William Blake : Paradise the Hard Way.

Born in London in 1757 William Blake lived through both the American War of Independence and the
French Revolution, and witnessed the vicious repression after these events by the British ruling
class .Although a deeply spiritual man, he was nevertheless appalled by the conditions of his fellow
human beings and laid the blame in his political poems squarely on the twin evils of Church and State.
Blake was part of a group of close-knit skilled artisans who placed more weight on the moral value of
their products than the market value. The fierce independence he sought throughout his life
manifested itself in his trying to obtain total control over the labour process. He came up with the idea
of publishing his own illuminated books, in which the text and illustrations could be printed from a
single plate that was etched in relief before being sold direct to the buyers for a fair price. The process
was so time consuming that he never gained materially and he never escaped the hated but much
needed patronage of patrons.
The other consequence of this desire for independence was his opposition to the encroachments of
both Church and State. The evidence for what influenced Blakes ideas was the appearance of his
signature on a document circulated at a Conference of Swedenborgians in Easter 1789. Emmanuel
Swedenborg was a Swedish spiritual philosopher. The Swedenborgians stood for a millenarian
proclamation of a New Age, hostility to priest craft, a positive view of human sexuality and a visionary
reading of the material world. There was a split over the movements aim of creating a New Church
and Emmanuel Swedenborgs attitudes to sexuality .(Swedenborg had a vision of an overtly sexual
heaven and tolerated concubinage). Blake identified with the expelled minority who opposed this but
he also had differences with this expelled minority in turn. He was not a joiner of organisations but
stood with the oppressed as an individual.
Opposition to Swedenborg was grouped around his publisher Jacob Johnson and his journal the
Analytical Review .Although all dissenters identified with the French Revolution and Blake was to
defend Paines Republicanism from reactionary attacks, he also had a lifelong enthusiasm for
visionary experiences which gave him a correlative scepticism about the power of Reason .This
marked him out from both the Painite Republican Deists and the Johnson circle. Central to the
differences were his ideas about the self and his attitudes to sexuality. Blake was willing to put the self
into hazard in the interests of his prophetic vision- Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life
he declared .This contrasted with the Painite idea of the autonomous individual. The modern day
equivalent might be a kind of idealist self-help New Age working on oneself in order to liberate
humanity.
Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism:
Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write
upon a scroll which seems to project from his own head.
Blake saw sexuality as unruly and depicted sexual difference as an unstable rather than a fixed part of
human nature (See his Visions of the Daughters of Albion) What was shared with Paine was a rough
handling of the Bible .In Paines Age of Reason the Bible was dismissed as a priestly distortion of
Hebrew folk tradition. Blake wrote in his Notebook:The Hebrew nation did not write it, Avarice and
Chastity did shite it
(Notebook, E 516).
He supported Paine for the latters attacks on the Bibles- Perversions of Christs words and acts.
But if radical politics abstracted the individual from the sum of human brotherhood in its stress on the
autonomy of the reasoning power , then it would perpetuate , in Blokes view, a mystery as destructive
of human potential as the State religion it wished to replace.
In Visions of the daughter of Albion (1793), which contains Blake's critique of Judeo-Christian values
of marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left) are chained together, as Bromion has raped
Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon (right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon
is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.
Many of Blakes most angry poems were published in his Songs of Innocence and Experience

In the Chimney Sweeper Blake contrasts the drudgery and shocking lives of a child chimney sweep
with the intoxicating image of a promised afterlife in Toms dream of an Angel- a thinly disguised attack
on the Church if you submit to misery and dont resist oppression we will give you a dream- its form
and language give a sense of fate for the life of the child slave so its a poem that still matters now
given the scale of child and sweatshop labour that still exists in the 21st century.
The Chimney Sweeper
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd: so I said
Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your heads bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.
And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if hed be a good boy,
Hed have God for his father, & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
In Holy Thursday Blake describes an annual procession, when thousands of the poorest children in
London were marched from Charity schools to St Pauls. There they demonstrate their piety while their
patrons look on. There is an ironic attack on the wise guardians of the poor.

Holy Thursday
Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two in red and blue and green,
Grey headed beadles walking before with wands as white as snow;
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.
Oh what a multitude they seemed, those flowers of London town.
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs:
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.
Beneath them sit the agd men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
The Holy Thursday of Experience makes this more explicit-Blake contrasts the bounty of nature in a
rich and bountiful land with the poverty and misery of the children .The disbelief of the speaker serves
to emphasize the absurdity of plentiful nature and poverty existing side by side reinforcing its
unnaturalness. But the children are also seen as a force and the Holy Thursday of Experience uses
plainer imagery to suggest that both anger and nature will end this oppression.
Babe can never hunger there but only in a different system Blake thought charity almost evil- no
tinkering be honest about the causes and eradicate it.
In the Garden of Love the innocence and natural development of childhood that took place in the
past has been distorted in the present by priests and their draconian church laws. Every element of
the poem-its form, language, repetition and syllables contribute to the portrayal of a world that is full of
despair and oppression, the poem becoming darker and darker with each line. The Garden reveals a
loss of innocence and a denial of natural sexuality with the graves representing the death of pleasure
and beauty- (Note how the imagery of the plate reinforces the message.) -namely his complete
opposition to chastity, shame and marriage.
The Garden Of Love
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
London is another poem full of anger at the state of society.
London
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry

Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
The poems power lies in the juxtaposition of powerful images as Blake wanders through the streets of
London- its key words are Mind forgd Manacles Blakes equivalent of Marxs false consciousness.
People are imprisoned by their fears and false beliefs, the cop in all our heads- this leads to fatalism
and false despair. In other words mental imprisonment, manipulation and psychological oppression
were not abstract concepts for Blake but as much a prison as bars and steel doors. If you couldnt
imagine a society without oppression and exploitation, you really were in a prison .He attacks the
monarchy, militarism and imperialism and their hypocrisy and in the last stanza also has a pop at
marriage and its corollary prostitution.
In the Prophetic books Blake continues with these themes. America -a prophecy dramatises the
Revolutionary war in America , Blake seeing the war as a step forward for world wide liberty and an
opportunity for the British ruling class to see the futility of its militaristic policy. His Europe- a
Prophecy progresses onwards from America describing war and revolution in Europe, but with plates
illuminated in code because of the fierce political repression of those who identified with the French
Revolution. The poem tells the British Establishment to head the warning of a failed militaristic policy
in America.
In Blakes famine a starving child is portrayed intimately and with chilling dignity in Revolutionary
France.The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English poet, and was
illustrated by Blake's own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen. Later
editions dropped the word "first".
The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blakes mythology who represents alienated
reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the "primeval priest", and
describes how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and
enslaving realm of religious dogma. Los and Enitharmon create a space within Urizen's fallen
universe to give birth to their son Orc, the spirit of revolution and freedom. He is symbolic of the
French and American revolutions. In form the book is a parody of the Book of Genesis.
Blake moves on from specific instances of oppression and injustice in the Songs to talk about
underlying causes. Its the ruling class that has invented heaven and Church laws with its Thou shall
not bans , policed by black gowned priests , economic power and slavery in Londons charterd street,
cemented by personal fear and self -imposed limitations in a corrupt world. Fear corrupts the
powerful, the individual and society which, in turn, leads to a hardening of the individual and society
when the causal repression is not honestly addressed and fought against by us all.
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of Religion. Charity is a crime as it reinforces
an unequal status quo and ignores the cause-Capitalism.
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the
fairest joys: Shame is Prides cloak; A dead body revenges not injuries; Prudence is a rich ugly old
maid courted by incapacity.- Proverbs of Hell.
Religion, Patriotism, Commerce and war are all hypocritical excuses for a status quo that exploits the
poorest and weakest. Its cause, for Blake, was a lack of vision and imagination and an over-emphasis
on Reason at the expense of the former.
The prophetic books present a vision of a dynamic, dialectical process in society,
Blake seeing oppression and division followed by revolution as cyclical.

He gives the different energies, forces and desires that exist within societies at different stages of
development coded symbolic names, characteristics and stories and saw change occurring as a
product of the unfolding of contraries. In doing so he revealed eternal truths about humanity through
the specific injustices of his time making Blake a revolutionary.
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Peter Burton

Radical Burns by Peter Burton

The 250th Centenary year of Robert Burnss birth has seen even more events and merry-making
than usual. The writer Andrew O Hagan has a series on TV, there are highlights of Burns poems on
Wiseman dairies Milk cartons, and a bunch of new books on the bard Robert Crawford and Patrick
Hogg have produced new biographies, Donald Smith has written a Novel and photographer Andy Hall
has persuaded Sir Alex Fergusson and other famous people to pick a favourite poem and say a few
words about what Burns has meant to them. The Hall book and Patrick Hogs biography are actually
worthwhile particularly Hoggs radical reinterpretation of Burns work.
The Burns events form part of the Scottish Governments year long Homecoming Scotland campaign
designed on the surface to help celebrate Scottish culture and boost Tourist trade in these hard credit
crunch times. Nothing to do then with the fact that there is a referendum on Independence next year
which the SNP has no guarantee of winning. Once again-for the millionth time Burns is being used
by politicians with agendas plus ca change!
To begin to understand Burns it is necessary to place him in his historical context. He was a product of
Scottish Enlightenment ideas in an Age of Revolutions first the American then the French. The
peasantry were being squeezed and many farms were failing with peasants unable to maintain their
debt bondage to Landowners.
A teacher-John Murdoch- hired by his father William Burnes' helped create a voracious reader and
wordsmith from an early age . Arthur Massons Collection of Prose and Verse which included the
work of Shakespeare, Milton, Thompson,Pope,Gray,Shenstone,Addison and Akenside was read by
Burns till it fell apart . Of these Joseph Addison was seminal .Fellow Scottish poet Robert Fergusson
became Burns greatest influence
In the aftermath of the French Revolution Robert Burns was engaged in refuting accusations that he
was a member of the reforming Friends of the People in Dumfries and in joining a rendition of the
French revolutionary song Ca Ira in the Dumfries Theatre.
His denials came against a background of Louis XVs execution in France-and the arrest and charge
of the lawyer and reformer Thomas Muir. (Muir was sentenced to 14 years in Botany Bay). The British
state was stepping up its persecution of dissenters in fear of the reform movement in Britain and the
ideasof the French revolution that movement stood for. By 1793 the repression
aimed at nothing less than the crushing of the whole democratic and reform movement and a network
of spies was on the hunt for examples the State could use to crush dissent.
Robert Burns had by this time become an Exciseman after successive attempts at make a living as a
ploughman from farming had failed. His class was being squeezed out of existence by enclosure and
agrarian reform and Burns knew it.
He feared for the destitution of his family and dealt with the repression by using the guile and native
wit of an educated poor peasant a public face of being a good excise men to his employers and
maintaining good personal relations with them Burns came up with the idea of a local tax on the
breweries in Ayrshire netting the Excise vastly increased revenue. He combined this public face with
the sending of radical poems and songs anonymously or pseudonymously to dissenting papers such

as the Edinburgh Gazetteer. Morning Chronicle (London) and Glasgow Advertiser.

Burns survived by being careful who he sent his work to refusing to even acknowledge the existence
of some poems to publishers he did not trust He also avoided the Mail system. The Victorian
mythologizes who presented Burns as a heaven taught ploughman who quickly gave up dissenting
work when the going got tough could not have been more wrong. Poems and Songs such as Scots
What hae were coded attacks on the on-going repression of the Pitt government .Ostensibly this song
was about the Bruce and Wallace of centuries ago but was really full of veiled references to the
French Revolution. Its last line let us do or die came from the famous Tennis court Oath made during
the French Revolution
By Oppressions woes and pains!
By your Sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Libertys in every blow!Let us Do or Die!
Or in another poem about the French Revolution published posthumously
The Tree of Liberty
"Heard ye o' the tree o' France,
I watna what's the name o't;
Around it a' the patriots dance,
Weel Europ kens the fame o't.
It stands where ance the Bastille stood,
A prison built by kings, man,
When superstition's hellish brood
Kept France in leading strings, man.
"Upo' this tree there grows sic fruit,
Its virtues a' can tell, man,
It raises man aboon the brute,
It maks him ken himsel, man.
Gif ance the peasant taste a bit,
He's greater than a Lord, man,
And wi' the beggar shares a mite
O' a' he can afford, man.
Last Verse
"Wae worth the loon wha wadna eat
Sic halesome dainty cheer, man;
I'd gie my shoon frae aff my feet,
To taste sic fruit, I swear, man.
Syne let us pray, auld England may
Sure plant this far-famed tree, man;
And blythe we'll sing, and hail the day
That gave us liberty, man."

