excellent songs and to learn the entire album was recorded over the course of a single year is a bit hard to grasp. Even Dylan himself has said in recent interviews that he doesn’t know how he did it and most certainly couldn’t do it again. It has to be chalked up to a creative miracle.

When Freewheelin' was chosen one of 50 recordings to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2002, the citation read: "This album is considered by some to be the most important collection of original songs issued in the 1960s.” That statement is as true as ever on this 50th anniversary.

This outstanding group of folk singers did Dylan’s work justice in what was an fine tribute to the master’s work.

Telling the Truth Is No Longer the Top Priority in Journalism

I graduated debt-free from journalism school in 1968 at a time when there were plenty of jobs and some great opportunities in the news business. I was lucky enough to work at some prestigious news organizations, including United Press International, Post-Newsweek, Gannett and the Miami Herald.

In every one of those news jobs, accuracy in reporting was priority number one. At UPI, it was very simple. Make a major error in a story that’s released nationally and you were fired. There were no ifs, ands or buts. Rules like that kept you on your toes.

Yes, you also had to be quick. But not so fast that you made mistakes. You were judged on a combination of both speed and accuracy. But accuracy was always the most important part of the job.

It’s clear that’s no longer true. Just in the past week, the New York Post got the Boston Marathon bombing story so wrong on so many counts it was hard to believe. They reported that 12 people had died, when only three had. They reported that a Saudi man was a suspect being held “in custody” when that wasn’t true.

And, perhaps worst of all, they put pictures of two young men on the front page that turned out not to be the bombers. The newspaper admitted not knowing whether the men were even suspects. One of those young people was 17 years old and told other reporters that he was afraid to leave his home after the Post printed his picture.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the paper, should have been outraged—but he was not. He argued that the picture was “instantly” withdrawn when the mistake was known. He did not explain how one instantly withdraws a printed front page from the streets.

Television news networks are equally notorious for errors. When astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died, NBC incorrectly called him Neil Young, the musician. That’s what happens when networks rely on 20-something staffers who don’t know their history.

We are all aware that few journalism jobs are left and most pay very little. In fact, I was paid far more in the early 1970s than most journalists make today. Make no mistake, it’s that downsizing of jobs and salaries and journalistic standards that leads to the mistakes and errors we see so often today.

At least most news organizations try to be accurate. Others have a different agenda, which complicates the picture further. Networks like Murdoch’s Fox News present a clearly right-wing agenda—not one based on genuine attempts at truth and accuracy. Too many people believe this is actual news.

Yet, the politicization of journalism seems to be getting worse. Charles and David Koch, the notorious supporters of far right-wing causes, are said to be exploring the purchase of the Tribune Company, which owns 23 television stations and eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

These men, who finance favored political candidates, are not journalists or even interested in objective reporting. The New York Times reported a source saying the Koch brothers often say “they see the conservative voice as not being well represented” in the news media. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what these financiers are up to.

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told the New York Times.

Journalism is not just in a poor financial state these days. It is in a moral crisis as well. The old standards of truth and accuracy in news reporting have been thrown out the window. The Internet, which has empowered everyone as a citizen “journalist,” has not helped. The day is quickly coming when truly independent journalists will have to work on their own.

Just as members of Congress are under the control of money, now the same has happened to journalism. It’s a sad day indeed for accurate, truthful reporting.

Bob Dylan's Professional Debut Was 52 Years Ago Today

Who knows how many other young men arrived in New York City in the winter of 1961 looking like James Dean and talking like Jack Kerouac? 

It would have been difficult to pick Bob Dylan out of the crowd at first, considering how much he had in common with the other Bohemian kids kicking around Greenwich Village. Artistic ambition? Check. Antipathy toward mainstream culture? Yes. A desire to put his middle-class identity behind him? Definitely.

But the singular creative vision that would separate Dylan from the rest of his peers and change the face of popular music wasn't really in evidence yet. What Bob Dylan did have, though, in addition to his guitar and harmonica, was a unique stage presence and a vast library of American folk songs in his repertoire.

On April 11, 1961—52 years ago today—he got his first real chance to put those on display with his first major gig in New York City, opening for bluesman John Lee Hooker at Gerde's Folk City.

Bob Dylan had just arrived in town a few months earlier, but as the prominent producer/talent scout John Hammond would write in the liner notes of his debut album one year later, "The young man from the provinces began to make friends very quickly in New York, all the while continuing, as he has since he was ten, to assimilate musical ideas from everyone he met, every record he heard."

Dylan befriended not only his idol Woody Guthrie—whose hospitalization in New Jersey had been the initial impetus for Dylan to come east from Minnesota—but also some of the significant figures on the burgeoning Downtown folk scene, like Jack Elliot and Dave Van Ronk.

Dylan would write about this period in "Talkin' New York" (1962), which included a verse about his breakthrough gig at Gerde's:

After weeks and weeks of hanging around
I finally got a job in New York town
In a bigger place, bigger money too
Even joined the Union and paid my dues.

Gerde's was probably the most important folk-music venue in New York City at the time—the club that every folk act with a national profile played when they were in town.

Dylan had previously joined other unknowns like himself onstage at Gerde's during the club's Monday "Hootenanny Night," but the invitation to appear on a regular bill presented a bit of an administrative problem.

At just 19 years old, Bob Dylan was too young to obtain the necessary union card and cabaret license. The club’s owners, Mike Porco, was interested enough in getting the young man on the bill, though, that he signed on as Dylan's guardian—"the Sicilian father I never knew I had," as Dylan put it.

