MANIFESTO & SUPERMANIFESTO.

This manifesto begins with love. For my mentor and close friend, Faye Moskowitz, who passed away in February. A love that can no longer be expressed, directly, to the person whom I love. Faye changed my life, through hundreds of interactions. Teaching, listening, sharing, crying, singing, even smoking weed once, yep. What does one do with grief that keeps ringing outward? Understandably, loss can turn to outrage, given the subtractions we must endure.

 

I listen to “In My Head” quite often. I’m jealous of the group, Gilla Band (or “Girl Band”), who hail from Dublin. This song is emblematic of the music I’d like to make: short, powerful, and aggressive. It’s the group’s first single, from 10 years ago. When the vocalist, Dara Kiely, screams toward the end—well, that’s how I feel, about losing Faye. You transport your feelings to a song and make them fit.

 

I did something similar on a piece, “Uh Huh,” I recorded with Joy on Fire, the band I collaborated with to produce States of America, an album which we released in June. In the middle of the tune, when our saxophonist Anna Meadors (above, left) tears the building down, I do some shouting. But it’s not like Kiely in Gilla Band. I think he means it a bit more. And it’s something, frankly, I need to work on.

I listen to John Coltrane’s composition “Equinox” (recorded in 1960) every day. He’s more famous for other compositions but I keep returning to this blues because of the gravity established by the pianist, McCoy Tyner, and Coltrane, too, when he enters the song on tenor sax. Of course, Coltrane’s notes become brighter, the brightness of grief, because he was a cerebral and sweet individual, I would imagine. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go listen to “In a Sentimental Way” released in 1963 by Trane and Duke Ellington. 

You could look upon the1963 Ellington & Coltrane album as a “super-group” effort. I do. Together with my friend, Emily Cohen, I’m assembling a “super-group” to help tell the story of the folk song “Liza Jane.” (Above: find a conceptual trailer featuring harmonica player Phil Wiggins.) It’s not public yet, the super-group, so I can’t reveal the identities of the musicians, but they’re amazing. We’re going to film them, extensively, in performance, in 2023. The group is older and younger, men and women, Black and white, folk and blues and rock, banjo and fiddle and violin and slide guitar and quills . . . .

2023 will also see the release of POOR GAL: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi. I wrote the book during a torrid six months, while the pandemic raged. Above, I say “the folk song ‘Liza Jane’” but it’s a family of songs, an extremely unruly lot at that. This book’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and undoubtedly, flawed. But I mean it, the writing. Just as much as Kiely means his yelling in Gilla Band. The story of this family of songs, well, is bigger than me. And that’s part of the supermanifesto. Writing is not about “me.” Rather, it’s bigger than “me.” 

I did okay as a writer in 2022. A book of poems, Metacarpalism, appeared from Unsolicited Press, out yonder in Portland, Ore. The Washington, D.C. press Primary Writing Books produced my prose-and-photography collection, The Fox Who Loves Me. Grantmakers, literally, kept me afloat: the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County (Md.) I am indebted to the kindness and professionalism of these presses and organizations.

A few weeks ago, my close friend Doug Lang (above) passed away. Doug was a poet, and a teacher, who inspired people with his writing, Welsh wit, and comprehensive knowledge of American culture. We grew especially close after his childhood football team, Swansea City, climbed into the Premier League for a few years. A group of us became hooligans upon this development, often getting tight off stout at 10 am in pubs, and listing out into the sunshine, to crow about our worldview. Doug enjoyed this “bloke” activity quite a bit, and now, once more, there’s love that can no longer be expressed, directly, to the person whom I love.

I will always be Swansea, “O City Said I.”

One of the Swansea City hooligans (Casey) turned me on to Gilla Band and another (Rod) turned me on to Dry Cleaning, a group from London. I’m a bit obsessed with “Magic of Meghan” and with the singer, Florence Shaw. She projects so much tragedy at the microphone, and of course, the lyrics are often spoken, which is what I tried to do with Joy on Fire. She has amazing timing, and often delivers scathing satire. The “whoops” (all three of them) are quite nourishing.

I was once at a reading facilitated by the English department where Faye and I taught. Since students were there, it was a “dry” event, but I’d bootlegged-in a bitteen of the spirits, and, having extensive knowledge of the domicile, I snuck through some secret passageways and doorways, where I would situate myself in a private enclave, where I could partake of a “nip.” Privately, or so I thought, because once I stepped-through into the ostensible safety of the enclave, there was Faye, smoking a joint(!)

At a party once (but not the one depicted above.) Doug with an “ass pocket of whiskey.” I have to put it like this: an “English aristocratic sort” had insisted that Doug’s hometown of Swansea had not been bombarded during World War II. Doug retorted that he’d lived through said bombardments as a very young boy. (Wikipedia, et cetera, confirms Doug’s account.) Anyhow, this “English aristocratic sort” had attended the event with his trousers rolled very high, and Doug made sure that the fellow understood the folly of the trouser-rolling, as we were on the second floor, in a city that wasn’t bracing for a flood. It wasn’t even raining.  

When your best friend from the animal kingdom emerges from the mist. The scoundrel. The trickster. The beautiful vixen. She knows she’s a good-looking fox because I tell her as much every time I jog with her after sunset.