Burns had written political poetry all his life .In Holy Willies Prayer he attacked the idiocies of the
salvation of the elect that Calvinism stood for again circulating the poem privately amongst friends.
In a fantastic piece entitled Address to Beelzebub Burns combined support for the ideas of the
American and French revolutions with reference to the Highland Clearances and the escape by the
poor to the colonies. It is a dramatic monologue in form addressed from hell and one of Burns best if

lesser known poems.

Address Of Beelzebub
To the Right Honourable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right Honourable and Honourable
the Highland Society, which met on the 23rd of May last at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to
concert ways and means to frustrate the designs of five hundred Highlanders, who, as the Society
were informed by Mr. M'Kenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt an escape from their
lawful lords and masters whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. Macdonald of
Glengary to the wilds of Canada, in search of that fantastic thing-Liberty.
1786
Long life, my Lord, an' health be yours,
Unskaithed by hunger'd Highland boors;
Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,
Wi' dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,
May twin auld Scotland o' a life
She likes-as butchers like a knife.
Faith you and Applecross were right
To keep the Highland hounds in sight:
I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,
Than let them ance out owre the water,
Then up among thae lakes and seas,
They'll mak what rules and laws they please:
Some daring Hancocke, or a Franklin,
May set their Highland bluid a-ranklin;
Some Washington again may head them,
Or some Montgomery, fearless, lead them,
Till God knows what may be effected
When by such heads and hearts directed,
Poor dunghill sons of dirt and mire
May to Patrician rights aspire!
Nae sage North now, nor sager Sackville,
To watch and premier o'er the pack vile, An' whare will ye get Howes and Clintons
To bring them to a right repentanceTo cowe the rebel generation,
An' save the honour o' the nation?
They, an' be d-d! what right hae they
To meat, or sleep, or light o' day?
Far less-to riches, pow'r, or freedom,
But what your lordship likes to gie them?

But hear, my lord! Glengarry, hear!

Your hand's owre light to them, I fear;
Your factors, grieves, trustees, and bailies,
I canna say but they do gaylies;
They lay aside a' tender mercies,
An' tirl the hallions to the birses;
Yet while they're only poind't and herriet,
They'll keep their stubborn Highland spirit:
But smash them! crash them a' to spails,

An' rot the dyvors i' the jails!

The young dogs, swinge them to the labour;
Let wark an' hunger mak them sober!
The hizzies, if they're aughtlins fawsont,
Let them in Drury-lane be lesson'd!
An' if the wives an' dirty brats
Come thiggin at your doors an' yetts,
Flaffin wi' duds, an' grey wi' beas',
Frightin away your ducks an' geese;
Get out a horsewhip or a jowler,
The langest thong, the fiercest growler,
An' gar the tatter'd gypsies pack
Wi' a' their bastards on their back!
Go on, my Lord! I lang to meet you,
An' in my house at hame to greet you;
Wi' common lords ye shanna mingle,
The benmost neuk beside the ingle,
At my right han' assigned your seat,
'Tween Herod's hip an' Polycrate:
Or if you on your station tarrow,
Between Almagro and Pizarro,
A seat, I'm sure ye're well deservin't;
An' till ye come-your humble servant,
Beelzebub.
June 1st, Anno Mundi, 5790.
Against a background of a National Seamans strike he wrote to a friend a satirical political song
Why shouldna poor folk Mo . It was one of many bawdy songs that Burns used to undermine the
repression of the State and Church authorities with their Calvinist ideas on sex and the pre-destination
of the elect.
When Princes and Prilates and het-headed zealots (hot)
All Europe hae set in a lowe, (flame)
The poor man lies down, nor envies a crown,
And comforts himself with a mowe (fuck)
The poem goes on to express solidarity with the Poles who were being oppressed by the Russia of
Catherine the Great , each stanza undermining the pretentions and authority of those in power both
here and internationally.
There were countless other satirical poems and songs such as A Good Mowe ,and Nine Inch Will
Please a Lady .Burns used bawdy verse to demonstrate the impotence of Church and State. He
points up the hubris of totalitarian pretensions and their futile attempts to suppress sex by edicts.
While other writers talked of the democracy of death, Burns preferred to contemplate the democracy
of sex- Sex ranfrae the queen to the tinkler ( Bonie Mary)
The Kirk and State may join and tell;
To do sic things I manna:
The Kirk and State may gae to h-ll,
An I shall gae to Anna

The sex drive outweighed Kirk, State and Houses of Parliament put together and burlesque antiofficial language and popular culture were utilised by Burns to subvert authority and its
methods of control.
FIRST ,YOU,JOHN BROWN, theres witness borne,
And affidavit made and sworn,
That ye hae bred a hurly- burly

Bout JEANY MITCHELLS tirlie whirlie,

And bloosterd at her regulator
,Till aher wheels gang clitter-clatter.
Burns satire went as far as setting up a court to penalise those who were not good at fornicating
amongst an Edinburgh society- The Crochallian Fencibles. They used the same legal language as
the authorities in their poems and Songs .Burns was, of course , its President.
At the heart of all his political satires as well as his more straightforwardly political poems lay a deep
desire to expose and defeat an absolute political power that was shored up by a reactionary
institutional Christianity that presented hierarchy, Class, rank .status and power as natural givens.
This was an ambition shared by his contemporary Blake though the two men seemed not to know of
each other. (Both men , as an aside ,were also obsessed by the Book of Job in those repressive
times).
Victorian Scotland turned Burns into an iconic national figure of whiskey and shortbread and haggis
eating at Burns suppers in opposition to the political values and aims he had passionately stood for
and there has been a terrible legacy left from Victorian times. The first attempt to place Burns in
historical context Catherine Carswells biography in the 1930s led to her receiving a bullet through the
post but the arguments rage on.
Influences are way too many to list but the most intelligent and committed of Burns admirers were
The Ulster poets-Burns ideas influencing the intellectuals of the 1798 rebellion.
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were hugely influenced by his work. Other disciples followed
Emerson and Whitman to Maya Angelou the latter no doubt influenced by his song The Slaves
lament Burns translation into Russian by Marshak led to his celebration as the working class
embodiment of the Soviet ideal . Domestically he has been used by Gladstone in his Midlothian
campaign, the opening of the Scottish Parliament and the current Nationalist campaign for
Independence Cue :
A Mans A Man for Athat
Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.
Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind

He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.
Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern
Drama
Was Bertolt Brecht a Fraudster ?

Bertold Brecht is well known for his plays, poems, short stories and contributions to theatre theory and
practice .His influence is extensive in theatre and in the films of Lars Von Trier, Werner
Fassbinder,Nagisa, Oshima, Ritwik, Ghatak and Jean Luc Godard. Yet since the publication of John
Fuegis biography of Brecht in 1994 Brecht and Company a debate has raged about whether Brecht
was not more than a bit of a fraud with as perhaps as much as 80 % of the writing being the work of
others-most notably three women-Elisabeth Hauptmann, Greta Steffen and Ruth Berlau.
Fuegis central argument is that Brecht had neither the talent nor the will power to write or finish much
of the most famous works that he is credited for works such as The Threepenny Opera , Mother
Courage and her Children and Galileo. The book claims there is documented evidence that these
works were written by these three women. The famous Threepenny opera is 100% the work of
Elisabeth Hauptman Fuegi contends.
The 700 page biography researched over 25 years represents Brecht as an arch- manipulator of
people and a misogynist who engaged in sex for text deals. Brecht had extraordinary charisma and
charm that seduced figures such as Kurt Weill, Auden, Isherwood, and Charles and Laughton as well
as the three lovers and creative collaborators Hauptmann, Steffen and Berlau.
Brecht, according to Fuegi, was a product of a middle class upbringing in Augsburg Germany- an
environment and culture that saw the denigration of women as wholly natural. Plays with strong
female characters such as Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Good Woman of Setzuan, Mother
Courage and Her children and The Caucasian Chalk circle could only have been written by these
politically committed communist women, argues Fuegi.
Fuegi goes on to accuse Brecht of being a plagiarist, stealing works from French symbolist poets
Verlaine and Rimbaud something most clearly visible in the 1927 play Jungle of the Cities.
Manuscripts in Elisabeth Hauptmanns handwriting or her strike pattern on typewritten texts prove
beyond doubt that The Threepenny opera was written by Hauptmann without either credit or
royalties going to her. To the reply that it was possible Brecht might be dictating, Fuegi insists times

10

and dates of when they were together dont back this up. Brecht's own contribution was the song
Mack the Knife and few nips and tucks to the look of the script.
Fuegi goes on to state that Brechts influential theory of theatre The Epic theatre was motivated by a
financial backer who thought it would make more money.
Invent a theory, my dear Brecht! When one presents Germans with a theory, they are willing to
swallow anything.

Brechts relationship with women followed a pattern- use them to the point
where they break with him, at that point focus exclusively on the one who has broken away to get
her back into the fold then, go back to the same maltreatment
that went on before. Fuegis explanation as to why the women stuck around or continued to help
Brecht as they did long after relationships were over , was the hope that one day eventually each of
them would have Brecht to themselves.
But by far the most controversial part of the biography is Fuegi lumping
Brecht in with Hitler and Stalin.
To understand this century, it is essential to recognise the wholly irrational power these figureswhether Hitler, Stalin, or Brecht-exerted when they were encountered in person. Brecht is very much a
part of this century of the charismatic,irrational yet effective Pied Piper powers that could, in the case
of both Hitler and Stalin, lure hundreds of millions of supposedly intelligent beings to embrace their
butchers.
Hauptman, Steffen and Berlau were intriguing women and Fuegi does a service in relating their
stories and showing that they were both talented and more politically committed and ethical than
Brecht. When Brecht went into exile in 1933 , Hauptman risked her life by remaining in Berlin in order
to gather together and secure all of Brechts papers and manuscripts and get them out of Germany.
Hauptmann, according to Fuegi was the author of most of the Short Stories. Margaret Stefan
contributed significantly to Mother Courage and her Children and The Good Woman of Setzuan.
She continued to help Brecht while suffering from TB, dying painfully at the age of 33 from the
disease. Her death in 1941, argues Fuegi, meant the virtual death of Brecht as a playwright .Berlau
contributed to "Brecht" plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Simone Machard, & The Good
Person of Sezuan. She loved Brecht in her words not wisely, but too well." and was not credited by
him for her contribution.
In 1997 Sabine Kebir replied to Fuegis' work in I didnt ask for my share: Elisabeth Hauptmanns
Work with Bertold Brecht. Kebir examined the Hauptmann archives at Berlin's Akademie der Kunste
and referred to previously unknown notes and letters as well as Hauptmanns 1926 journal. Kebir
suggest that as members of the CP in the mid- twenties, there were drawn to the collective of artists,
writers and intellectuals around Brecht precisely because it was a collective collaboration that
promised to shorten the road to Womens Liberation and Socialism.
The women were openly interested in sex, sexual experimentation and autonomy in relationships free
of ownership claims, including claims to mental property and sexual partners. Open marriages,
triangular and bisexual relationships were part of the social utopia they pursued. These sometimes
collided with more traditional needs and expectations resulting in great personal pain- but this was a
very different complex contradictory reality from the passive women as victims story that Fuegi
represented.
Fuegis book makes a strong case for Brecht being an overly controlling, self- centred miser who
repeatedly used people and took credit for others work. Perhaps he was a mysoginist also (one
example-in his will he asked to be buried with a stilletto heal through his heart) Fuegi also makes a an
undeniable case for these women being better known than they are and the book is worth reading for
their stories alone. However Brecht was not a talentless, Svengali figure whose abuse of power was
akin to a Hitler or a Stalin. Work like The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie and Days of

11

the Commune and poems like The Song of the Class enemy and Questions from a Worker who
reads are the work of a very gifted writer who contributed enormously to theatre theory and practice.

