In Search Of The American Plainsong- In Search Of The Fathers We Never Knew-For The Adonis Of The West-The Gangster-Poet Of Times Square-A Flower For The New Jersey Monk And Muddying The Merrimack Stone Age Tokay Dream -In Commemoration Of The 50^th Anniversary Of The Death Of Jack Kerouac-The Father We Did Know        

Allan Jackson Introduction

I have been around the publishing, editing, writing business a long time so I know when the dime drops it can drop for thee. Know once a new technology, true ever since the printing press got invented there would be social shake-us. Know first-hand having been a couple of years back the subject of a vote of no confidence by the younger writers at this publication aided and abetted by my long-time hometown high school friend Sam Lowell who cast the deciding vote for my ouster based on his notion that “the torch had to be passed.”  Naturally I was pissed off although maybe in the end Sam was half-right to do what he did. We have spent our lives since mean streets North Adamsville youth days being half-right, and keeping some very close finishes from tumbling down that Jack and Jill hill, not Jack Kerouac’s but black lives matter hills which in the old days you could sneak by calling them mean ass negro streets and everything even those who seethed at the expression that way knew exactly what you mean.

In any case that is politics in this cutthroat business, and it comes with the territory so shed no lion eyes tears for my trouble fate. After the purge and my exile Sam sent out an olive branch to me in what he too called my “exile” and got me back here to do a plum kind of “of counsel” job doing the Encore Introductions to the very successful and sweated out The Roots Are the Toots rock and roll series which I fathered and which I claim was the best job of editing, cajoling, whipping, nagging, etc. I ever did in my long career.

That assignment though whetted my appetite to do more encore introductions (although definitely not looking to get back the site manager’s job which fell to Greg Green whom I actually brought in to do the day to day operation which I was heartily sick of and who wound up with the whole ball of wax) and I was fortunate enough to get Sam, now head of the Editorial Board put in place after my exile to ensure that there would not be a return to “one man” rule, to get me an assignment doing the encore intros for the Sam and Ralph Stories about the improbable life-long friendship and political activism of two very different working-class guys who met on the “battlefields” of the struggle against the Vietnam War.

Then, apparently, I pressed my luck when I asked to do the encore presentations for the Film Noir series which really was my baby despite the fact that Sam Lowell did all the heavy lifting and Zack James most of the best of the writings. I tussled with both Sam and Greg over this to no avail. Sam for obvious reasons wanted to do what he considered his baby and Greg because I don’t think he thought it was a good idea for me to be continuing to work here with some kind of official title even as a contributing editor which means really free-lance and good luck. I proved to be wrong and I should have slapped my hand on my head when I thought about it in this damn cutthroat business. Sam pulled rank, pulled his chair of the Ed Board card and Greg fell down and payed homage to his request. As the next best thing in the universe today I got this highly regarded assignment which Si Lannon was supposed to do but begged off of having been ill for a while and passed off to me.

Of course Searching for the American Songbook, the idea behind it anyway was, is very far from the devotion that we of the Generation of ’68, those who came of age in the mid-1950s paid to rock and roll, now called the classic age of rock and roll, the age begotten by fathers we never knew Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a ton of other talent that got us on our dancing feet. Frankly, as Sam mentioned in one of his introductions, we were rebelling, naturally rebelling looking back on the times, against our parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II music from the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters heard wafting (Sam’s forever-etched in the brain word) through the early 1950s house on the family radio. Having now gone through a couple of generations of changes in musical taste, guess what, those latter generations have up and rebelled against our “old fogie” music. What age and experience has taught though is that the mystical mythical American Songbook is a very big tent, has plenty of room for everyone. Even that music from our parents’ generation that sounded so “square” has made a big “comeback” even if the emotional roller-coaster for a lot of us who used that musical uprising as a big step toward our own understandings of the world have never quite calmed down, the battle of the generations never quite settled at anything but an “armed truce.” (Truth to tell the passing on of that parental generation has left many of us with things never said or conversely said in hardboiled anger that now can never be resolved.)         

Which brings us to the idea behind the idea. This series for the most part was Bart Webber’s “baby” since he was the first guy to “break-out” of the classic rock and roll music we lived and died for in the 1970s. No, that is not true, not true as many things are not true in dealing with events and personalities of guys from the old neighborhood, the old Acre section of North Adamsville. The driving force toward the big tent look at the American Songbook was done by one Peter Paul Markin, forever known as the Scribe, who was the first guy out of the blocks to make the connection between ancient blues and the roots of rock and roll. Was the first guy who caught the whiff of that “folk minute” from the early 1960s and dragged some of us in his wake. All Bart did was expand of those understandings to visit jazz, Cajun music, Zydeco, be-bop, and a host of other musical genre including those World War II pop hits that used to drive us crazy. Two things you need to know going forward-the sketches will be very eclectic as the big tent idea implies and the reason that Bart Webber was tagged with this assignment originally was the still bitter fact that the Scribe had given up the ghost long ago murdered through his own hubris and delusions down in Mexico on a busted drug deal in the mid-1970s. A big fall from grace, a very big fall which we still mourn today.

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Kenny Jackman heard the late Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe 2005, when he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line. At that time, he got into all things Carter Family unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, hipped him to Hazel during his frenzy and he picked up the CD second-hand in Harvard Square. (Really at Sandy’s located between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around town where until recently Sandy had held forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home knocked him out. The latter, moreover, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story.

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation of ’68 was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared 4-F by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown North Adamsville (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, walking fast and far a skill that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do). So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man friend Peter Paul Markin with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his beat brothers (and a few sisters) but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended Kenny told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then).

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia at a road-side campsite. Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised. When he entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner, he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats that always accompany the vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit” on (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself and had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place, and, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten. And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old North Adamsville. And denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the South, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time. And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had longish hair and a wisp of a beard), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain.

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually, the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that he had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home. Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So Kenny did really hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970, see.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown as Kenny headed west to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos. They were supposed to meet out there a couple of months later after she finished up some family business. They never did, a not unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her and that wind-swept mountain dance night for a long time after that.]