A number of major developments in the year that followed would set Bob Dylan on his road toward stardom, but the very first of those was his appearance at Gerde's Folk City on this day in 1961.

Thanks History.com

Ted Joans and David Amram Perform "Scat" at 1994 Beat Conference

David Amram (at piano) and Ted Joans. Photo by Frank Beacham

Ted Joans, who died in 2003, was a jazz poet, surrealist, trumpeter and painter. His work stands at the intersection of several avant-garde streams and some have seen in it a precursor to the orality of the spoken-word movement. Joans is known for his motto: "Jazz is my religion, and Surrealism is my point of view."

In New York, Joans painted in a style he dubbed Jazz Action and read his poetry, developing a personal style of oral delivery called Jazz Poetry. He was a participant in the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village. He was a contemporary and friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others.

Joans shared a room for a time with the great jazz musician, Charlie Parker. His bohemian costume balls and rent parties were photographed by Fred McDarrah and Weegee.

Joans' painting Bird Lives hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. He was also the originator of the "Bird Lives" legend and graffiti in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in March 1955.

Here, at a Beat Poetry conference at New York University in 1994, Joans joins the Beat composer, David Amram, for an improved scat performance.

              

Rodriguez Brings His Mystique to the New York's Beacon Theatre

Sixto Rodriguez—in addition to sounding like Bob Dylan even on songs Dylan didn’t write—pulled off another Dylanesque move Sunday night at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. 

He managed to disappear on stage even while performing under the spotlight. Outside of Dylan, himself, and Sly Stone, I’ve never seen another performer so successful at hiding in plain view.

In a kind of striptease act, Rodriguez came on stage in a jacket and hat, completely hiding his face for the first half of his show. Then, he removed the jacket, revealing his arms. Occasionally, when he turned to the side, you could get glimpse of his face.

Finally at the end, Rodriguez removed the hat, and a for just a few minutes, revealed himself to the sold out audience. They gave him a standing ovation.

His mystique, the Academy Award winning movie—Searching for Sugar Man, and a compelling set list, were a crowd pleaser in a house filled with all ages.

Izzy Young Revisits Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village

Izzy Young, 85, is a legend in folk music circles—both in America and Sweden. He is the former owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, and since 1973, he has owned and operated the Folklore Centrum store in Stockholm.

In 1957, on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, he opened the Folklore Center, a store for books and records and everything related to folk music. It became a major hangout for folk musicians, including a very young Bob Dylan.

From 1959 to 1969, Young wrote a column entitled "Fret and Frails" for the folk music journal Sing Out. He served on the "editorial advisory board" for the magazine until his departure for Sweden a few years later.

Young arranged concerts with folk musicians and songwriters, who often made contacts with other musicians at the Folklore Center. Bob Dylan relates in his memoirs, Chronicles, how he spent time at the Center, where Young allowed him to sit in the backroom of the store, listening to folk music records and reading books.

Dylan met Dave Van Ronk in the store, and Young produced Dylan's first concert at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. Dylan wrote a song about the store and Young, "Talking Folklore Center."

After developing an interest in Swedish folk music at a festival, Young closed his New York store, and in 1973, he moved to Stockholm where he opened the Folklore Centrum.

Young is visiting New York City, where he is doing a documentary with Bob Porco, grandson of Gerde’s Folk City owner Mike Porco. Young was instrumental in the founding of Gerdes.

I talked with Young during a break in filming for the documentary. I wanted to know how to differentiate folk music from other forms of music. It was a hot button question for Young. At first he didn’t want to answer it, but then got going. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what he said.

(It was very windy in the park when we interviewed Izzy. The audio has some wind noise. We're sorry about that.)

George Dean: Pioneering the S.C. National Guard

During my long quest to learn the truth about the Orangeburg Massacre, I was given many tips. Most led to dead-ends. One of vital importance to the story would take more than five years to pay off.

George Dean, a lifelong resident of Orangeburg, owned and operated a men’s clothing store at 1185 Russell Street. In 1968, he was the only black member of the South Carolina National Guard. I phoned him at his store on Sept. 8, 2000 after being told he had been called to duty during the days prior to the shooting.

I asked his help in putting together the still missing pieces of the massacre story. Though extremely polite, Dean was cautious and hesitant. Yes, he was the only black Guardsman on duty in Orangeburg. He had driven a jeep that shuttled key personnel to the central communications facility and had protected the Guard’s main ammunition storage depot.

However, he was conflicted and told me he couldn’t reveal what he knew. The reasons: he had kids in college and a mortgage on his business. There might be a price to pay for his going public with details on the shooting, and he couldn’t jeopardize his family’s welfare in the event there was a boycott of his business.

At this stage, I asked him if we could go “off the record.” I read him a summary of the path I was taking in this project. I asked him if he would simply warn me if anything were not true. Through carefully calculated silence, Dean signaled I was on the right path.

I kept in touch with George Dean in the subsequent years. I followed the progress of his children through college. I made sure he remembered my interest and never pressured him for his story. Until early 2006, that is.

I was planning a trip to South Carolina in February to introduce Frank Military, a screenwriter researching Orangeburg, to various figures in the massacre story. A week before the visit, I called George Dean again.

“George, all your kids graduated from college?” I asked. “Yes,” he said with a chuckle, sensing what was coming. “And you finally paid off that mortgage, right?” “Sure did.” Well, my friend, the time is now. It’s time to tell your story.”