Political Song in America in the Thirties and Sixties by Peter Burton

Labour and political songs have existed since the beginning of the 19th century ranging from worker
and abolitionist songs to farmers laments and spirituals.
The songs tended to appear in broadsides and song sheets as well as labour publications.By the
beginning of the 20th century a tradition had been established of using songs for labour organising
goals- the Wobbles being the organisation most associated with this means of agitating and
organising.
Their first publication was Songs of the workers: On the road in the jungles and the shops in 1909. It
was better known as The Little Red song book and was designed to fit into a shirt or back pocket .
Key songs included- Casey Jones- The Union scab, T-Bone Slim- Im too old to be a scab , Ralph
Chaplin, Paint er Red to the tune of Marching through Georgia -not forgetting the Marseillase and
The Internationale. The socialist party also printed songbooks as did various labour unions at this
time.
Joe Hill was a key IWW organiser who traveled widely organizing workers and writing and singing
political songs. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky", which appeared in his most famous protest
song "The Preacher and the Slave (1911). The song calls for "Workingmen of all countries, Unite/
Side by side we for freedom will fight/ When the world and its wealth we have gained/ To the grafters
we'll sing this refrain." Other notable protest songs written by Hill include "The Tramp", "There Is
Power in a Union", "Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones--Union Scab".
Another one of the best-known songs of this period was "Bread and Roses" . It was sung in protest en
masse at a textile strike in Lawrence during January-March 1912 and has been subsequently taken
up by protest movements ever since.
In the Thirties the American CP and individual CIO unions published numerous songbooks-The Red
songbook of 1932 included IWW songs such as the aforementioned Preacher and the Slave, Hold
the Fort and Aunt Molly Jacksons Poor Miners Farewell. And the Spanish Civil war generated
many folk-style songs supporting the Republican side- (A Las Barricadas remains a popular song for
anarchist militants to this day).
The Brookwood Chautauqua songs booklet-from the later 1930s-published in Katonah,NewYork,
with the slogan A singing armys a winning army, began with Solidarity Forever, and included
Victory song of the Dressmakers, The Soup Song and March Song of the Workers.
Commonwealth labour songs appeared in 1938 and included a similar line-up with The
International and ending with Old John Lewis (to the tune of old McDonald had a farm). The goal
during the depression was to get catchy folk song style songs that could be easily remembered to
spread throughout the country-e.g.' The CIOs in Dixie' to the tune Dixie issued by the Birmingham
Industrial union council, and The Workers Marseillaise- the steel workers battle hymn (to the tune of
hold the fort) did just this.
Songs for America.-American Ballads, Folk Songs, Marching songs, songs of other lands appeared
in 1939, a rich and varied group of songs that included The Star Spangled banner , the
International, Spanish civil war tunes Kevin Barry and The Ballad of the Chicago steel massacre.
Unions such as the ILGWU published Everybody sings and in 1942 the New York State Federation
of Teachers Unions issued Sing with the Union.
There were individuals too who promoted rural protest songs that reached the North. Memphis born
Bob Miller wrote scores of songs and published a portfolio -Songs of the Almanac singers in 42.
Poet and journalist Margaret Larkin publicised The songs and struggles of Ella May Wiggins, who

12

had been shot in 1929 during the Gastonia textile strike.

Composers and performers Florence Reese, Ella May Wiggins, Jim Garland, his half sister Aunt Molly
Jackson, and sister Sarah Ogan Gunning, Woody Guthrie, Agnes Sis Cunningham, Lee Hays and
John Handcox captured a mix of radical political songs, working class trials and hardships during the
depression years and on into World War 2.These singers identified with the left unions of the time.The National Miners union, the National Textile Workers Union and the Southern Tenant farmers
union.
In addition there were also labour orientated schools, such as the Highlander Folk school in
Monteagle, Tennesse, Commonwealth college in Mena, Arkansas, The Southern school for workers
near Ashland, North Carolina, and the socialist Brookwood Labour school in Katonah, New York.
Hancock wrote Ragged are We and There are mean things happening in this Land while
organising for the Socialist- connected STFU.
By the early forties there were a number of labour records available but it was the Almanac singers
who were most associated with conscious organising songs .It was formed by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays
and Millard Lampell in early 1941-it led to Songs for John Doe- peace songs and Talking Union
once again labour songs that were written to catch on . The Almanac singers lasted only two years
but laid the basis for the folk revival in the 1960s .Other labour orientated groups recorded during
WW11 included The Priority Ramblers and the Union boys and Woody Guthrie. Alan Lomax was
heavily responsible for shaping the careers of Guthrie, Leadbelly, Burl Ives, Josh White, and Peter
Seeger to the point where they were sometimes called the Lomax Singers.
A similarly influential folk music band who sang protest songs were The Weavers, Pete Seeger being
its main member. The weavers were the first American band to court mainstream success while
singing protest songs, and they were eventually to pay the price for it. While they specifically avoided
recording the more controversial songs in their repertoire, and refrained from performing at
controversial venues and events (for which the leftwing press derided them as having sold out their
beliefs in exchange for popular success), they nevertheless came under political pressure as a result
of their history of singing protest songs and folk songs favoring labor unions, as well as for the leftist
political beliefs of the individuals in the group.
Despite their caution they were placed under FBI surveillance and blacklisted by parts of the
entertainment industry during the McCarthy era, from 1950. Right-wing and anti-Communist groups
protested at their performances and harassed promoters. As a result of the blacklisting, the Weavers
lost radio airplay and the group's popularity diminished rapidly. Decca Records eventually terminated
their recording contract.
Woody Guthries influence was huge and Dylan was only one of many who was inspired by the
Oklahoma Bard in the Sixties. Sis Cunningham had been a member of the Almanac singers in the
forties with Guthrie, Seeger and Bess Hawes. Together with her husband Gordon Friesen she
launched the magazine Broadside in New York on the encouragement of Seeger and Malvinas
Reynolds in February 1962 (it was subtitled A handful of songs about our times).

Broadside was seminal because it published the songs that the more mainstream Sing Out! would
not. Its first issue contained Reynolds Come clean Blues and Dylans Talkin John Birch Society
blues about a right-wing racist organisation-it was his first published song. Dylan , Tom Paxton, Phil
Ochs, Len Chandler and Peter LaFarge would meet monthly in Sis and Gordons cramped apartment
and record their new songs, which would be transcribed before then appearing in the magazine. This
inspired other political songwriters to send their demos and tapes to Broadside from around the
country. The magazine included articles, letters and illustrations capturing the rapidly changing
political climate of the 60s and only folded in the 1980s.
The civil rights movement in the sixties, as opposed to the labour movement, became the inspiration
for organizing songs-with Guy Carawan the music director of the Highland Folk school in Tennessee
being central to this change.. He made field recordings of the civil rights movement and introduced
We shall overcome in 1960 which rapidly became the Civil rights anthem. It was one of many mass

13

organising tool songs derived from familiar gospel tunes.

Dylan, Odetta, Josh White, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary performed during a pre-march
concert on the day of the historic march on Washington in August 1963. Later in the day, Dylan , the
Freedom Singers, Peter Paul and Mary , opera Star Marian Anderson, and gospel star Mahalia
Jackson sang to the mass crowd.
Sadly the only black artists directly involved in civil rights actions were Harry Belafonte and Nina
Simone. Ray Charles and James Brown represented black consciousness in their music but avoided
overt civil rights concerts and events. Berry Gordy, owner of Motown, issued civil rights records,but
was slow to urge his acts to get involved.
Civil rights songs were used from the summer of 1964 to encourage voter registration in the South at
Civil rights workshops and Folk festivals such as the Northern District Mississippi Folk festival and
Greenwood Festival.
The civil rights movement, in turn, led to campus organising and the founding of the S.D.S (Students
for a Democratic Society) in 1960 and the University of California Berkeley Free speech movement in
64,with Baez singing The Times they are a changing and We shall overcome at the initial protest.
As fighting escalated in Vietnam, folk music began to serve as a rallying cry for the mounting peace
movement . A sing in for Peace concert at Carnegie Hall in mid-65 featured 60 performers including
Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez and the Freedom Singers, attracting 5,000 people. Peace songs were
used to swell the crowds at anti war rallies with 'Broadside' and 'Sing out' publishing both old and
new peace songs.

The story of the Blues

Peter Burton- Part One.
The Blues? Its the mother of American music. Thats what it is the source. BB
King
Europeans involved in the slave trade stripped as much culture from their human
cargo as possible but music was so deep rooted in the African men and women that
it was impossible to tear it away from those who survived the horrific journey.
In West Africa, where the slaves came from, every ceremony was celebrated with
singing and dancing and the music went with them to work into the fields of North
America.
Initially the music took the form of Negro spirituals and field hollers. What came to be
known as the Blues drew on both forms and spread throughout south USA as
itinerant songsters carried what they learned from place to place and entertained
people for a profit.
After the failure of Reconstruction in the ten year period after the end of the
American Civil war, institutionalised racism defined the South. After Union troops left
white supremacists moved quickly to maintain their power structures. Jim Crow
14

segregation laws spread to 14 states in the period between 1890 and 1910. This
meant so-called separate but equal facilities enshrined by the US Senate in law in
1896.
Of course facilities were far from equal. And racist laws were backed up with weekly
lynchings. Grinding poverty and shifting seasonal employment affected black people
the most. Fiercer competition for jobs in the depression of the 1890s meant racism
took this particularly brutal form.
What came to be known as Blues music grew up in this transition period from a slave
plantation economy to a sharecropper plantation system of smaller farms based on
debt bondage. Black sharecroppers would in theory own a share of land but given
that tools, clothes and accommodation had to be paid to the landowners from the
share very few actually owned any land. Most ended up owing the landlord more
than they received from the work.
In 1894 there were massive strikes in the North over unemployment. The jobless
were on the move. In response the Democrats wound up supporting segregation in
the South share cropping peonage, railroad construction using black labour, and
convict-lease to landowners predominated.
It was this mixture of unrealised hope from the end of slavery, continued real
oppression and a greater possibility of individual freedom of expression that led to
the creativity of the Blues.
Initially the black church was an outlet for black frustrations, with many black
musicians such as the Reverend Gary Davies and Son House being preachers as
well as musicians. Blues and Gospel developed along parallel lines. But the Church
proved inadequate as a protector, and with the prospect of industrial work in the
north two major migrations north took place at the outset of both world wars.
The music reflected and articulated the emotions that went with the oppression and
now, the dilemmas of staying with kin in oppression in the South or moving North
away from family to look for work. The music was a safe means of escape. It
eventually became universally popular as people the world over identified with the
hopes and frustrations of the blues men and women.
Blues lyrics tended to avoid direct reference to oppression because that could mean
death. Instead oppression was expressed in coded lyrics and dissatisfactions of
specific aspects of life, or stories of heroes like John Henry and Stagolee.
Early blues musicians did not create with a mass audience in mind, so it was very
personal and resonant in sound. The rural south of America lacked good transport
and communication links and there were no obvious fortunes to be made by the
15

bluesmen. They made livings as farmers and played for tips on Saturday nights.
These circumstances meant the blues were partly a product of folklore, word of
mouth and one-to-one tuition with borrowing of links and styles between the
bluesmen.
The Blues really thrived in the Delta region of Mississippi, where work was
particularly hard sharecropping, building levees to hold back the river, cutting
timber and building railroads to carry crops to new markets; mining towns, tobacco
plantations, work camps and prisons. The Blues thrived in the places that black
workers went to relax the saloons, gambling dens, brothels, Saturday night parties
and fish fries. It was shunned by the Churches, both because of where it was
performed and the subject content of much of the lyrics. Many Churches denounced
it as Devils Music
Improvisation reflected a need in these kinds of places for images of strength against
adversity. It was also encouraged by some landowners and work gang leaders on
the levees and railroads, as it improved productivity (Some gang leaders even gave
instruction on call-and-response work songs).
The legend about the blues being heard first by band leader and composer WC
Handy in a railroad station in Tutwiler is worth retelling. Handy recounted it in his
book: Father of the Blues:
A young man approached him carrying a guitar. His clothes were rags, his feet
peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. The
singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the
weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. Going where the
Southern crosses the dog the bit of lyric Handy made out referred to a railway
intersection.
Arguments rage over when this actually took place 1895, 1903 or even 1905
and whether it was the first time anyone had ever heard the sound, a sound whose
range came to cover the poetic, frank discussions of sex (often just spoken about
instead of sung), wails, moans and humming. Vocals reflected the artists feelings of
anguish, and the guitar wailed along, sometimes hard and visceral, sometimes soft
and playful.
The when of Handys encounter is not important. What is important is that band
leaders like Handy started to incorporate the sound into their sets as the sound
proved popular and profitable, and in the 20s the phonograph replaced sheet music
allowing for recorded sound. Initially the records were sold as race records and
were only bought by blacks, until a more open and democratic radio changed this in
the fifties.

