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July 21. 2002
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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|
Weekend
Edition
July 21, 2002
Mr.
Big Stuff
Alan
Lomax: Great White Hunter
or Thief, Plagiarist and Bigot?
by Dave Marsh
Seeing Alan Lomax's obituary on
the front page of the New York Times irked the hell out of me.
Harry Smith syndrome all over again----the Great White "Discoverer"
as the axis of cultural genesis. Lomax, wrote Jon Pareles, "advocated
what he called 'cultural equity: the right of every culture to
have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.'"
He did?
In 1993, when Lomax published
The
Land Where the Blues Began, his memoir of blues research in the deep South,
Peter Bochan invited him to do a WBAI interview. Bochan ventured
to Lomax that Elvis Presley stood as a great product of the Southern
folk cultures. Lomax firmly denied this, and said that Bochan
couldn't even know that Presley had listened as a boy to Sister
Rosetta Tharpe's gospel radio show because "You  weren't
there." He said this so persistently and adamantly -- with
all the stupid "folklorist" purism that ruined the
folk music revival--that Bochan went home and intercut Lomax's
prissy voice and dumb assertions with excerpts from Beavis and
Butthead. It aired that way.
Even sticking to the
blues, Lomax cut a dubious figure. As a veteran blues observer
wrote me, "Don't get too caught up in grieving for Alan
Lomax. For every fine musical contribution that he made, there
was an evil venal manipulation of copyright, publishing and ownership
of the collected material."
The most notorious concerns
"Goodnight Irene." Lomax and his father recorded Huddie
"Leadbelly" Ledbetter's song first, so when the song needed to be formally
copyrighted because the Weavers were about to have a huge hit
with it, representatives of the Ledbetter family approached him.
Lomax agreed that this copyright should be established. He adamantly
refused to take his name off the song, or to surrender income
from it, even though Leadbelly's family was impoverished in the
wake of his death two years earlier.
Lomax believed folk culture
needed guidance from superior beings like himself. Lomax told
Bochan what he believed: nothing in poor people's culture truly
happened unless someone like him documented it. He hated rock'n'roll--down
to instigating the assault against Bob Dylan's sound system at
Newport in '65--because it had no need of mediation by experts
like himself.
The nature of the expert
mattered, too. Lomax's obit made the front page mainly because
he "discovered" Son
House and
Muddy
Waters. But
in Can't
Be Satisfied,
his new Muddy Waters biography, Robert Gordon shows that Lomax's
discoveries weren't the serendipitous events the great white
hunter portrayed. Lomax was led to House and then Waters by the
great Negro scholar, John Work III of Fisk University. Gordon
even shows Lomax plagiarizing Work, and not on a minor point.
(See page 51) In his book, Lomax offers precisely one sentence
about Work. He eliminated Work from his second Mississippi trip.
He also burned Muddy Waters for the $20 he promised for making
the records.
Maybe the fact that Lomax
served as a folk music "missionary" (to use Bob Dylan's
term) offsets all this. Provided that it doesn't turn out that
Lomax used and discarded ethnic workers worldwide the way he
used Work, I guess there's a case to be made. But I do hope that
people understand that when Pareles says that "Mr. Lomax
wasn't interested in simply discovering stars," part of
the meaning is that he didn't want them to get in the way of
his self--importance.
Sometime soon, we need
to figure out why it is that, when it comes to cultures like
those of Mississippi black people, we celebrate the milkman more
than the milk. Meanwhile, every sentence that will be uttered
about Lomax this week--including these--would be better used
to describe the great musicians he recorded in the U.S., the
Bahamas, and elsewhere. Reading Gordon's book serves as a good
corrective.
DeskScan
(what's playing in my office)
1. "The
Rising"
(track), Bruce Springsteen (Sony)
2. Watermelon,
Chicken and Gritz,
Nappy Roots (Atlantic)
3. "Sway"
and "Moonlight Mile," Alvin Youngblood Hart from Songs of the Rolling
Stones, All Blues'd Up (Compendia This Ain't No Tribute series)
Hart channels Jagger the way Jagger channels Bobby Womack, further
establishing him as the finest of today's young bluesmen. Other
highlights: Junior Wells does "Satisfaction" as "Smokestack
Lightnin'"; Luther Allison does "You Can't Always Get
What You Want" as autobiography. Forget the rest of the
series--volumes devoted to Dylan, Clapton, Zeppelin and Joplin,
although every volume has at
least one good performance by Otis Clay.
4. Blazing
Arrow, Blackalicious
(MCA)
5. Try
Again, Mike
Ireland and Holler
(Ashmont)
6. Adult
World, Wayne
Kramer (MuscleTone)
7. Dreamland, Robert Plant (Universal)
8. Little
By Little,
The Stevens Sisters (Rounder)
9. 1000
Kisses, Patty
Griffin, (ATO)
10. Living
in a New World,
Willie King and the
Liberators (Rooster Blues)
11. The
Better Part of Me,
Clifford Coulter (Sony, Jpn) This 1980 album might be the last
stand of disco as art form. Producer/songwriter Bill
Withers and soul veteran Clifford Coulter combined for a blend
neo--soul never quite reaches: Polished, funky, heartfelt, driving.
12. Down
the Road,
Van Morrison (Universal)
13. The Shed Sessions,
Bhundu Boys (Sadza, Ger.)
14. Millionaire, Kevin Welch (Dead Reckoning)
15. Keep on Burning, Bob Frank (Bowstring.
Dave Marsh coedits
Rock and Rap Confidential.
Marsh is the author of The
Heart of Rock and Soul: the 1001 Greatest Singles.
He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net
This Weekend's
Features
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Coming of Age in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stockmarket Hogwallow
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
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