With George Dean, as I had learned over the years, there are no guarantees. When Frank and I finished our work in Orangeburg on the afternoon of February 13, 2006, I was told to call George on his mobile phone. He’d let us know then if he could do the interview.

Our schedule that day was tight. We had interviews in Columbia in the morning and then drove to the Chestnut Grill on the outskirts of Orangeburg, where we had lunch with Bill Hine, an expert on the massacre and professor at S.C. State University.

A comfortable, family-style lunch hangout, the Chestnut was clearly a community gathering place. As Hine briefed Frank Military and I on the town, we spotted Andrew Hugine, the ninth president of S.C. State University. A former S.C. State student himself, Hugine was clearly sympathetic to our mission and offered the services of his office for anything we needed. It was a warm, gracious welcome to Orangeburg.

Less than a month later, Hugine would apologize to nine former students for the actions of Dr. Benner C. Turner, S.C. State’s fourth president. The students, who were expelled or suspended from the school in the wake of peaceful protests in 1956, had returned to the campus for the first time in 50 years.

“You fought for justice, equality and dignity,” Hugine told them. “You were exercising your constitutional rights to challenge segregation. We can never ever repay you. We cannot undo the past as much as we would like to.”

We’d learn that day—more than I had previously realized—that Orangeburg had a very deep history in the American civil rights movement. These 1956 demonstrations at S.C. State came before Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery; before the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro; and before Emmett Till had been lynched.

Later in the day, after Hine had guided us on a tour of the town and walked us through the area of the shooting, I retreated to our rental car to call George Dean. I dialed his mobile number. No answer. I got voice mail. Dejected, I tried again. Bingo! This time he answered.

“Meet me in the parking lot behind the Trinity Methodist Church in exactly one hour,” he said abruptly.

No address or directions were given, and—it became immediately clear—that none were needed. A towering presence across a street from the S.C. State campus, the Trinity church, founded in 1866, is an icon of civil rights history. It was a fitting place for our meeting with Dean.

Precisely on time, George Dean drove into the nearly empty parking lot and greeted us. He led us to a small office complex next to the church, where he was well known by the staff, and waved us into a conference room.

There was little small talk. I received permission to record audio of the interview and we got started. Within minutes, it was clear that Dean, a precise and cautious man, had carefully considered what he wanted to say (and not say) about the Orangeburg Massacre. For the next hour, we’d hear an intense, spellbinding monologue. There was little opportunity for questions.

In 1965, George Dean, facing imminent draft and almost certain of duty in Vietnam, became the first black member of his state’s National Guard. He volunteered in order not to fight in what he considered an unjust war. “I perceived it then and that’s the way I perceive it now,” he said firmly.

The oldest male in a family of seven children, Dean was raised by parents who were professional educators. He was literally brought up on the campus of S.C. State. “They didn’t have enough money to send me to Canada,” Dean recalled. “I didn’t see myself going into the military. I knew the percentage of black Americans in Vietnam. I didn’t see my chances being good for survival.”

Having taken ROTC in college, Dean aced the test for admission to the Guard. He did so well, in fact, that the surprised and skeptical white test administrators put him through more hoops, asking him for credit and character references. Each time he complied and exceeded expectations. There was no denying he was an ideal candidate. Finally, in late 1965, George Dean integrated the National Guard. He’d serve as a weekend soldier for six years.

“It wasn’t long before I realized that I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire,” he recalled. It took three years for other Guard members even to recognize him as a fellow soldier. “When I joined the Guard in ’65, it was just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The South was still in an uproar. Every time there was a civil unrest, they called the Guard. Here I was, the lone black soldier in the militia.”

While Dean experienced racism within the ranks of the Guard, he was simultaneously castigated by members of his own black community. “I was really between a rock and a hard place.” He still winced at the pain of being called to Charleston in the mid ’60s, where his job was to protect electrical utilities during a civil rights disturbance.

While walking along King Street with a uniformed white colleague, an elderly black lady leaving a hotel approached them. “She looked at me and she said ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ It’s hard to explain the feelings. I didn’t blame her. She just didn’t understand. But it hurt no less. That’s the price we pay when we carry the coat in America.”

Another difficult moment came in 1966 when the Guard was called to stop a civil rights disturbance at Voorhees College in Denmark, the home town of Cleveland Sellers, a local activist that Dean knew and admired. “We went to Voorhees and I just didn’t feel right,” Dean said, recalling that he was threatened with a court martial over his reluctance.

“We entered the campus there at about five in the morning to find no unrest or students. I was a member of a unit that was supposed to quell an unrest and all they did was go into an institution of learning to destroy physical property. The Guardsmen knocked down the doors of professors’ offices and classrooms to find whatever they perceived was there.”

Over time, Dean’s skill and professionalism was recognized within the Guard’s ranks. He got along well with John Shuler, his commanding officer, a white man he worked with over the years as both a civilian and a soldier.

Then came 1968. “Orangeburg simmered for a long time before Cleve even got here,” Dean noted. “Cleve was victimized like so many others. Racism in Orangeburg was no different from any other Southern town. It had all the makings of any other Southern community—from its segregated (movie) theaters to its water fountains to everything else.”

When the Guard was activated by Gov. McNair for duty in Orangeburg in early 1968, Shuler chose to keep Dean close to him. Dean’s assignment was to drive Shuler’s jeep and, when other soldiers were away, to protect the main door of the National Guard Armory on Broughton Street, about two miles from the S.C. State campus.

“Being the jeep driver...you know drivers, chauffeurs, waiters hear and see a lot of things.” On the nights leading up to violence in Orangeburg, Dean said he heard plenty, much of it perceived by white ears in ways far out of proportion from reality.