16

The first blues singers to record were women, most notably Ma Rainey and the
Queen of the Blues, Bessie Smith. They were backed up by the top jazz musicians
of the time, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton.
Portable sound recording equipment in 1925 led the companies to send out talent
scouts to record in the major cities of the South, in motel rooms, churches and
auditoriums and even prisons. Communist Party members Alan and John Lomax
were key figures in recording many of the early blues men and women.
Guitars would be purchased by black musicians from pawn shops, as they were
eager to escape sharecropping, making tips on corners or in bars. The guitar
replaced the banjo, as the instrument of choice as it suited the singers vocal range
meter and distinct blues notes. Distinct geographical areas produced skilled players
with sounds specific to the region Texas Blues, Piedmont blues and Delta sounds.
The latter sound transferred northwards with economic migration, principally to
Chicago, where it would evolve into electric blues.

Sex, prison, law, and racism in the

blues- Part Two.
Peter Burton
It was the fusion of blues with ragtime and Jazz in the early twenties by band leaders
like Handy that popularised the blues. His signature work was the St Louis Blues.
The other way blues reached white audiences was through the classic female blues
performers, the music evolving from informal entertainment in bars to entertainment
in theatres.
The blues performers were organised by the Theatre Owners Bookers Association
(also known as Tough on Black Asses). Musicians performed in nightclubs such as
the Cotton Club, juke joints and infamous bars along Beale Street in Memphis. At the
same time Okeh, Paramount and the American Music Corporation began to record
African-American music. With its growth came the rise in popularity of country blues
performers like Bo Carter, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and
Blind Blake, country blues songsters like Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert
Johnson and singers like Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller.

17

But the 1920s was also the time of classic female urban or vaudeville blues singers
like Mamie Smith, Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey. Key
Urban male performers included Big Bill Broonzy, Leroy Carr and Tampa Red, the
latter having a risqu hit with Its tight like that. Stories about oppression, often
coded, sometimes explicit, covered themes like male/female relationships, lesbian
relationships, economic migration, prison experiences, racism, violence, illegal
numbers playing, and coping with the law.
Men and Women/Women and Women Blues
Men sure is deceitful and theys gettin worser every day
Men sure is deceitful and theys gettin worser every day
Act like a bunch of women, theys just-a gab, gab, gabbin away
Theres two things got me puzzled, theres two things I cant stand
Theres two things got me puzzled, theres two things I cant stand
A mannish actin woman and a skippin twistin woman actin man
Foolish Man Blues doesnt reveal anything particularly about Bessie Smiths
sexuality, but it does have some interesting takes on gender. Theres a treasury of
blues songs by and about lesbians.
Lucille Bogan, recording under the name Bessie Jackson, accompanied by pianist
Walter Roland from 1935, recorded one of the best. Shes talking about bull dykes
or bull daggers in B.D. Womans Blues.
Lesbians were common on the classic blues scene of the 1920s and 1930s, singers
like Alberta Hunter. They lived in an environment where their sexuality could at times
be flaunted, at other times it had to be hidden. The songs reflect this. Their stage
shows did even more so. Whatever they were representing, most of these
performers never stopped entertaining.
Ma Rainey was the first superstar of the classic blues women. She was a married
woman, married to Pa Rainey, but in the 1920s, her love of women was no secret.
She was arrested in 1925 after a police raid at a party where several women
including Ma were found together naked and having sex. In Prove It on Me, while
backed up by a sort of a jazz jug band that featured Thomas Dorsey, she sings about
the elusiveness of her sexuality and her feelings toward men and women.
18

Charley Patton was the greatest chronicler of Mississippi in blues song. In Stone
Pony Blues from 1934, he sings about Vicksburg, Greenville, Lula, and Natchez.
Stone Pony was an expression for anything good. Pattons uses the phrase as a
metaphor for young women he has seen around Mississippi. Bukka White sang
about his troubled times with the women in Aberdeen, Mississippi.
New Orleans is over 300 miles away from Aberdeen. But that was nothing to many
blues musicians willing to pick up and go for any reason. Bukka White sung about
getting away from the Aberdeen women to get to some new ones down in New
Orleans.
Big Bill Broonzy was one of the many who made the trek out of Mississippi to
Chicago. But he never forgot the south. In Lowland Blues, from 1936, he sings about
Jackson, Greenwood, and anywhere in Mississippi being his true home.
Prison Blues
Field recordings from Southern penitentiaries were a frequent pursuit of folklorists
recording for the Library of Congress or universities. Alan Lomax recorded some
remarkable songs by prisoners about their experiences, including a harmonica
feature from a man known only as Alex and a haunting vocal from Tangle Eye,
though Leadbellys songs are the best known
Life in the penitentiary was the subject of many a blues song. Furry Lewis sang
about the inevitability of ending up in the penitentiary once he ended up in the court
of Judge Harsh. Furry sang about heading to prison despite never having harmed a
man. His woman offers money to the judge, but its not enough to keep the
penitentiary from becoming his home.
Peg Leg Howell recorded several songs about crimes and prison. In Ball and Chain
Blues recorded in Atlanta in 1929, he sings a song about the hard labour that comes
with a sentence. Labour was a constant in Southern prisons and it took various
forms. Howell discusses being part of a chain gang. He knew what it was like to
endure physical labour for the state as a prisoner.
Chain gang work had a reputation for harshness, but there were equally harsh
systems in states like Mississippi, with Parchman Farm, and Louisiana, with Angola
penitentiary. They had their prisoners work the fields of a prison plantation. Nearly all
observers remarked on the similarities between these prisons and the systems of
plantation slavery that had ended decades earlier in those same states. Bukka White
recorded two songs about prison including Parchman Farm Blues.

19

Parchman Farms crops created a huge amount of revenue for the state of
Mississippi creating an incentive to imprison labourers for the fields. The prisons
brutality was the stuff of legend.
One of the few ways to be released early was for one prisoner to kill another that
was thought to be trying to escape. The state farms and the chain gangs held many
in an era when hard labour was the punishment for those who ended up in prisons,
some guilty of violent crimes, others lesser offences that still violated the Jim Crow
system. This included countless blues musicians who recorded dozens of songs.
Together they create a fascinating document of prisons in the 20s and 30s.
Dealing with the Law Blues
One of the most difficult things about living in a discriminatory society is having the
law work against you rather than protecting you. This was the situation for AfricanAmericans in the Jim Crow era. Even lawyers of the time referred to an unwritten
negro law that treated black men without regard to their rights. This was
implemented at every level of justice from the police to the courthouse to the prisons
and jails.
Thanks to the heritage of slavery, black men and woman would need the protection
of white men to avoid ending in trouble with local police. This protection would often
be unavailable for someone living an itinerant blues lifestyle, and a huge number of
blues songs were recorded about dealing with the law.
Bo Carter expressed the trouble that can come from a black man having even a little
alcohol in the age of prohibition in his 1931 song The Law Gonna Step on You.
Memphis musician Robert Wilkins recorded Police Sergeant Blues in 1930. The
song equates trouble with his woman to trouble with the law. He describes the
inevitability of a sentence once the police come for you.
Blind Blake recorded a song about being thrown in jail, and he wished someone
would have told him What a Low Down Place the Jailhouse Is. In the song, Blake
was thrown in jail by a judge. Even worse than getting sent to jail for a few weeks
was being sentenced to the state prison Leroy Carrs Prison Bound Blues describes
the feeling of knowing your headed to the penitentiary and losing the life you
enjoyed.
The number of blues songs about police, lawyers, judges, jails, and prisons testifies
to the difficulty of dealing with the law for those living a blues lifestyle. Though the
stories of lynching and murder are told frequently, these songs help document the
smaller problems with the law that African-Americans could have on a nearly daily
basis in the Jim Crow South.
20

These could include being thrown in jail without a second thought from a police
officer and being sentenced with little more consideration from a judge.
Racism Blues
When these 1920s blues songs were recorded, skin-lightening cream products ads
were always seen alongside the blues record advertisements in black newspapers
like the Chicago Defender. The assumption was that light skinned was automatically
more attractive.
Blues singers often subverted this assumption, but at times reinforced it. The popular
music comedy team from the 1920s, Butterbeans and Susie, sing in Brown Skin Gal
about how a brown skinned girl can be trusted and is the best, but she might not
have the money, status, or look as good as a yellow.
Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell have a similar take in Good Woman Blues. In Its
Heated, Frankie Half-Pint Jaxon gives his ideas about sexual stereotypes with the
darkest woman coming out on top: Now a yellow gal is like a frigid zone,
brownskins about the same. You want some good loving, get yourself an old Crow
Jane.
The term Crow Jane shows up in dozens of blues songs referring to dark women.
Texas Alexander subscribed to the lighter-is-better school in Yellow Girl Blues: Black
woman evil, brown skin evil too. Going to get me a yellow woman and see what she
will do.
Some male blues singers expressed the attitude that the high status of light-skinned
women made them more difficult to deal with as romantic partners. The idea was that
light-skinned women may be more beautiful, have more money, and a generally
higher status, but they wont treat a man well.
Bo Weavil Jackson sang in Some Scream High Yellow: Some Scream High Yellow, I
scream black or brown. High yellow may mistreat you, but black wont turn you
down.
In this way issues of race and class were written and thought about in the blues
culture of the time.

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Migration blues
Peter Burton -Part Three
Beginning around the First World War, millions of black US Southerners moved north
to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Known as the Great Migration, this
population movement changed the course of American history. People left the South
to escape the oppressive racist system, but also, and more importantly, because of
the job opportunities and promise of economic security in Northern cities.
Blind Blake sang about getting a job at Mr Fords place in Detroit Bound Blues. Jobs
in the automotive industry were an important factor pulling African-Americans to
Detroit. And cars and trains provided transportation to the North. Many from Alabama
headed to Detroit via railroad. And many from Mississippi and Tennessee headed to
Chicago. From Georgia and the Carolinas, they went to DC or New York. The route
of the migration patterns was often identical to that of the large railroad lines.
Tennessee native Bessie Smith sang about missing her man who had caught the
train to Chicago in her song Chicago Bound Blues. In this song, she references the
Chicago Defender newspaper. The Defender actively encouraged African-Americans
in the South to come to Northern cities and was very successful at recruiting wage
labour for Chicagos industries.
Though the traffic of the Great Migration was largely one way, at times economic
opportunity dictated a return down south (in recent years moving back down has
become even more common). In 1948, Roosevelt Sykes sang of a time when cotton
prices made working in the Southern fields more profitable than the Northern
factories.
Between the entire period 1914-1950 in several waves, millions of black Southerners
arrived in Northern cities. The transition from the acoustic Delta blues of the 20s and
30s to electric Chicago blues is one of the easily observable musical manifestations
of the Great Migration. But the migration changed more than music, it changed race
relations, economics, and living conditions for millions. Blues musicians were some
of the best observers of their own lives and the changes in the world around them.

