#OTD (4/7) in 2020, John Prine Moved On: This Date in History
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CarolinaFever
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I remember getting off the bus at.my grandma's house and watching the news coverage about Reagan being shot, but I don't remember the championship game.
Centerpiece
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I was in Philadelphia. Heard about the shooting and was more afraid that they would postpone the game.
Game went on as scheduled. Watched it in the hotel bar.
Sad night for me. But only because we lost.
To hell with Ronnie Raygun
Game went on as scheduled. Watched it in the hotel bar.
Sad night for me. But only because we lost.
To hell with Ronnie Raygun
donbosco
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218,092 views Oct 3, 2007
Cameramen capture the many vivid angles of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.http://channel.nationalgeographic.com...
From a friend involved in the making of the film: "...this is a link to a documentary I edited for National Geographic. We had access to the audio recorded in the Situation Room that whole day. It is filled with very interesting moments...it did not fill me with confidence in the intellectual quality of those in the highest positions of the US government. Also, George W. Bush seems to have been almost as grammatically challenged as his son W."
donbosco
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Bill Withers passed away on March 30, 2020 (his family announced his passing on April 3). This was a sad thing for me and a lot of other people of course. Bill Withers first came to my young boy world in Chatham County by way of "Lean on Me," I guess his most well-known release (or was that “Ain’t No Sunshine”?). At the time (1972) I was deeply into activities at my church in Bonlee. Fourteen years old, I was teaching my age-group Sunday School class a good deal of the time and my contemporaries and I there were also increasingly participating in the choir and other worship service moments. It was an interesting time as I look back, especially when I do a little research into the context and recollect the world around me as I was receiving it.
What I found when I dug into those times was Jesus all around and me, a sponge soaking up every bit. I was also absorbing, breathing in nigh literally, every scrap of media that crossed my eyes and ears. The radio, then all AM, was a lifeline into the outside world and WKIX in Raleigh and WNCA in Siler City were primary senders. There I got my tunes. My brother Glenn had left the radio in our bedroom tuned to those stations when he went off to college. Indeed, his own dedication to the hits of the day had in turn introduced them to me. During his high school years he had even been a Disc Jockey at the Siler City station and our house was filled with 45s and the rock and soul sounds of the mid-1960s. Everything from the British Invasion to MoTown to the Rhythm and Blues of East Coast Beach Music (the stuff I would later discover was the favorite of Frat Boys one I headed off to college). AM radio played all those things in those days — the radio stations that I was glued to were hardly discerning in their playlist — you got a little bit of everything. And that was good.
Looking back I can see that as the early 1970s started up I was feeling very introspective. I read Hal Lindsay’s ‘The Late, Great, Planet Earth’ with its apocalyptic prophecies tied to current events and the End-Times seemed to loom. In contrast the 5th Dimension sang about “The Age of Aquarius” and the dawning of a new era of love and peace and harmony. Of course, Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’ was always somewhere in the depths of my remembering as was The Bomb. At church the messages were intriguing to say the least. While the preacher railed against long hair and the wrong-headedness of Protesting for Peace I was reading, really reading, ‘Good News for Modern Man,’ a New Testament transposed into the language of the day. I still read the King James Bible of course, and even took copies of both to church with me on Sunday, but there was something enticing, almost subversive, about that Good News version. I’ve always been drawn to that sort of thing.
My parents were avid magazine readers. We had subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, The U.S. News and World Report, Life, and Look. I got Sports Illustrated and Sport too. The Progressive Farmer and Southern Living were ‘must haves’ to boot. In 1971 the “Jesus Revolution” made the cover of ‘Time Magazine.’ I knew something was up for sure then.
On the radio too I was hearing some decidedly Christian Rock. “Day by Day” from the musical ‘Godspell’ was there and even stronger was the power of the simple lyrics to “Superstar” from the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Both those songs were top radio hits of 1971. By that time, I had become practiced at reading all sorts of messages into the lyrics of pretty much any song that I heard. The world “out there” was, after all, mighty spiritual and I was picking up on it.
Around that time, somehow I got permission to play the 45 of Bill Withers’ hit “Lean on Me" and say a few words at Sunday evening meeting. I did not know this then but Withers had written that song when living in Los Angeles and missing the community that he had known in the small West Virginia town, much like Bonlee, where he had grown up. I felt the message of the lyrics deeply at that time as I did most things around me. Such is the life of a 14 year old after all. I came to understand that there had been some grumbling in the aftermath from a few (not all) when they noted that the singer was African American but my parents stood by me on it (Deddy was a deacon). I don't think I ever appreciated that enough. The voice and the message have always been powerfully pertinent. They remain so…
“Lean On Me”
Sometimes in our lives
We all have pain
We all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We know that there's always tomorrow
Lean on me
When you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on...
For it won't be long
Till I'm gonna need somebody to lean on
Please swallow your pride
If I have things you need to borrow
For no one can fill
Those of your needs that you won't let show
You just call on me brother when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you'll understand
We all need somebody to lean on
Lean on me
When you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on...
For it won't be long
Till I'm gonna need somebody to lean on
You just call on me brother
When you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you'll understand
We all need somebody to lean on
If there is a load you have to bear
That you can't carry
I'm right up the road
I'll share your load
If you just call me
Call me
If you need a friend
(call me)
Call me (call me)
If you need a friend
(call me)
If you ever need a friend.
Addendum to the #OTD...