“It’s like the three of us in this room could see something and perceive it in a totally different manner. That’s what happened.”

At the wheel of a jeep, Dean repeatedly drove his white Guard superiors to the communications center at the telephone company, where they had direct communication with Gov. McNair. Time after time, he interpreted their comments to the governor as “amplified” and over the top.

“In another setting, at another time, you would say it was blown way out of proportion. I’ve thought...these were civilian soldiers just like myself that carried a different rank. They were still Southerners. White Southerners. So many stories in the South are so parallel. In that whether it’s the police chief, the mayor, or even the solicitor—they are all in the same room with the same damn hood. Just when night came up, they wore a different hat. There’s nothing unique about the South. So I can see why they might have seen things in a different light.”

From the conversations that he overheard, Dean is convinced that if Robert McNair was not fed misinformation, he was certainly given wrongly perceived information by his men in the field.

By February 8, Dean had been on active duty about a week, mostly securing the armory door when not driving the jeep. Shuler, his commanding officer, obviously aware of his sensitive position, didn’t deploy him for other duties in Orangeburg. “He didn’t put me in harm’s way. I won’t fantasize what might have happened if he had. I just thank God that he didn’t.”

On the morning of February 8, Shuler approached Dean at the armory and gave him a welcome break to go home, get a shower, and take a short rest.

“I lived about two miles from the armory and one block below the campus on Buckley Street. The first thing I did is go home, get out of my uniform and put on my civvies. Mobility in town was really on lock down. Tanks were at every crossing....every major entry into the city and even at every exit or entrance to the campus. I got on my bicycle and I rode to the campus.”

Dean went directly to the office of Dr. Maceo Nance, S.C. State’s acting president. He asked the secretary if he could speak with Nance and was immediately shown in. Nance was meeting with two student leaders in his office at the time.

“Dr. Nance, if there’s any way humanly possible that you can keep the students off the street tonight, do so.” Dean warned him of the skewed perceptions of the white men outside and how dangerous the climate had become.

Dean and Nance each maintained an air of formality in this critical exchange. Though the young man wore civilian clothes during their brief meeting, Nance knew very well that Dean was the only black member of the National Guard. They had a long personal history in a small town. As a kid, George Dean was Maceo Nance’s paper boy!

Dean had a gut feeling that compelled him to warn Nance. “I knew from standing at the door five days and from seeing and hearing SLED to Highway Patrol to Guardsmen. I knew the climate. I knew what I heard and I knew what I was seeing.”

When he returned to duty, Dean’s first sergeant ordered him to start clipping ammo. “Ammo comes loose. It doesn’t come clipped. It comes in a wooden box. And I was ordered to start clipping ammo.”

A clip is a small metal case that is used to store multiple rounds of 5.56 millimeter ammunition together as a unit, ready for insertion into the magazine of the M16 semiautomatic rifles—commonly called carbines—used by the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies.

In the evening, a short time before the shootings on the campus, Dean brought some clipped ammo from the armory for Pete Strom, the chief of SLED. As Strom put a load of M16 ammo on his shoulder and walked away, he uttered words that George Dean will never forget:

“We’re tired of playing with them niggers.”

Pete Strom in the streets of Orangeburg Just Before the Shooting

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In less than an hour, Dean got the word from Shuler that some students had been shot. “I didn’t know the magnitude then and I didn’t know until the next morning.”

Dean makes it clear he didn’t witness the shooting and cannot say definitely who pulled the triggers. “But I do know the record shows that the students were shot in the back while retreating from a peaceful demonstration for their civil and equal rights. They were denied (those rights) and their lives were taken. They were wounded. And justice to this day has never been served.”

At this point, Dean—increasingly emotional from telling his story—began to weep.

“I think it would be easier to talk about this if I could sit here at this time and say that I think justice was served. But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think that has happened yet. Smith, Hammond and Middleton will never come back. And triggers don’t squeeze themselves.”

Dean stood and took off his microphone. He asked us to take a short walk with him. We left the building and crossed a lawn over to the massive Trinity United Methodist Church. We entered a side door and descended some steps to a large room in the basement.

It was sunset and the dimming light through the church’s stained glass windows cast an eerie, warm glow over the vast space. This very room, Dean told us, served as headquarters for the ’60s civil rights movement in Orangeburg. It pulsed with rich history—the site of key organizational meetings, as well as rallies attended by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins.

As we walked into the chilly evening air outside the vast sanctuary, completed in 1944, it was hard to escape the view. Just across the street, only a few yards away, was the grassy hill, where on another chilly Februrary night 38 years earlier, guns opened fire on the students at S.C. State.

“Jim Crow is not something you want to talk about every day,” Dean told us. “Jim Crow was not pretty. Any place in the South. My story is many stories of blacks in the South. Many had it worse than me. I was never lynched or hung from a tree. I was not humiliated.”

However, Dean said sadly, “I sit in my own hometown, where I was reared, educated, and raised my family. I would like to think I’ve been a pretty respectable and decent citizen. (Yet) I still see the antebellum South.” He pauses to consider his words. “Do I feel good saying that? Hell, no.”

Dean was never asked by any investigator or law enforcement agency to tell his story. “I don’t think the Southern white man is ready to correct any wrongs yet. The Southern white man still deals more with what his peers think of him than what’s right. It’s like the kid on the school grounds that wants to remain popular instead of doing what’s right. I don’t think the hearts of South Carolinians have changed to do what’s right (in order) to remain popular with their friends.”