Bonus Blues
22

The earliest recorded blues were made in the wake of the First World War. Its tough
to know how many blues musicians served in the armed forces, but the war was
clearly a formative experience for many. Every veteran of the Great War was
promised a pension that includes $1 for every day served on the home front and
$1.25 for every day served overseas. The fight to actually receive this money would
turn into one of the most important experiences of the Great Depression and inspire
several blues songs.
From 1929, Congress had reviewed the bonus situation several times and in 1932 a
bill to allow immediate payment passed in Congress, but not in the Senate. In 1932,
a Veterans Bonus Army known as the Bonus Expeditionary Force (in an echo of the
American Expeditionary Force that served in Europe) had marched on Washington
to demand payment. Black and white soldiers came from all over the country and
formed integrated camps in south-east Washington along the Anacostia River. The
veterans camp presented a stark contrast to the strictly segregated units the soldiers
had served in during the war as well as to the still segregated streets of Washington
D.C.
After the defeat of the Bonus Bill, President Hoover ordered the camp of the Bonus
Army be disbanded. General Douglas MacArthur led the effort to burn down the
camp and force the veterans army out of the city. The images of the standing army
attacking veterans from its own ranks were printed in newspapers across the
country, cementing national anger with the Hoover administration, and creating great
sympathy for the veterans.
After being cleared out in 1932, the veterans continued their campaign to receive the
bonus money including additional marches on Washington that had vast public
support. The Government continued to resist immediate payment, citing concern
about the effects of the huge expenditure on the economy. The veterans were finally
successful in 1936. A bill to allow bonds to be cashed whenever the veteran chose
passed over President Roosevelts veto.
Joe Pullum may have been the first blues singer to reference the bonus in his 1934
song Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard? At that time the bonus money was
available only in the form of bonds that could not be cashed out until 1945. Many
veterans were able to capitalise on the bonuses through loans, but that entailed
paying interest. Thats what Joe Pullum referred to when he sang about having his
bonus money. Joe Pullum eventually recorded several more songs that reference the
bonus including Bonus Blues in 1936.
Most of the blues songs that address the bonus talk about how the money will be
spent when they finally get it. These include songs by Carl Martin, Peetie
Wheatstraw, and others. The political issues are referenced indirectly as they often
are in blues songs.
Living in a Violent World
23

Blues musicians of the 1920s and 30s existed in a violent world. Fights were
common and it was usual to carry a weapon, a gun even, and to keep an eye open
for the quickest way to get off the stage and out of the building. Some blues
musicians still exist in this kind of world, and its common to other musical worlds. It
was reflected in the music. Will Shade recorded She Stabbed me with an Ice Pick in
1928.
Carrying a weapon was seen as an essential part of life for many blues musicians
dealing with rough crowds and tough situations and self-defence murders by
bluesmen, fighting jealous husbands were common in the 1920s.

The Pre-War Blues

Pete Burton- Part Four.
The American sheet music publishing industry produced a lot of ragtime music. By
1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions,
precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: Baby Seals Blues by
Baby F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews), Dallas Blues by Hart Wand, and
Memphis Blues by W. C. Handy.
Handy used his formal training as a musician, composer and arranger to popularize
the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with
bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself
as the Father of the Blues. However, his compositions can be described as a fusion
of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera
rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime; Handys signature work was the St.
Louis Blues.
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American
popular music, reaching white audiences via Handys arrangements and the classic
female blues performers. The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to
entertainment in theatres.
Blues performances were organised by the Theater Owners Bookers Association
(also known as Tough on Black Asses) in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club, and
juke joints, such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. This evolution led to a
notable diversification of the styles and to a clearer division between blues and jazz.
Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh
Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African American music.

24

As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter, Blind Lemon
Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Blind Blake became more popular in the
African American community. Sylvester Weaver was the first to record the slide guitar
style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.
The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues.
The first blues recordings from the 1920s were in two categories: a traditional, rural
country blues and more polished city or urban blues. The 1920s blues songsters
became highly influential in the post-war period. Lonnie Johnson was so influential
on Lonnie Donegan that Donegan adopted his name, Lonnie. Donegan, the
founder of skiffle in Britain, became an icon for Paul McCartney and many British
bands.
Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with
only a banjo or guitar. There were many regional styles of country blues in the early
20th century.
The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style, with passionate vocals
accompanied by slide guitar. Robert Johnson, who was little-recorded, combined
elements of both urban and rural blues.
Along with Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style were his predecessors
Charley Patton and Son House. Singers such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy
Fuller performed in the southeastern delicate and lyrical Piedmont blues tradition,
which used an elaborate fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early
slide tradition.
The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s around
Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug bands, such as the Memphis Jug Band
or the Gus Cannons Jug Stompers. Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John
Estes, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual
instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin. Memphis Minnie was
famous for her virtuoso guitar style.
Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his quite distinct style was
smoother and contained some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in
Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the
urban blues movement which blended country music and electric blues.
Bessie Smith
City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate. Classic female urban or
vaudeville blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith,
Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. Mamie Smith, more a
25

vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African- American to record a
blues in 1920; her Crazy Blues sold 75,000 copies in its first month.
Ma Rainey, called the Mother of Blues, and Bessie Smith, sang ... each song
around centre tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of
a room. Smith would ...sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending
and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own
interpretation was unsurpassed.
Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such Tampa
Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr.
Before World War Two, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as The Guitar
Wizard. Carr made the then-unusual choice of accompanying himself on the piano.
Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues.
While the style is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to
accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-Woogie
style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level
in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand.
Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the BoogieWoogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis). Chicago boogiewoogie performers included Clarence Pine Top Smith and Earl Hines, who linked
the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar
to those of Armstrongs trumpet in the right hand.
In the 1940s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues is influenced by big band
music and uses saxophone or other brass instruments and the guitar in the rhythm
section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals. Jump blues
tunes by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri,
influenced the development of later styles such as rock and roll and rhythm and
blues.The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr John,
blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles.
In 1942 James C Pelisto (AFM) organised a ban on the record labels to secure more
royalties for the musicians. Decca settled 12 months later and new independent
labels like Savoy, Aladdin and Modern sprung up in New York, Chicago and LA. Two
consequences of the strike were that singers like Frank Sinatra became as famous
as band leaders like Henry James and Tommy Dorsey, and the new labels then
specialised in black jazz, Blues and Gospel.

26

Blues in the 1960s and 1970s

Peter Burton- Part Five.
By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by African American music such as
rock and roll and soul were part of mainstream popular music. White performers had
brought African-American music to new audiences, both within the US and abroad.
In the UK, bands emulated US blues legends, and UK blues-rock-based bands had
an influential role throughout the 1960s.
Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform
to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as
New York-born Taj Mahal.
John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with
younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971
album Endless Boogie. BB Kings virtuoso guitar technique earned him the
eponymous title king of the blues. In contrast to the Chicago style, Kings band
used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of
using slide guitar or harp. Tennessee-born Bobby Blue Bland, like B.B. King, also
straddled the blues and R&B genres.
During this period, Freddie King and Albert King often played with rock and soul
musicians (Eric Clapton, Booker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those
styles of music that has carried through to the present.
The music of the civil rights and free speech movements in the US prompted a
resurgence of interest in American roots music and early African American music. As
well as traditional venues, music festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival brought
traditional blues to a new audience, which helped to revive interest in pre-war
acoustic blues and performers such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip
James, and the Reverend Gary Davis. (Skip James at Newport in 1963 blew a white
middle class audience away with his guitar playing, having not played or recorded for
30 years )
These artists began to tour again after many decades of not playing, bringing blues
to a new wealthier generation of young people . Muddy Waters had been playing
electric blues as part of the American Blues Music tours in Europe from 1958
onwards. Dylans 1963 and 1964 Newport performances had made him popular with
the Newport crowd, but on July 25, 1965 Dylan was booed by some fans when he
played alongside an electric blues/rock and roll band while headlining the festival.
27

(The backing players were from the Chicago based and influential Paul Buttersfield
Blues band most notably Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar.)
It is usually said that the reason for the crowds hostile reception was Dylans
abandoning of the folk orthodoxy, or poor sound quality on the night (or a
combination of the two).
This incident, Dylans first live plugged-in set of his professional career, marked the
shift in his artistic direction from folk to rock, and had wider implications for both
styles of music. He added his authority to what the electric bluesmen were already
doing, bringing the unofficial and artificial separate acoustic folk and electric blues
culture to an end much to the annoyance of many Stalinist purist folkies (for a
detailed history of the CPGB Stalinists mindset about Folk Music see C P Lee: Bob
Dylan and the road to the Manchester Free trade Hall).
Ewan McColl, in spite of his radical radio shows and contribution to political song,
was one of the purists who insisted on artists singing in their own national tongue.

Recent years
Peter Burton-Part Six.
JB Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs
using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass
or drums. His songs commented on political issues such as racism and the Vietnam
War, which was unusual for this period. His Alabama blues recording had a song that
stated:
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me (2x)
You know they killed my sister and my brother,
And the whole world let them peoples go down there free
White audiences interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the
Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the British blues movement. British
bands such as Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, The Rolling
Stones, The Yardbirds, and Cream performed classic blues songs from the Delta or
Chicago blues traditions.

28

The British blues musicians inspired a number of American blues-rock fusion

performers, including Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, The J. Geils Band,
Ry Cooder and The Allman Brothers Band. Many of Led Zeppelin's earlier hits were
renditions of traditional blues songs. But Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the
time: a black man who played psychedelic rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and
a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and feedback in his music. Through
these artists and others, blues music influenced the development of rock music.
In the late 1960s, the West Side style blues emerged in Chicago with Magic Sam,
Magic Slim and Otis Rush. West Side style has strong rhythmic support from a
rhythm guitar, bass electric guitar, and drums. Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Luther
Allison had a West Side style that was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.
Blues Incorporated the British R&B band of the early 1960s, although never very
successful commercially, was extremely influential on the development of British rock
music in the 1960s and later.
The band established a regular Rhythm and Blues Night at the Ealing Jazz Club in
1962. This brought together many more fans of blues and R&B music, including Mick
Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Rod Stewart, Paul Jones, John Mayall, Zoot
Money and Jimmy Page, some of whom would occasionally sit in on Blues
Incorporated performances.
Blues Incorporated was conceived as an informal 'band'; its membership was
intended to be fluid. Korners Ealing club and the American Folk Blues Festivals in
Britain and Europe were a magnet to blues /rock musicians , combining to ensure
strong and pervasive links between blues and early rock and roll music.
From the early 1970s, the Texas rock-blues style emerged which used guitars in both
solo and rhythm roles. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is
strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of the Texas
style are Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and ZZ
Top.
These artists all began their musical journey in the 1970s, but they wouldn't achieve
major international success until the next decade.

The Documentary Photograph

(Peter Burton)
Critics of early documentary photography repeated the same critique of the medium that had been
made against the founding father of documentary film John Grierson - that working class people had
been represented as passive victims of industrial capitalism . At best the photograph aimed to
pressurise governments into a charitable response to poverty , slum housing or bad working
conditions. And at worst the goal was simply to display the skill and humanity of the photographer.