It wouldn’t be a true “Blood And Gutstein” without an old R&B number that will rattle your windowpanes. Behold: “Big Bo’s Iron Horse” from 1962. This has been a longish, searching, raking post, one that expressed despair, and yet, there is much vitality ahead of us, in 2023 and beyond. Let us jump. Let us flounce. It’s hard to know where the manifesto leaves off, and where the supermanifesto begins. Where our hands touch, and where we embrace. Most of all, let us acknowledge the love that’s still around us. Even in sorrow, the love we feel for those we’ve lost will inform the very next love we develop with a new soul, and if that soul is you, my friend, then I want you to know how much I love you, and maybe, in some small way, you can see just where I’m coming from.

discographic information for “Big Bo’s Iron Horse”

Big Bo and the Arrows. Willie “Big Bo” Thomas, Jr. (tenor sax). Other musicians, potentially including organ, bass, drums, guitar, horns: unknown. Gay-Shel Records, 1962, Dallas, Tex. “Big Bo’s Iron Horse” 701A b/w “Hully Gully” 701B.

HOW THE PERSONAL NONSENSE HIPTSTER WORD—“YOCKADOT”—OF SAXOPHONIST TOM ARCHIA MIGHT HAVE BEEN A VARIANT ON THE WELSH DRINKING TOAST.

“Downfall Blues” contains the curious word “Yockadot”

Many years ago, I added “Downfall Blues”, by Tom Archia, to Disc 5 of my home-made jump blues compilation. The song, which features rare singing by the jazz saxophonist, fit well on beloved Disc 5, the novelty volume in a compilation that has, by now, stretched to 11 discs. Amid the sophisticated early statements from Archia’s tenor, amid the roughened lyrics about the musician’s weakness for whiskey, I became interested in a word, “yockadot”, that the man shouts twice before replacing the horn in his mouth and offering the listener his gracious swerve. The song subsides in a sweet, if haunting fashion.

Disc 5 contains early jump songs, such as those by Duke Henderson and Sammy Price. It presents jumps about certain characters like Deacon Jones and Butcher Pete. Some pieces serve as “answer songs”, such as the Lucky Millinder Orchestra’s “Who Said Shorty Wasn’t Coming Back?”, which answers Bull Moose Jackson’s piece, “Shorty’s Got To Go.” The disc veers into salty lyrics, food songs, New Orleans marching collision jumps, and plenty of drinking fare. Jimmy Liggins sings, in his song, “Drunk”: “Go home at night with a swimmin’ in my head / Reach for the pillow miss the whole durn bed.”

I discovered “Downfall Blues” when I bought a used copy of The Chronological Tom Archia 1947-1948, #5006 in the Classics Blues & Rhythm CD series (2001). While hunting for additional information on the saxophonist, I arrived at The Tom Archia Discography, a thorough online review of Archia’s life and output, written by Robert L.  Campbell and two other researchers. I wrote an email to Campbell, a Professor of Psychology at Clemson, about the word “Yockadot.” Kind enough to write back, he suggested that “Yockadot” may have been Archia’s “personal nonsense hipster word.”

Born in Texas, in 1919, Tom Archia played tenor saxophone in a high school orchestra that included Illinois Jacquet. He joined Milt Larkin’s band in 1940, and in 1942, the band landed a breakthrough nine-month residency at Chicago’s Rhumboogie Club. Archia would lead, play alongside, and/or record with the likes of Roy Eldridge, Charlie Parker, Wynonie Harris, Gene Ammons, and Dinah Washington, throughout his career. In the Classics liner notes, Dave Penny writes that Archia was “known among his contemporaries as ‘The Devil’ because he could play the hell out of his tenor.”

Tom Archia

A few years back, I hosted a group of friends at my apartment for a whiskey toast. We’d been following the Welsh football club, Swansea City, during their freshman campaign in the English Premier League, and after the club’s impressive finish, we aimed to celebrate their success with Penderyn, the single malt Welsh whiskey. My friend Doug Lang, a Swansea native and lifelong supporter of the football club, said, “iechyd da”, after we hoisted our glasses, the Welsh drinking toast pronounced, roughly, “yockee-dah.” We all knew the Archia song by then; Doug suggested a possible link to the drinking toast.

I cannot find any obvious link between Tom Archia and anything Welsh, although from the sound of “Downfall Blues”, he may have known a few toasts. If Archia indeed kept “yockadot” as his personal nonsense hipster word, perhaps he converted “iechyd da” via the jive phrasings of musicians in his scene, the muscular wailing of his tenor saxophone, or the beauty and “nonsense” associations that may occur to many of us when fooling with language. Either way, “iechyd da” often leads to Penderyn, and “yockadot” always leads to “Texas Tom” Archia’s fine tenor jump, a unique and necessary moment.

Sources of Information:

The Tom Archia Discography, written by Robert L. Campbell, Leonard J. Bukowski, and Armin Büttner

Texas State Historical Association page for Tom Archia, written by Dave Oliphant 

Wikipedia entry on Tom Archia

The Chronological Tom Archia 1947-1948, #5006 in the Classics Blues & Rhythm CD series (2001). Liner notes written by Dave Penny

Band information for “Downfall Blues”: Tom Archia (tenor sax, vocals), Bill Searcy (piano), Leo Blevins (guitar), Lowell Pointer (bass), Robert ‘Hendu’ Henderson (drums). Recorded in Chicago, in October 1947, on Aristocrat #605.