I asked Dean: Have things improved in Orangeburg since 1968?

“Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. Has substantive change taken place in Orangeburg? No. There’s a different code of racism now. I would say that most change in the South, and most change in my town, which I love so dearly, is cosmetic. The new South ain’t so new.”

I had a final question for Dean: Will the issue of the Orangeburg shootings be resolved in our lifetime?

“I was optimistic of that. I don’t know whether I am anymore. I will never say never because, as a Christian, I believe if you ever lose hope, you’ve lost everything.”

George Dean’s historic and exclusive interview is part of “Wild History,” my Kickstarter project.

I’m pleased to say that our Kickstarter goal of $15,000 has been reached and exceeded. I wish to thank the generous contributors who made it possible.

There are three days left in the campaign and there’s still time to contribute. A donation of only one dollar would be appreciated and would put your name on a list of supporters of a new kind of journalistic storytelling.

To all that have supported this work so far, a big THANK YOU!

Wild History

George Lineberry: Inventor of Shag's "Belly Roll," Introduced Black Music on the Carolina Beaches

“Big George” Lineberry (left) and Harry Driver in 1994 at Fat Harold's Beach Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Lineberry invented the “belly roll” and Driver the “smooth pivot” in the shag, the state dance of the Carolinas. Photo by Frank Beacham

                                                                      ---
Due to the unique ploy of a talented young white dancer, George Lineberry, black music found its way onto the jukeboxes in the white dance halls and pavilions along the Carolina beaches after World War II.

“Big George,” as he was nicknamed, was hired to install records on the coin-operated jukeboxes, then called “piccolos,” for a local amusements company in Myrtle Beach.

Lineberry was told which records to place on specific jukeboxes. Playlists were strict in this time of segregation. Black music in the day was forbidden from the jukeboxes in white establishments and was designated for black clubs only.

Lineberry ignored his bosses and took it upon himself to switch records, placing the most popular black records from the jukeboxes in the black clubs, including Charlie’s Place, to the jukeboxes in the white dance halls. It was this switcharoo by a single young worker that changed music along the coast for generations to come.

Big George, who died in 1999 at age 76, was an immensely popular fixture at the beach at the time and was often slipped a few bucks by concerned parents to dance with a daughter who needed a boost in self-esteem.

With great ceremony, he made it a point to “test” each new record installation with a personal spin on the dance floor. He often single handedly introduced new black records.

Soon after Lineberry serviced the jukeboxes along the Carolina coast, the “forbidden” R&B that could be heard only at the beach joints became known as “beach music.”

As a dancer, Lineberry was also a major contributor to what today is known as the “shag,” the state dance of the Carolinas.

“I first heard the term shag at Charlie’s Place,” Lineberry, who left the beach in 1948, told me in an interview. “They called it the shag on the Hill (Charlie’s Place). I think the shag and dirty shag came out of Charlie’s nightclub.”

Lineberry, who was a first generation member of the Shaggers Hall of Fame, had warm memories of his nights at Charlie’s Place—many ending at daylight.

“Charlie once told me, ‘George, you got a little black in you.’ I knew the black music had a better beat. It would turn me on a little more. I was the best at the belly roll and the dirty shag. I could lay it on them.”

In fact, Lineberry is credited with inventing the belly roll as used in today’s shag.

For young Dino Thompson, the belly roll—or “vertical sex” as it was also called—was the ultimate shag step, a move that was perfected by Lineberry at Charlie’s Place.

In his personal memoir, Greek Boy, Thompson offers a description of the belly roll: “Boy pulls girl close enough to touch belly buttons. Then, in rhythm, they throw one leg out together, then the other. Slick and sexy.”

The belly roll and a 10-cent song on the jukebox, recalled Thompson, was “your license for romance. Pick out the girl of your dreams, lead her out to the dance floor, ease her out of a fast sweaty pivot into a tight belly roll and bruise your excited private parts all up against hers. Then, right as the lyrics get down and dirty, burn her down with your Tyrone Power eyes.”

Lineberry later turned his love of music and dance into a career. He owned and operated Southern Amusement Corp. in Virginia Beach, Virginia. An avid shagger until he died, Lineberry later gave his fellow dancers their own jukeboxes loaded with their favorite music as a gift.

Lineberry’s story is in “Wild History,” Frank Beacham’s current Kickstarter project.

The Sad Story of Iona Cannon

I saw Sue Cannon Hill for the first time on television. Her grief-stricken words in the documentary, The Uprising of ’34, upset me. Teary and emotionally fragile, she told in a gripping interview how the management at the local textile mill—led by my grandfather—had nearly destroyed her family. 

But when she spoke his name, she put a knife through me. I’d never heard my family name spoken that way. “Beacham.” Contempt dripped from the word. To her, it was the name of a mass murderer, the man who killed her father, Claude Cannon, and destroyed her mother. It was a name she’d never forget...or forgive.

In late 1994, I was planning to return to South Carolina for the Christmas holidays. I wrote a letter to Sue Hill, telling her who I was. I apologized for what my grandfather had done. I told her I had been surprised to learn what happened to her father and mother, and wanted to know more. I asked what I could do to make things right. Would she allow me to visit? Could we talk about it?

A couple of weeks went by before I heard back from her. I later learned that she, like others I had written at the time, saw the name Beacham in the return address of my envelope and had been unable to open the letter.

Finally, after a few days, their curiosity won out. One of her friends told Sue that my letter to her had been harmless, and it might be okay after all to read what I had sent. A relieved, but hesitant, Sue Hill called and invited me to her home during the Christmas holiday.