29

Nevertheless documentary photographs have led to progressive social change that might otherwise
have been delayed or not occurred at all. Lewis Hines photographs at the outset of the Twentieth
Century were used to help end child labour in US factories, Sweatshops and Mines. Tina Modotti
made an empathetic representation of the Mexican Revolution in the 20s and 30s and here in the UK
Edith Tudoe- Hardt worked with the National Unemployed Workers Association to highlight the
consequences of mass unemployment in depression Britain. The iniquities of Apartheid South Africa
were wonderfully represented in Ernets Coles famous House of Bondage and Sebastian Salgados
photos of Workers has undoubtedly contributed to a worldwide struggle for social justice.
However the medium has not escaped the retreat from class politics from the Thatcher period
onwards and it is not obvious who, if anybody, has replaced documentary photographers like
McCullin, Bresson, Capa, and Salgado.
Whatever the aims of the photographer it is undeniable that the documentary photograph has been
and continues to be seen as a threat not just by dictatorial regimes but increasingly by late Capitalist
Western liberal-democracy also.
The first big example of censorship was the banning of photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the
Americans during their seven year occupation of Japan at the end of WW 2, the photos of Yamhata,
Domon and Tomatsu bringing the horrors of the atomic age to the Worlds attention only after the
occupation ended. Don McCullin , Philipp Jones Griffiths , David Douglas Duncan, Tim Page and
Larry Burroughs negative representation of Vietnam were significant in turning public opinion against
the war . Crucially Eddie Adams photo of the cold blooded execution of a North Vietnamese by the
Saigon Chief of Police increased the numbers of Americans on anti-war demos dramatically, the
numbers increasing again as the smuggled photos of the My Lai massacre emerged.
Government reaction has seen much tighter control, Don McCullin infamously being denied a press
pass during the Falklands/Malvinos war. Photographers in Ireland during The Troubles were
embedded with army units- a practice repeated in the recent Iraq war. Technological advances yet
again have made absolute control impossible as images of the Abu Ghraib tortures ably
demonstrated.
It remains to be seen if there is a downside to the greater availability of high quality images. Will the
fantastic quantity of photographs undermine the mediums power to both shock and provoke much
needed protest and dissent? Or shall widespread availability of easily usable digital technology at
increasingly reduced prices make oppression and cover -up increasingly difficult ?

Thursday, 3 April 2008

Fred Wiseman
Time for Wiseman
Technological changes in the sixties led to the introduction of lightweight portable
16 mm cameras , the new technology changing the nature of documentary filmmaking.
Cinema Verite minimised voiceover commentary and non-diegestic music. The style and form
appeared observational but in fact a film would be culled from days of footage, the selection of shots
having deliberate intended effects on the audience.
One of the key exponents of the new style Cimema Verite ( Cinema Truth) was Fred Wiseman .In the
case of Wisemans High School 80 minutes of film was selected from 40 hours of footage. On the
surface the film looks like a slice of High school life, but through the use of long shots, editing,
extensive dialogue, close ups, conflict, and an absence of continuity, a representation is made of
power and conformity to that power by students and parents. And No one in power loses an
argument to quote Wiseman.
Regimentation of school life is conveyed through association or montage techniques.
The power of both content and form saw Wisemans first film Titticut Follies about

30

the criminally insane at a Massachussettes Institute banned from 1967 until 1991.
Wiseman destroyed stereotypes , and combined tenderness , brutality ,apathy dedication of purpose
and integrity in a way that other Cinema Verite filmmakers struggled to match. To watch a Wiseman
film is to go through a real experience. His main films in addition to High School were Hospital 1970
and Near Death 1969. Other must see Cinema Verite films include Salesman-1969, -Gimme
Shelter-1970, Primary- 1960 ,Grey Gardens-1973 and Dont Look Back in 1965.

Blattered !!
Peter Burton
In 1996 Joao Havelange retired as President of FIFA. Serge Blatter, a Swiss Lawyer and Havelange's
chosen successor defeated the reform candidate Lennart Johannsoon (a Swedish truck magnate).
Johansoon had stood on a platform of transparency, accountability and greater recognition within FIFA
for European pre-eminence. Blatter did the rounds in the heart of Johannson's support in Europe and
Africa, blatantly electioneering under the guise of official business with Havelange at his side. He won
111-80 in the first round of voting and there was no need for a second round.
Havelenge's authoritarian and patrician-charm style was replaced by an extensive system of
bureaucratic power. Blatter's staff were hand-picked at the Presidential office and an enlarged phalanx
of kept support was sent on official business. Five-star hotels, business class flights, black Mercedes,
$500-a-day expense accounts with no receipts required all became the norm. As if that wasnt enough
$50,000 "honorariums" were given to all Executive Committee members. This combined with a new
level of opaqueness over all financial transactions. Blatter's salary, expenses, emoluments and
accounts remained top secret in spite of numerous requests from the Press and UEFA. Massive debts
owed to FIFA from Confederations and Football Associations were written off without any good reason
given.
Blatter's first three years from 1999 to 2001 coincided with an economic boom, the growth of digital
television, inflated TV rights deals, the expansion of the Champions' League and a transfer market
that visibly increased its prices for players. The bubble seemed to burst in 2001 when FIFA's main
marketing partner, International Sports and Leisure (ISL), went bankrupt. Extraordinary financial
transactions were revealed and included $60 million due to FIFA from the Brazilian TV company
Globo for World Cup rights in secret bank accounts.
200 million sponsorship money was simply missing. Under Blatter companies like Coca-Cola and
McDonalds were prepared to pay FIFA millions in exchange for their brand name being sold to billions
of people worldwide at the World Cups. Difficult markets to break into like China and Russia became
accessible. And FIFA was prepared to take companies to court to guarantee exclusivity.
Blatter's solution to the burst bubble a huge private securitization deal a large loan at above
market rates secured for the creditors against the income FIFA would receive for selling TV rights to
the 2002 and 2006 World Cups in the future. Opposition within FIFA mounted to Blatters's methods.
The crises deepened with the collapse of European companies who had gambled on investments on
television rights for subscription channels. The mighty German conglomerate Kirch Media took over
these companies investments after ISL collapsed. Kirch already had the rights to the 2002 and 2006
World Cups. They now took the rest of the tournament rights and sold them across the world. In April
2002 it collapsed too under a mountain of debt and unachievable income projections.
This was the final straw for the then FIFA General Secretary Michel-Zen Ruffnen who distributed a
detailed report on all the financial mismanagement that had been going on to the FA Executive.
Eleven of its members were so alarmed they took court action at the Swiss public prosecutor's office
in Zurich..
Blatter's response was to indirectly call an extraordinary meeting of the Executive on the eve of the
2002 World Cup at the Seoul Hilton. A succession of FA Presidents close to Blatter were wheeled out

31

to offer paeans of praise to Blatter. No one critical was allowed to contribute. Blatter's critics were
themselves criticised incoherently by a succession of FA Presidents loyal to Blatter. Adam Crozier, the
then head of the English FA, described it as "an absolute disgrace from start to finish. There was no
attempt at transparency in two hours of manipulation".
When the votes rolled in the next day, Blatter had won an even bigger margin than in 1998 139
votes to 36. Leo Mugabe - nephew of Robert Mugabe and President of the Zimbabwean FA commented "It is shocking...this is a travesty of democracy". When Adam Crozier and Mugabe's
nephew are outraged you know its been a bad day for democracy.
The threat of intervention from seriously powerful organisations like the European Commission led
Blatter to adopt the language of his enemies and he also set up a Committee of Investigation. He
appointed Ricardo Teixeira and Jack Warner to this committee - the two most corrupt bureaucrats he
could have picked.
In Spring 2006 it was revealed Jack Warners family travel agency was selling World Cup ticket
packages straight out of the Football Associations allocation. Asked for an explanation by Blatter he
said he and his wife had resigned from the board of the travel agency and so there was no conflict of
interest, an explanation that was accepted. Since then the allies in corruption have fallen out, with
Blatter raising the need for a corruption investigation into his rival for the Presidency Mr Bin Hamman
(a Qatari billionaire) on the eve of the election for President.
Since the 2002 World Cup a global pandemic of corruption has grown with much match-fixing. The
biggest clubs have grown much richer and more powerful at the expense of smaller clubs. A
globalised international financial elite now controls football in which the winners are a few rich clubs,
some star footballers and their agents and the owners and controllers of the game from a world of
corporate finance. Many of them have little or no real interest in the game. The governing bodies like
the FAs often have conflicting interests with FIFA and other regulators of the game and in any case
are cash dependent on FIFA. Blatter's "Ethics Committee" has represented that corporate elite in
stating that he has "no case to answer". The losers will continue to be the smaller clubs, the fans and
the beautiful game itself.

32

Great Book on 65 to 72 in US

Theres a riot going on, revolutionaries,rock Stars and the rise and fall of 60s counter-culture by
Peter Doggett
Peter Doggetts Theres a riot going on, revolutionaries, rock Stars and the rise and fall of 60s
counter-culture was one of the best featured books at the recent Aye Write festival in Glasgow .
The book recalls in detail ( its 525 pages) the uneasy relationship between rock stars, political
activists and the counter culture in the 8 years between 1965 and 1972.
Doggetts raison detre for the book:In an era when Bono, the hand in glove darling of the global political establishment and Bruce
Springsteen, the personification of cosy liberalism, are revered as rock and pop icons, its timely to be
reminded of an era when artists were prepared to court popularity (and worse) for their ideals.
Dogget also attacks some of the myths that have been created by the artists themselves about the
period citing the documentary The U.S. against John Lennon as sanitising the role of an artist who
gave both money and publicity to the IRA, Black Panthers , The Vietnam solidarity Committee,
Zippies, Yippee and ,not least, the Dylan Liberation Front .
The book begins with an account of how a key figure like Jerry Rubin began to channel the Berkley
Teach- in - in May 1965 for free speech against the war using artists like Phil Ochs . Rubin also
attempts to revive and use a by now disgruntled Dylan through Alan Ginsberg. He describes the role
of Ginsberg, Ed Sanders and Tulin Kupferberg and their musical ensemble The Fugs exploring the
limits of censorship as they travel across America.
Dylans' attitude by 65 is described in discussions with Ginsberg and quotes from Dylan himself. The
more Dylan tried to distance himself from the political activists the more they, in turn, tried to reclaim
and re-activate him. This took on bizarre proportions as the Dylan obsessive A J Weberman makes it
his sole mission to liberate Dylan launching a Dylan liberation Front campaign . One of the more
unsavoury of Weberman tactics was raking through Dylans garbage to find incriminating sell-out
evidence about the artist.

And Black Panther leaders like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton read coded hidden messages into
Dylans' lyrics on Bringing it all Back home and Highway 61 revisited supposedly telling them what
tactics to use in their war against The Man.
There are recurring chronological accounts of the relations between artists like ,Dylan, Mick Jagger,
Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe McDonald , The Who, Joan Baez etc and the key underground
activists of the time. This is interspersed with arguments that took place within the counter -culture
between Abbie Hoffman , Jerry Rubin ,Elridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, John Sinclair, Michael X and key
organisations like the SDS, The Weathermen, The Black Panthers over tactics, aims and the very
nature of protest itself.
(Mick Jagger comes in for particular criticism for all the tax exile stuff) .Though others are also

33

exposed -( like Jefferson Aeroplane making excuses for not going to the Chicago convention where
there was likely to be police violence). This is the central ongoing theme of the book.
Doggett is particularly sharp on the absence of women from the revolution. Joan Baez
notwithstanding, they were largely expected to roll joints and throw themselves into the cause of
sexual freedom.
Asked about the position of women in the black consciousness movement, Stokely Carmichael,
honorary prime minister for the Black Nation, replied prone. Women were not allowed to bear arms
in the Black Panthers but would have found a role in the British underground press.
One advertisement in The Black Dwarf read: Dwarf Designer Seeks Girl. Head girl typer to make
tea, organise paper, me. Free food, smoke, space. Suit American negress.
Dogget also recalls the stories of the big events of these years-Kent state, Woodstock, the Isle of
Wight festival, Altamont, Biafra , Attica, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Newport Folk
Festival , Grovenor square and the Prague Spring - sometimes taking time out to talk about the civil
rights protests in the fifties.
There is an ongoing invaluable discography informing readers of seminal albums and individual songs
and the affect they had on different individuals and a number of great anecdotes -Country Joe
McDonald bursting into anti--Vietnam song at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial having being been primed
by pranksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to do so- Dylan cycling after A J Weberman to beat him
up after one too many intrusions.
There are also details of meetings between Tariq Ali , Robin Blackburn and Lennon and Yoko and the
relationship between Hoffman, Rubin and the Lennons in the early 70s .
There's a riot going on is an invaluable book about the counter-culture in the US at a crucial time
and the limits of the New Left . There are also many lessons for us about successful and unsuccessful
tactics through his examination of both the underground activists methods and the American States
response.