There "is a Chapel Hill connection to your old well-worn copy of "Good News for Modern Man." Dr. Robert "Bob" Bratcher, a longtime resident of Chapel Hill and member of Binkley Baptist Church, produced that "simple, everyday English" translation of the New Testament while working for the American Bible Society. Born in 1920 to Southern Baptist Missionaries ministering in Campos, Brazil, Robert Galveston Bratcher and his wife, June, returned to Brazil as missionaries themselves in the early 1950s, where Bob taught New Testament and Greek at the South Brazil Theological Seminary in Rio de Janeiro. For the last thirty-five years of his life, Bob lived in Chapel Hill, eventually retiring to the Carol Woods retirement community. (BTW, his son-in-law is Tim West, the former Curator of the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, and his daughter, Priscilla, worked in many years in arts management and as a development professional for a number of organizations, including Playmakers Repertory Company, Carolina Performing Arts, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.g)."*
Info passed along to me by a former UNC Special Collections Curator.
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I never had a particularly high opinion of Ronald Reagan. But then, St. Donald of Mar-a-Lago oozed into power and bitch-slapped me into knowing the damage a genuinely evil person--deeply compromized by foreign goverments who view the United States as just a mark to be exploited--could wreak on the US.
donbosco
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#OTD (April 7, 2020) John Prine left us behind.
"Paradise" by John Prine is probably my favorite of his songs, among so many with such poignant and striking lyrics, that has always stuck with me. My friends and I must have sung it, a capella, from one end of Guatemala to the other as we backpacked around there some 30 odd years ago and the tune has always been in my heart. It was in my repertoire as I tried to sing the always night-owl daughter to sleep when she was a wee girl and I probably made too many people listen to it when I could wrestle control of the tape deck at the Hardback Cafe back in the early '90s.
When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away
Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.
Prine wrote Paradise for his father, who was indeed from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. It is a protest song, about the fecklessness of the Peabody Coal Mining Company and the ravages it wrought upon the town called Paradise. Still, there is a haunting story of beauty and country life told in it as well, despite the boom and bust capitalism that never paid the workers what they were worth nor cared one whit about their health and safety. I'll add here that as a rule Mitch McConnell and his ilk have played no small part in holding up legislation that would work to repair damage done and alleviate the suffering in Paradise.
The song always makes me think of my Uncle Cecil who took me hunting ‘cause most days “empty pop bottles was all we would kill.” But we did love shooting those cans and bottles off of those fence posts and eating the ham biscuits that my Momma and Aunt Lila would pack for us. And the air did pretty often “smell like snakes” down by those creeks off to the edge of those big fields. Back in those days I didn’t know Prine but I did have a brush with paradise. Rest In Peace Mr. Prine, (April 7, 2020) you managed the words we could never imagine.
"Paradise" by John Prine is probably my favorite of his songs, among so many with such poignant and striking lyrics, that has always stuck with me. My friends and I must have sung it, a capella, from one end of Guatemala to the other as we backpacked around there some 30 odd years ago and the tune has always been in my heart. It was in my repertoire as I tried to sing the always night-owl daughter to sleep when she was a wee girl and I probably made too many people listen to it when I could wrestle control of the tape deck at the Hardback Cafe back in the early '90s.
When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away
Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.
Prine wrote Paradise for his father, who was indeed from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. It is a protest song, about the fecklessness of the Peabody Coal Mining Company and the ravages it wrought upon the town called Paradise. Still, there is a haunting story of beauty and country life told in it as well, despite the boom and bust capitalism that never paid the workers what they were worth nor cared one whit about their health and safety. I'll add here that as a rule Mitch McConnell and his ilk have played no small part in holding up legislation that would work to repair damage done and alleviate the suffering in Paradise.
The song always makes me think of my Uncle Cecil who took me hunting ‘cause most days “empty pop bottles was all we would kill.” But we did love shooting those cans and bottles off of those fence posts and eating the ham biscuits that my Momma and Aunt Lila would pack for us. And the air did pretty often “smell like snakes” down by those creeks off to the edge of those big fields. Back in those days I didn’t know Prine but I did have a brush with paradise. Rest In Peace Mr. Prine, (April 7, 2020) you managed the words we could never imagine.
ChileG
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I also had an Aunt Lila that was famous (to us) for her biscuits (my mother was also named Lila).
My dad had a John Denver album in which he covered Paradise. It’s how I first came to know and love the song as a young child. Much later in life I became a John Prine fan. When I learned to play guitar, my father (who liked to sing and play harmonica) and I played one song together - Paradise, as it was the one song we both knew.
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Having worked for TVA at the Paradise Steam Plant for nearly a decade, Prine did take some artistic liberties with the lyrics of his song. Perhaps the most egregious is that it wasn't Peabody that strip mined where the town of Paradise was, It was the P&M Coal Company. And actual area where town of Paradise was, was turned into a parking lot for the power plant, i.e., Joni Mitchell was closer to the mark than John Prine was. Sadly, TVA did not build a "swinging hot spot." Also, it wasn't an abandoned prison up on Airdrie, it was an abandoned foundry from the 1840's and, as far as I know, its ruins are still standing. And as the Paradise Power Plant burned crushed, rather than pulverized, coal, NO ONE would want to live within 5 miles of the place. While Peabody Coal Company in fact did wreak havoc on many, if not all, of the places where it mined coal, the Town of Paradise, KY is not on that list.
ETA: Peabody did come with the then "world's largest shovel," but used it at a spot about a mile or so from where Paradise was. The shovel was big enough that you could turn around a Greyhound Bus in it. Where Peabody mined, the 11 & 12 seams, about 100 feet down, were strip mined and the #9 seam was another 400 feet down and was mined with the room and pillar method.
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I feel the exact opposite way when someone tells me Obama has been out of office for only nine years. It seems so much longer with St. Donald of Mar-a-Lago defiling the office.
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I had been planning to see him at Merlefest that year.