As I approached the sprawling modern ranch house where Sue now lived with her husband, I couldn’t help but be surprised at how far she had come from the days of living in poverty with her mother on Chiquola’s mill hill.

Sue had married a prosperous businessman, I was told, and this home—one of the nicest in town—fronted fifty acres of land with two private fish ponds.

I was ushered into a huge, rectangular living room with a panoramic rear view of the extended rural landscape. Sue’s greeting was gracious, but I sensed that she was not comfortable. Neither was I. We were both walking on egg shells.

As we seated ourselves across from each other on comfortable sofas at one end of the room, the Southern tradition of beginning a visit with small talk seemed terribly inappropriate. I knew Sue wanted to know why I was there, and decided it was best to get to the point right away.

I never knew Dan Beacham and was not there to defend him. He was a mystery to me, I told her, and she probably knew more about him than I did. I was horrified by what he had apparently done, and wanted to learn the truth about him. I wanted her to tell me what she knew—warts and all. I wanted to record it on a tape recorder, I told her, so that I didn’t miss a word of her story.

She agreed, I clumsily set up the recorder, and we began what was to be a wrenching afternoon.

After Claude Cannon’s death at the mill, Sue’s mother, Iona Cannon, found herself with no job, six young children to raise and an eviction notice ordering her to vacate her mill-owned home. Because Honea Path was a one employer town, there was no option of finding alternative work there.

Mrs. Cannon, who had no money to relocate, had a simple choice: either lose her home, or go back to work for the very men responsible for killing her husband.

Even more humiliating, she would be allowed to resume her job at the Chiquola Mill only after she pledged to never again utter the word union.

The pain in Sue's face was vivid as she recalled the extraordinary grief her mother had endured and was forced to conceal throughout most of her life. “Can you imagine waking up one day with no husband, no job, and six children staring you in the face? Not knowing where your next meal is coming from. That’s what my mom faced.”

While at least one of the Chiquola widows placed her children in an orphanage, Sue said her mother chose to keep her family together. First, that meant taking a job at the mill—and the oath of silence that came with it. “They talked to her like they wanted to. They told her to either take the job on their terms or leave.”

I asked Sue what it was like at home in those days. Did her mother ever talk about what happened to their father at the mill? No, she responded, Iona Cannon’s grief played out not in words, but in actions—sometimes bizarre actions.

One was a morbid habit. At night, Mrs. Cannon often sat quietly for hours at home clenching the blood-soaked clothes her husband wore at the time of his death. She stopped only after Sue’s brother, Marvin—who could no longer endure the routine—took his father’s tattered garments and buried them in a nearby field.

Even then, Mrs. Cannon refused to let go. She searched the ground near her home, digging in various spots in a fruitless effort to recover the clothes.

Then Sue told me about the infamous “bleeding sidewalk.” 

Sue Hill’s father, Claude Canon, was killed on a Honea Path sidewalk across the street from the Chiquola Mill’s main entrance on Sept. 6, 1934.

After being shot three times in the back and twice in the hand, he bled profusely, leaving an immense blood stain in the concrete.

Over time, Sue told me, the stain faded and was barely visible —except when the sidewalk was wet. “When it rained the blood stain would come back a dark, copper-looking color. A lot of people came to look at the ‘bleeding sidewalk’ when it rained. The neighbors complained, but the mill wouldn’t do anything.”

Then, about eight years after the shooting, the two sections of stained concrete were quietly removed. Honea Path’s legendary “bleeding sidewalk” was suddenly no more.

It didn’t matter to Iona Cannon, who, after her husband’s killing, never set foot on that sidewalk again. “We had no car and walked everywhere. Whenever we went into town, mom refused to use that sidewalk,” Sue said.

“She would take us a back way behind the mill through the weeds and we’d cross the railroad tracks to get into town. Only when I was grown did I understand that she didn’t want to walk where daddy was killed.”

Even with Iona’s mill job, the family faced years of poverty and near starvation. “I saw mom diluting a can of Carnation milk with water to make cornbread to feed six children,” Sue said, unable to hold back the tears. “It must have been hard for her knowing we were going hungry.”

At this point, Sue began to sob. Crying has always unnerved me. I felt guilt for making her tell this story. Should I leave? No, I thought, I’ll just wait.

We sat quietly. Time froze. It seemed like hours went by. When Sue recovered, I asked if she felt like going on. Yes, she said. Her mother would want this story told.

And it was only because I had apologized for the actions of my grandfather, she said, that she decided to see me at all. No one else from the side of the mill’s management had ever expressed remorse. Not in 60 years. She was determined to go on.

Composed for the moment, the story continued.

On rare occasions, there was unexpected help. Iona would hear a knock on the front door. When she answered, no one would be there. On the porch, however, she’d find several bags of groceries. Though the family never found out who left the food, Iona suspected it was the man witnesses said shot her husband.

“There had to be some sleepless nights for these people,” Sue said. “If there weren’t, then they didn’t have a conscience. I don’t know how these people that did the shooting—for jobs or money or whatever—lived with themselves. They shot people whose kids went to the same school with their kids. They shared the same benches in church with the family members of the ones they killed. They watched as the families of these workers nearly starved, living on beans and fat meat or whatever they could find. I think many of them suffered for it the rest of their lives.”