Who belongs to Glasgow -by Mary Edward

A landmark publication in 1993, this study of Glasgow immigration was used in all schools throughout
the city. Now thoroughly revised and updated with a new chapter, this timely publication is an
essential insight into the historical background of Glasgow's migrant groups and their interactions with
the indigenous population.
In this insightful second edition, Mary Edward traces the history of immigration to Glasgow over the
past 200 years. From Highlanders to exiled Jews and asylum seekers, the Irish, Poles, Chinese and
Asians experiences of Glasgow are all covered. There is an initial chapter on Glasgows roots as an
industrial city based on the slave trade analyzing how the merchants and tobacco barons used profits
from the Southern plantation system to exploit an abundant workforce fleeing economic destitution
and political persecution. This turned Glasgow into the second city of the Empire.
There is a final chapter discussing the discrimination recent Asylum seekers have faced in
Employment and Housing and there are details of the work of some of the campaigning groups who
have tried to address the different forms this discrimination has taken.

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The Irish in Glasgow

Irish The Remarkable Saga of a Nation and a City tells the story of the Irish in
Glasgow.
The real origins of Celtic FC and those responsible for the religious sectarianism
between Celtic and Rangers are also explored something that only began several
years after the clubs were founded. Both players and fans socialised after the games
in the early years.
The strength of Burrowes account lies in his prose style and great anecdotes that
brings home to the reader the level of exploitation and oppression that the Irish went
through. The story of the Irish in Glasgow really is a remarkable saga.
John Burrowes has written extensively on different aspects of Glasgow over the
years everything from short pieces on John MacLean and The Battle of George
Square to the World Championship boxer Benny Lynch (see his Glasgow Stories
Volumes I and 2). His journalism is always perceptive, articulate and informative.
In ten days in August 1847, 11,080 new immigrants arrived fleeing the Great Famine.
33,000 more were to arrive over the next three months in Coffin Ships. Those going
to America and Canada via Liverpool often did not arrive at all, thousands dying
because of the conditions en route.
Burrowes describes the horrific story of the SS Londonderry. It set sail on the 1
December 1848 in weather conditions that virtually guaranteed its sinking with the
loss of 72 lives. He exposes the corrupt relationship between the Glasgow
authorities and Coffin ship owners, who were allowed to by-pass quarantine laws
for financial gain.
Irish goes on to give harrowing anecdotal accounts of how both individuals and
families met their deaths in an Irish Holocaust that started in the Eastern counties
before spreading all over Ireland. He relates how the actions of a free market
government guaranteed the crises turned into a total disaster. The book discusses
housing conditions in Glasgow and describes how social engineering ensured the
Irish lived in the worst slums and got sent to the worst poorhouses youll be sent
to Barnhill being a threat that still exists in living memory.

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The role of the Church of Scotland and the press in representing the Irish ensured
sectarianism and division, and Burroughs details the story of the Battle of Partick
Cross. Religious sectarianism existed in workplaces to divide and rule, and there are
anecdotal accounts of how this affected work on the Clyde. The book has a section
on the Blantyre disaster, the lives of the Irish Navies on the railways and their
relationship with other nationalities and grades.
The most interesting section of the book explores the role of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood in Glasgow and the effects of the actions of the Black and Tans in
Ireland on the Catholic Irish in Glasgow. The consequences of the Irish civil war are
also explored in accounts of volunteers who took refuge in Glasgow and the
sometimes unlikely sources of help they got in fleeing.
In the 30s Glasgow appointed a new Chief Constable to deal with the roughly 50
gangs that existed. There was laughter and ridicule when the gangs found out that
the new Chief Constable was an Englishman called Percy who liked choir music as a
pastime. The establishment more diplomatically asked is there really no one
Scottish who could do the job ? Burrowes explains how Percy Sillitoe stopped all the
laughing.

The Power of Documentary Film

Peter Burton
The following films are not necessarily the best documentary films every made, and
by no means the only films that have changed the course of events in the real world.
But they have been either innovative in some aspect of film technique or led to
changes in the way filmmakers represented the creative treatment of reality (John
Grierson). All of the films have been highly influential.
Nanook of the North (1922) combined the editing techniques and dramatic structure
of fiction film with real life characters, Inuit Eskimos, to try and represent and
establish a common humanity across cultural differences. These fiction techniques
allowed the filmmaker Robert Flaherty to create tension and expectation in any given
scene amidst the overall narrative question of whether the Inuit would survive. This
was an original way of making documentary films.
Walter Ruttmans Symphony of a City (1927) began a trend of films about cities
around the world poetic City Symphonies. German-born Ruttman had been
highly influenced by Viking Eggeling a Dadaist. Ruttman combined Eggelings
techniques with those of Dziga Vertov to create a rhythmic plot-less representation of
dawn to dusk in Weimar Berlin.

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Film critic Siegrfried Kracauer and film maker Vsevolod Pudovkin criticised
Symphony of a City for not capturing the mood of growing crises in Weimar
Germany. However the film was revolutionary in its form.
The Russian film maker Dziga Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera has the revelatory
capacity of unscripted documentary footage at its heart, but combined these with
montage and film technique. Vertovs goal was the classical Marxist one of unity of
form and content. Centrally his was to be a cinema about facts footage of real
people in real life situations preferably filmed without their knowledge using film
technology that was superior to the human eye its ability to see long distances,
slow down or speed up motion. Editing provided further liberation from the confines
of time and space.
In the pursuit of a deeper level of truth Vertov and his Kinoks [a 1920s collective of
Russian film makers, kinoks means cinema-eyes] experimented with everything
freeze frames, multiple frames, animation, telescopic and microscopic lenses,
multiple exposures, sublimal cuts of one or two frames, slow motion, fast motion,
cameras in plains, hand held and in cars. Vertov also theorised about the use of
contrapunctal sound long before it became technically feasible.
On seeing Vertovs first sound film Enthusiaism, Charlie Chaplin described him as a
master who should be learned from instead of criticised.
Esther Shub was the most brilliant woman filmmaker of her times. Alone Shub
brought to the world an awareness of how important archive footage could be in its
cultural and material value- an awareness that led in time to the establishment of the
first film archives. She edited home movie footage to create compilations of films that
told the story of Russia from 1900 to 1928 and combined Vertovs and Eisensteins
montage techniques with a firm narrative sense to create radical, sympathetic and
humanistic films. Her film Spain (1939) is a very powerful film about the Spanish Civil
War.
Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) directed by Alan Resnais in 1955 is still regarded
by many as the most powerful documentary about the Holocaust. In 1990 when Le
Pen achieved 12% in French opinion polls, all five French TV channels cancelled
their evenings schedules and showed the Night and Fog repeatedly.
The narration is by Auschwitz survivor Jean Cayroll and the music is by Hans Eisler,
Bertold Brechts old collaborator. Serene landscape, sealed boxcars, and barbed
wire are juxtaposed, a deep distant monotonous voice narration contrasts with
images of newsreel footage, documentary still images and movement between black
and white and colour. The camera glides along as the full horrors of Auschwitz are
exposed both visibly and audibly but without the narration ever trying to explain the
images. Violent images contrast with gentle music. The narrator asks Who is
responsible ? going on to say that the executioners are still in our midst.
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Marcel Ophuls The Sorrow and the Pity was banned in France until 1981. It didnt fit
into the Gaullist image of nation united in resistance against the Nazis in World War
Two France.
There are Resistance heroes in the film but as one of them says People thought we
were fools most French people tried to stay out of trouble. This did not suit De
Gauls goals in the post-war period as he sought to unify France on the basis of a
mythologised version of heroic resistance.
Ophuls undermines the myth stylistically by contrasting a number of different
interviewees contradicting each other when trying to recall events. The film is about
memory, as words are illustrated with film clips and music and the latter is used
ironically Maurice Chevalier ending the film playing a rationalisation ditty on piano.
He himself had opportunistically kept out the way during the war.
Errol Morris The Thin Blue Line represented an American miscarriage of justice and
helped to promote legal reform. A cop is killed in Dallas and a man (Randall Adams)
gets framed for the murder (with the actual killer as the prosecutions main witness).
The style of the film complements a world of duplicity, false perception and endless
ambiguous meanings it is circular and obsessive, employing the repetition of
motifs and a haunting score.
There are close ups of key words and a variety of photographic and text-based
materials coupled with several witness re-enactments. This creates a compulsive
Kennedy Conspiracy trance like representation of the nature of deception and selfdeception. Authority figures cops, the judge, the District Attorney and press are all
implicated in a subtle exposure of a corrupt system.
Randall Adams was eventually released in 1989 party as a result of the film and the
direct testimony of Errol Morris.
Shoah was made in 1985 by Claude Lanzmann. 350 hours of footage was cut to
nine and a half hours. It is one of cinemas greatest achievements. In form it can
seem repetitive moving back and forth between generalities and specifics,
bombarding the viewer with details. It is non-linear and archive footage and narration
are absent. Instead the film is constructed through contemporary testimony of
survivors juxtaposed by shots of European landscapes bound together by the death
trains there are recurring images of a train going through countryside pulling into
Treblinka station, a gaunt driver looking back to nothing.
Lanzmann interviews the railroad executive who planned the routes and scheduled
the death trains to Poland. Elsewhere, he interviews the drivers who drove the trains
and knew what they carried, the men who packed the victims into freight cars like
cattle before slamming the doors, station masters who waved the death trains away,
en route observers, camp guards who classified and processed the new arrivals,
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even the barbers who cut the hair before the gassing. Lanzmann coaxes them on as
they falter saying they owe it to history and their own peace. Shoah is another must
see.
Monsoons, sets destroyed, massive over-expenditure, logistical nightmares, Martin
Sheen being given first aid following a heart attack and a $1 million dollar a week
Marlon Brando wandering off scene while the cameras are still running, mumbling
and thats all the dialogue I can think of today. Just a few of the not so favourite
things of Francis Ford Coppola as caught on film by his wife in the making of
Apocalypse Now. (Hearts of Darkness A Film-makers Apocalypse, 1991)
Eleanor Coppola catches her husbands outbursts of despair unknown to him,
alongside endless arguments with Brando about his lines and how much of him
should be shot physically in darkness. Coppola struggles to keep Brando and Denis
Hopper apart as he knows that if they ever actually meet the film is over.
The covert filming makes us feel we are, for once, truly witnessing how really difficult
it is to create a great epic film.
Roger and Me (1989) launched Michael Moores career. It is documentary as tragiccomic revenge for American corporate greed. General Motors has closed eleven
plants and laid off 33,000 workers in Moores hometown of Flint. Moore engages in a
futile ongoing narrative quest to interview the Chairman Roger Smith with a view to
asking him to tour Flint with him to see the consequences of the closures and layoffs.
The revenge of the little guy takes the form of using the manipulative slick GM PR
manoeuvres against them and going beyond it. Moore juxtaposes a Flint Pride
parade that marches past boarded up store windows. We hear an enthusiastic PR
man promote Auto World an amusement park where Flint people can go and see
Flint as it used to be before the closures. In a key scene Flints Chairman addresses
a Christmas TV hook-up, reading selections from Dickens A Christmas Carol while
Moore shows us deputies evicting an unemployed GM worker and throwing his
Xmas tree into the gutter.
Unemployed GM workers hire themselves out as living statues standing around in
costumes at a Great Gatsby charity benefit. Moore gets ejected from a Country Club,
a yacht club and skyscraper offices by secretaries and bouncers who are well
schooled in guarding the elite. The gloom and despair of Reagans 80s America is
here represented with great anger and humour.
Barbara Kopples Harlan County USA (1976) and American Dreams (1990) deal
more directly with American worker resistance in the face of increasing bosses
attacks it is resistance as Greek tragedy.

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Some other must sees would include: Luis Bunuels Les Hurdes, The Spanish Earth
by Joris Evans, Humphrey Jennings Fires were Started, and the Cinema Vrit films
of the Maysles brothers and Frederick Wiseman.
Pilgers Death of a Nation deftly exposed the corruption and ruthlessness of the
Thatcher years as it sold arms to Indonesia knowing in advance the slaughter they
would be used for in East Timor.

Dylans Sixties Protest Songs revisited.

This month the American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan marks his 70th birthday.
In the early 1960s he was reckoned to be a protest singer, a direct voice of the left.
His songs referred straightforwardly to political issues the black civil rights
movement in the USA, anti-militarism and he performed at political events like the
1963 civil rights March on Washington.
Since then he has produced a long stream of new songs, and repeatedly been
charged with selling out, first when he used an electric rather than an acoustic
guitar in 1965.
He was largely off the public stage in 1966-74; became a born-again Christian in the
late 1970s, but eased back into secular songs over the 1980s; has been performing
on stage, in the Never Ending Tour, continuously since 1988.
As a tribute, and as an attempt to show that Dylan did not stop protesting in 1964,
Peter Burton gives a brief account of some of his Sixties songs.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

'Masters of War' is Dylan's hard hitting condemnation of the arms industry. Vested
interests successfully used the Cold War and US foreign policy for profit, and military
research came to dominate US research funding. The supposedly progressive
president John F Kennedy poured money into the arms budget in spite of the
warnings from his conservative Republican predecessor, Dwight D Eisenhower
about "the military-industrial complex". Dylan uses unpoetic plain language in order
that the accused understand him clearly. The song is an adaptation of an old Scottish
folk song called 'Nottanun Town', and was first recorded in January 1963.
'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall' is an apocalyptic representation of a post-nuclear war fallout. It was released a few weeks before the Cuban missile crisis, but the crisis gave
it edge. It is an adaptation of a Scottish ballad called 'Lord Randall'. Dylan's

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Greenwich Village friend, the Trotskyist Dave Van Ronk, commented on hearing the
song: "I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution."
'Oxford Town', jaunty in style, is about racism and civil rights - the story of the
struggle for the registration of the first black person at the University of Mississippi in
September 1962, James Meredith, after violent struggle and the deaths of two
people. Troops remained in Oxford Town until Meredith graduated in the summer of
1963.
'The Times they are a Changin'
'The Times they are a Changin' restated in song the message Dylan had tried to
make at an elderly middle-class liberal Tom Paine Award presentation in January
1964, where he said that a part of him had identified with Lee Harvey Oswald,
Kennedy's assassin: the old and reactionary should get out of the way. It is
influenced by the old Scottish and Irish ballads 'Come all ye bold highwaymen' and
'Come all ye tender hearted maidens'. It was a battle hymn for the youth whose aim
was a new Republic. There are biblical undercurrents from the Book of Ecclesiastes,
the Sermon on the Mount (the meek inheriting the earth), and Mark 10.31 - "But
many who are now first shall be last, and the last shall be first".
'With God on our Side' was one of the most performed finger-pointing songs of the
early sixties. The tune was taken from Dominic Behan's 'The Patriot Game', and
sounds like a funeral march for national integrity. It deals with the distortions of
history in school, the war-mongers falsely claiming to have God on their side during
the course of the genocide against native Americans, the Spanish-American and
Civil Wars, and two world wars, and the Cold War. It's a protest against political
expediency as secular hymn and the misuse of religion by manipulative bourgeois
politicians with a sardonic twist at the end: if God's on our side, then he'll stop the
next war.
'Only a Pawn in their Game' was as a protest against the murder of Civil Rights
activist Medgar Evers in June 1963, following the successful enrolment of two black
students at the University of Alabama earlier in the day. President Kennedy sent his
brother Robert to the funeral and then embarked on a policy of enforced desegregation.
What made 'Only a Pawn in their Game' stand out from other protest songs on the
same subject was the sharp attack on the underlying causes of the murder institutionalised poverty, and the divide-and-rule policies of southern politicians on
the make.
'When the Ship comes in' is a driven, uplifting, vindictive and self- righteous warning
of the eventual fate of those who rule. It was sung at the March on Washington,
where Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. Some have
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taken the biblical imagery to mean support for the foundation of Israel, but as with
many Dylan songs it is almost certainly open to at least two interpretations.
'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll'. "William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger." From that first line Dylan
goes on to expose the way that the state is not neutral in a class- based, hierarchical
capitalist society, how the institutions of the rich shamelessly close ranks against the
poor no matter how bad the crime. The well-connected William Zanzinger got only a
six-months prison sentence for the murder.
Another Side of Bob Dylan
'Chimes of Freedom' was written during a drug-fuelled cross- country road trip in
February 1964 which took in the Mardi Gras. Dylan and a friend are caught in a
storm and dive into a doorway to take cover as church bells begin to ring out.
In form it is heavily influenced by the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, and
marked a turning point away from straight-talking finger-pointing protest. Instead of
support for a specific cause or individual, there are chimes of freedom for all the
dispossessed, marginalised and downtrodden.
Bringing it all back Home
'Subterranean Homesick Blues' is full of Beat cynicism and drug paranoia. There is a
street nihilism about the song. The militant underground group Weatherman would
take its name from the line: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows". The song was used in the Pennebaker documentary "Don't Look Back",
with Dylan throwing cards on the ground while Allen Ginsburg looks on. Joan Baez
thought the song nihilistic, but a whole generation of youth identified with it.
'Maggie's Farm' was possibly influenced by Pete Seeger's 'Penny's Farm', a song
that criticised the meanness of a landlord. Dylan expands this out to condemn the
whole system of industrial relations. Worker alienation is the main issue of the song.
It indicts all those in power who impose their uniformity causing human
estrangement in the process. The song went through a revival during Thatcher's
early years in office.
'Bob Dylan's 115th dream' uses surreal imagery to parody Christopher Columbus's
discovery of America. Captain Ahab abandons his obsessive quest for the whale for
an equally obsessive mission of establishing landed private property in America, with
bloodshed against the Native population. Chaotic images are used to expose
nationalism, the police, religion and capitalism itself. The narrator passes Columbus
on the way home sardonically wishing him "Good Luck".

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'Gates of Eden' is another song using dream imagery and is probably influenced by
Blake's 'The Gates of Paradise and William Burroughs' writing style. Far from being
Eden, this is more like Milton's' Paradise Lost, a place that has become decayed and
corrupt. It is a hell of cold urban centres and capitalists with secret power, a land
where people try vainly to escape their fates.
'It's Alright Ma' is a variation on the Blues singer Arthur Crudups' 'That's alright,
mama'. Dylan sings about a manipulative Corporate America that cares only about
profits and never about the damage done to people and their mental health. Some of
the lines have become part of the language - "Money doesn't talk, it swears," "Even
the President of the United states sometimes has to stand naked".
Highway 61 Revisited
When 'Highway 61 Revisited' was finished, Dylan commented: "My records are not
gonna be better from now on... Highway 61 is just too good. There's a lot of stuff in
there which I would listen to'.
'Like a Rolling Stone' was a turning point for Dylan, original in its lyrics and musical
style - and in its length, over six minutes. Dylan's audience of young people
expanded enormously with this one record. There has been much speculation over
the years as to who the main character is, but whoever it is, he/she is an aloof, rich,
cocooned individual suddenly hitting the bottom with Dylan repeatedly, tauntingly
asking how this feels.
'Highway 61 Revisited'. Highway 61 is the longest Highway in the US, beginning in
Ontario, Canada, going down through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and
Arkansas alongside the Mississippi river, into Louisiana, and ending at the Gulf
Mexico in New Orleans. It's the highway those escaping the Depression travelled
from to find work in the industrialised Northern cities of Chicago and Detroit. They
brought with them the country blues music of the Delta, which was then electrified for
an urban audience by Muddy Waters in Chicago and John Lee Hooker in Detroit.
There is a strong blues feel to this track - a theological satire combines with images
of drifters, gamblers, chancers as well as some of the poor people who can be seen
by the roadside in old documentary footage of the migration North. Amidst the dodgy
characters are 'Mack the Knife' and 'Louie the King' - a dig at the entertainment
promoter who considers staging World War Three on Highway 61.
'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' deals with the issue of how sometimes human beings
deal with their alienation in self-destructive ways. 'Juarez', in the first line of the song,
is a border town in Mexico where Americans would go to party.

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'Desolation Row' Dante's' Inferno with flamenco backing is an alternative national

anthem, a 'Gates of Eden' only more surreal.
A long list of named historical, literary and unknown characters is deployed,
sometimes juxtaposed, to conjure up a nihilistic world of deceit and futile activity
when they are ripped out of their historical context and placed within contemporary
American culture. The song has Dylan's by now familiar group of targets - shameless
academics, cold-hearted elite figures, faceless bureaucrats, hypocritical religious
leaders. Those who escape to 'Desolation Row' are the outsiders, the rebels,
Marxists, anarchists. This is protest on a more sophisticated level than the pre-"sellout" "finger-pointing" songs.
The Basement Tapes
'Million Dollar Bash' was the Millennium Dome of its day for a rural community.
Capitalists out for a profit, selling one-off exciting events by keying into the
alienation, boredom and humdrum feeling of a rural America in decline.
'Tears of Rage' is a bitter song about America gone wrong, greed subverting the
original democratic ideal, the wasted lives of the Vietnam War made worse by
survivors being made to feel guilty for the defeat - it's a song about the betrayal of
the Founding Fathers' vision in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights,
and the most hard-hitting song of the Basement Tapes.
John Wesley Harding
John Wesley Harding was a real outlaw figure responsible for the death of over thirty
victims, getting caught and sentenced in 1877, and fully pardoned in 1894. He
became a lawyer, having gained a law degree in jail. He died from a bullet in the
back of the head from John Selma, a local constable in El Paso, Texas, in August
1895.
Dylan mythologises Harding into an ideal outlaw figure - a Robin Hood type
individual, courageous, on the side of the poor, anti-authority, guileful, and doomed.
'I dreamed I saw St Augustine' adapts the song, 'I dreamed I saw Joe Hill', about the
martyred Utah union organiser. Dylan protests about the commercialism of 1960s
America. The adaptation is far more sceptical about the power of collective action
than 'Hill', and also rejects the idea of any individual martyr saving humanity. The
individual has to fight his own weaknesses and temptations to get to a place of
morality.

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'All Along the Watchtower' was written at the time of bitter arguments with Dylan's
manager Albert Grossman and the record company CBS. Dylan felt they were
milking him without due attention to the creative process. "Businessmen they drink
my wine, ploughmen dig my earth". Dylan goes on to use Isaiah's prediction about
the fall of Babylon to convey the "thief's message" - that seeking remedy for the soul
is far more important than struggles over money.
Art house cinemas are showing a number of films about Dylan in tribute. Try to catch
them if you can.
Peter Burton
All the lyrics are at www.bobdylan.com/songs

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