About four years after the Chiquola violence, Tom Stalcup, one of the deputized workers who shot at strikers from a mill window, visited Mrs. Cannon. Stalcup told the widow he was ashamed of his role in the shooting and asked her for forgiveness. “He told her he couldn’t live right until he made it right with her,” Sue said.

Did Stalcup, I asked, tell Mrs. Cannon who gave the order to fire at the workers? Yes, Sue said, her mother had asked that very question.

“Dan Beacham,” Stalcup had answered. Not only did Dan Beacham give the order for the men to shoot, Stalcup said, but the mill superintendent told the deputized gunmen to kill every striker they could, no matter who it might be.

“Mr. Stalcup seemed to have a lot of trouble with this through the years,” Sue said.

Iona Cannon died at age sixty-four, never discussing the events at the mill outside of her own home. “Some days she’d talk about it. Other days she wouldn’t. She never got over my father. Never,” Sue said. “But I never saw her show any hate…not one word against them.”

Sue Hill’s compelling story is part of my “Wild History” project now on Kickstarter.

                                                      Wild History

Lois McClain Keeps a Deadly 60-Year Secret

While working on “Small Town Secret,” this photo of young Lois McClain, made by an unknown photographer, was identified for me by McClain’s daughter, Jessie Mae Holder. 

The bullet from McClain’s bleeding left hand, after being shot at Chiquola Mill in my hometown of Honea Path, South Carolina on Sept. 6, 1934 was never removed and was still intact when she died at age 91 in 1993.

Eventually, mother of five children, “Granny Lois” McClain, as she was called, worked in the mill in Honea Path through her mid 70s, while also serving as a volunteer midwife, seamstress and cook for local townspeople nearly all of her life.

Some years after the shooting, Tom Stalcup, a Chiquola millworker, revealed that he had shot McClain and asked for her forgiveness, which she granted.

Stalcup, who said my grandfather, Dan Beacham, ordered the mill shooting as superintendent, later became Sunday School teacher for McClain’s daughter at the Church of God in Honea Path. His son, Virgil Stalcup, went on to play shortstop for the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.

Never in her life did McClain, or her husband, Cowan, also a millworker, discuss the shooting or the mill violence with any of their children. For that reason, the circumstances of McClain’s shooting or her role in the labor dispute remain unknown even to her own family.

However, words were not needed. Lois McClain’s story is written on her face in this powerful photograph.

The small town secret in Honea Path, S.C. was kept for 60 years. Though my grandfather was complicit in the shooting, my own family never discussed it. Yet, in the mid 90s, before many of the mill workers had died, the lid came off after a documentary film was produced revealing the town’s secret.

I wanted to know the truth and sought it out. The results are part of my Kickstarter project, Wild History.

                                               Wild History Kickstarter Project

Paul Robeson vs. Strom Thurmond: A Battle Over Race!

To understand the great accomplishments of the singer Paul Robeson, it’s important to know the history.

Sen. Strom Thurmond, the segregationist South Carolina politician, viciously attacked Robeson in 1948. Thurmond charged that the popular performer “has been going all over the country demanding that we abolish segregation, and to show his contempt for our way of life in the South, he married his son off to a white girl.”

Robeson, one of the era’s most talented, articulate, and politically active public figures, had risked his life to tour small towns throughout the South in 1948 on behalf of the progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace. Thurmond, as that year’s presidential candidate of the segregationist Dixiecrat party, represented everything Robeson abhorred.

Robeson, however, was a black man that Thurmond couldn’t intimidate, and the eloquent intellectual knew how to get under the governor’s skin. Cheerfully singing his way through the deep South, Robeson attacked the Thurmond-led Dixiecrats as “powerful reactionaries who hope to stamp out the militant struggle of the Negro for complete freedom, equality and civil rights [and who] hope to keep all the wealth for themselves.”

Framing the “black belt of the South” as the area that would decide whether the Negro people “survive or perish,” Robeson spoke with a level of public candor then unheard of in South Carolina.

“For as long as any boy or girl can be denied opportunity in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi—so long as one can be lynched as he or she goes to vote—so long as the precious land does not belong to the people of that area (and with the land, the wealth that flows there from in agriculture and in industry)—so long as they do not have the full opportunity to develop and enrich their cultural heritage and their lives—so long are the whole Negro people not free.”

To the South’s white establishment, those were fighting words.

However, as one looks back on this dark chapter of history, it is fascinating to note that beginning in 1941, nine years before the senate campaign, Strom Thurmond began providing financial support to a daughter he had fathered with a black woman in 1925. The revelation that Thurmond had a daughter of mixed race came after his death at age 100 in June, 2003.

Thurmond’s daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was born October 12, 1925 to a 16-year-old unmarried mother, Carrie Butler, who cleaned the Thurmond family home in Edgefield, South Carolina. At the time, Thurmond, 22, was living at the home while he worked as a school teacher and high school coach.

Thurmond first met his daughter around 1941, after he had been a state senator and circuit judge. From then on, the aspiring politician provided financial support for the woman, who remained a well-kept secret throughout his public career.

In retrospect, Thurmond’s family secret made his attack on Robeson and his son staggering in its sheer hypocrisy. But this cynical Southern politician was not about to lower the racial temperature.

This is one of the stories in Frank Beacham’s Kickstarter project, Wild History.

                                          Wild History Kickstarter Project

"Wild History" Kickstarter Project is Launched

My first Kickstarter project—“Wild History”—is now in progress.

For friends and readers of this blog, this interactive multimedia journalism project is the culmination of a complex 20-plus year personal effort. It has been totally self-funded and came after a long career as a professional journalist. The work was triggered by my deep frustration in the decline of most mass market journalistic storytelling.

It is no secret that during recent years the integrity of most news and information programming has fallen dramatically. No longer can we trust mass media—whether television, print or web sites—to bring us truthful, fair or unbiased reporting. Those with money and special interests now control most media outlets.

So I created the “Wild History” project. The term “wild history” comes from Chinese scholars who divided historical works into two distinct genres. Official histories were called “zhengshi.”

Unofficial histories, or literally “wild histories” were called “yeshi.” They were based on eyewitness accounts, personal remembrances and popular lore. These “wild histories” were more truthful and fluid—catching “life on the wing.”

As a storyteller, I categorize myself as a “wild historian.” Through the years, as I researched and developed my true stories, I have collected film and video, photographs and audio elements during the research.

I had looked to a future when I could combine these audio-visual elements into my written text—creating interactive multimedia. Well, finally, that future has arrived. Now, multimedia books—soon to become a new genre entirely—can be done produced for Apple’s iPad.

This Kickstarter project—“Wild History”—is to raise money to bring the first three of those stories into the interactive age. Most of the story elements have been secured and completed. What remains is putting it all together.

If my work interests you, please visit my Kickstarter page. If the project intrigues you, a contribution of any size would be appreciated.

Thanks for your consideration as I begin this exciting experiment.

Frank Beacham

Kickstarter "Wild History" Project

David Amram Imparts a Musical Living History of Greenwich Village

 

Over the past year, Bob Porco, the grandson of Gerde’s Folk City owner Mike Porco, has promoted a series of concerts at the original Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, bringing back acts from the 60s who created the folk music revolution of that era.

There have been some wonderful performances, ranging from Delta blues to jazz, with a heavy dose of great stories about the historic Gaslight and the many famous people who played and listened to music there. But perhaps the best of the year came just before Christmas from David Amram, a composer, musician and master storyteller who worked with virtually every important artist of the past 50 years.

Amram, now 82 but not showing it, is a living history book. He has worked with—believe it or not—Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, Pepper Adams, Leonard Bernstein, Sir James Galway, Tito Puente, Mary Lou Williams, Joseph Papp, Arthur Miller, Miles Davis, Arturo Sandoval, Stan Getz, Pete Seeger, Elia Kazan, Odetta, Lord Buckley, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Allen, Machito, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Allen Ginsberg, Nina Simone, Gregory Corso, Steve Goodman, Hunter Thompson and Johnny Depp—just to name a few.

That’s quite a list, but it’s what 57 years in Greenwich Village will do when you are in the right place at the right time. Amram was back on stage at 116 MacDougal Street, where in 1958 his buddies Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso used to read poetry before the folk scene, led by Bob Dylan, took over. Better yet, most of this wide range of performers came to hear each other, feeding off totally different kinds of art.

As a classical composer and performer, Amram's integration of jazz into ethnic and folk music has resulted in more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works. But beyond the music are the stories. One of his funniest was the trial of trying to write Indian music for Eugene Ormandy, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Amram’s impressions of Ormandy were dead-on and hilarious.

Scattered in his historical stories about life in Greenwich Village, was some excellent advice for any aspiring artist. After writing the scores for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate, Amram was offered a seven picture deal by a Hollywood studio.

However, the studio wanted the seven pictures completed in only one year. When he asked how could he possibly do that, the studio suggested he use assistants, which, of course, would mean the work would not actually be by Amram. He walked away from the lucrative deal and what he called “Hollyweird” and came back to the Greenwich Village, a lot poorer, but still with his artistic integrity.

His advice: Turn off the television set, mass media and popular entertainment, and follow your own talent, regardless of the advice you get from others. Watch YouTube, he advised, saying there’s much to be mined from it. He reminded the audience that most of the really big things he was involved in began as a very few people in small groups.

One of those was the jazz and poetry movement with Jack Kerouac and what is now known as the Beat Generation, though most of the living poets hate the term today. Amram scored and acted in Pull My Daisy, a 1959 film narrated by Kerouac and co-directed by the great photographer Robert Frank. Rather than just tell about Kerouac and all his buddies, Amram did it in song—often ad libbing the lyrics as he went.

His style of “scat” singing was one of the highlights of the energetic two-hour performance, each totally unique due to his improvisation of lyrics. With that singing, Amram is also a pioneer player of the jazz French horn as well as a virtuoso on piano, numerous flutes and whistles, percussion and dozens of folkloric instruments he collected from travels to more than 25 countries. His performance on these instruments made it a truly eclectic, international concert.

Perhaps, however, the greatest thing about Amram’s performance was how gave the old Gaslight it’s proper historic context. As the night went on, young kids paraded through the club oblivious to the hallowed ground on which they were standing. But for those who listened and paid attention, this was one of the few men alive who can fill in the blanks and tell the rich stories of the Gaslight’s legacy.

This was the place that hosted the likes of Bill Cosby, Bruce Springsteen, Wavy Gravey, Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson, John Herald, The Greenbrier Boys, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Dave Van Ronk, The Blues Project, Mississippi John Hurt, Jimi Hendrix, John Hammond Jr., Odetta, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bonnie Raitt, Rev. Gary Davis, Big Mama Thornton, Link Wray, Mimi Farina, Charles Mingus, Happy and Artie Traum, Doug Kershaw, Bob Neuwirth and David Bromberg.

For the stories, I’m grateful for this rare connection to an earlier era in New York City, when so many of our musical tastes were being shaped by the legends Amram knew and worked with. He humanized them in a very special way.