Authenticity

“Soul is about authenticity.  Soul is about finding the things in your life that are real and pure,” John Legend

Migos

In “Johnny Cash Never Shot a Man in Reno. Or, The Migos: Nice Kids from the Suburbs” (2016) essayist Hanif Abdurriqib addresses his barber’s criticism that Migos are not authentic rappers because Offset, Takeoff, and Quavo grew up in the suburb of Lawrenceville, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Proverbial sword drawn, the hair stylist sneered that they’re “rapping about all this trap shit and they ain’t never even been to the trap.”  Trap houses are successors to crack houses and refer to places where kickback parties take place young participants go to get high, perhaps have sex, and play video and bondage games.  Abdurraqib wrote:

  Culture is the album that is set to be the group’s coronation.  The first single, “Bad and Boujee,” is the country’s number one song.  It’s being sung in trap houses and minivans.  They have entered the realm of many rap acts who have had number one songs in recent months: fascination in the suburbs.  And in the hood, a gentle resentment.

The previous year, after a Migos concert at Georgia Southern University, Offset was arrested for possession of narcotics and a loaded gun and incarcerated for eight months due to a previous criminal record. Abdurraqib wrote:

The members of Migos are what they are and what they’ve always been. Like Johnny Cash in the mid-1960s, they spent time getting too close to the fire.  It is hard to build a myth so large without eventually becoming part of it. I’m less interested in what happens in the hood you’re from and I’m more interested in how you can honor that place, especially for people who might not know that history.  Migos, more than anything, are still North Atlanta’s party starters; now it’s the rest of the world that is catching on.

  Back on stage in New York, Offset yells to the crowd.  Something about how good it is to make it out of where they are from alive. The word “from” hangs in the air.  The lights fade to black.

Regarding the question of whether Migos’ music is authentic, Abdurraqib concluded: “I do not know what it is that makes a person real, but I imagine it is the way they can convince you of the things they have not done.”

Being from the Philadelphia suburb of Fort Washington, I’ve never felt the need to apologize for my  WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) legacy or background. Nor, I believe, does it make me less authentic when I have long embraced black music, not rap necessarily but rhythm ‘n’ blues and soul, from Ray Charles to John Legend.  If part of growing up is rebelling from one’s roots, I’m thankful for the security my parents provided.  Besides, guilt, liberal or otherwise, is a wasted emotion and a poor substitute for helping the less fortunate.  That said, it’s frustrating being powerless to prevent our White House mad hatter from carrying out unconscionable actions.  His latest, dwarfing all others: giving Turkish leader Recap Erdogan the green light to wage war against the Kurds, America’s staunchest ally against ISIS.  He has put to rest the veneer of American exceptionalism and exposed the worst features of the axiom that power corrupts.

 Kurds fleeing bombing by Turks

In the Northwest Indiana suburbs of Chesterton and Valparaiso, I enjoyed two successful bridge games partnering with 76-year-old Joel Charpentier, who still referees high school soccer matches and volunteers at a food pantry.  I had trouble pronouncing his name until learning that it was French and the correct pronunciation was in four syllables with the accent on the second, like French actor and cabaret singer Maurice Chevalier. I continued my innocent flirtation with 89-year-old Dottie Hart, massaging her shoulders during a break.  “Can I take you home with me?” she joked. “Only if your daughter is not home,” I replied.  With the treats I found a napkin inscribed, “Make your rap about the day.” I’m totally without imagination and couldn’t even contribute a simple line to Corey Hagelberg’s group poem about Gary.  At Strack and Van Til the check-out out lady, Dominique, asked if anyone had told me I resembled novelist Stephen King.  Actually, the answer is yes. It must be the hair.  I almost replied that people used to say I looked like Rick Nelson and now it’s Bob Barker. I envy Stephen King’s fertile mind.  I couldn’t begin to write fiction.

above, Stephen King; below

Harris and Parton

The next-to-last Country Music episode profiled Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton.  Harris quit college to pursue a music career in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Performing folk songs in coffeehouses and small clubs, she met Gram Parsons, a Floridian who came to love country music while at Harvard.  Emmylou’s Grammy-winning “Roots” album “Blue Kentucky Girl” (1979) contains standards by the Louvin Brothers (“Everytime You Leave”) and Willie Nelson (“Sister’s Coming Home”).  Parton, born in a one-room cabin in East Tennessee, joined Porter Wagoner’s TV show at age 20 and had a huge hit with “Jolene,” about a woman who begs another not to steal her man (“Please don’t take him just because you can”).  Dolly claimed she modeled her image after a hot-looking town prostitute (Jolene?) whose style she admired. She dismissed “dumb blond” jokes by countering that she’s neither dumb nor blond.  She moved on to pop and acting success, co-starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in “9 to 5” (1980), but never forsook her image as a country girl at heart.  Parton’s astute business sense led to a line of Dolly dolls and the water park Dollyland.

 NWI Times photo of Hatcher below by Lauren Cross

At the unveiling of a bronze statue near City Hall of five-term mayor (1968-1987) Richard Gordon Hatcher Gary Crusader publisher Dorothy R. Leavell eulogized: “When nobody will disturb the norm, a disruptor who knows what it ought to be will come in and speak truth to power.  It’s is the greatest compliment I can give you.”  Carolyn McCrady thanked Hatcher for caring about the less fortunate: “When NIPSCO was throwing people out of their homes in the middle of winter because they couldn’t pay their bills, Hatcher used the power of his office to let people know that NIPSCO was wrong, and the people were right.”  I don’t have many political heroes, but Hatcher is the most authentic officeholder I’ve ever met.  He remained true to his ideals and endured 25 years in the arena unbossed, unbought, and with head unbowed.

 IUN Police force; Roy Dominguez top, second from left; below him are Brady Ratcliff and (seated) Chief Lazar

Lake County sheriff Roy Dominguez was another authentic public servant who I came to know well when collaborating on his autobiography “Valor.”  He recently posted a photo of the IUN police force in 1975, (he was a cadet), asking how many I recognized.  Right away, Chief Andy Lazar and African-American officer Brady Ratcliff stood out in civilian clothes. Former campus cop Don Young recalled: 

  Chief Andy Lazar never yelled or screamed and talked to me like I was his son.  He made you realize that mistakes happened but that one should learn from them.  Brady Ratcliff had spent 20 years in the military, never wore a uniform, and made it a point to socialize with students. He was a great mechanic and a stickler for being on time. If I came in a minute or two late, he’d say, “You see that clock? You’re late.  Don’t let it happen again.”

Roy remarked: "Andy and Brady always elected to wear the blazer. Andy retired from Gary PD, and I guess he had his fill of the regular police uniform. He always preferred the softer approach to his job and life. He was a wonderful mentor and taught us all that public service included politeness and patience until it was to no avail. Of course, Andy was a pretty big man and no one in their right mind wanted to test his patience.  We would say Andy should have been a priest and his equally, beloved brother, Father Lazar should have been the cop in their family."  

A judge sentenced Sherquell Magee (above) to 40 years for shooting an 11-year-old bystander while defending himself after being jumped by several kids from a rival East Chicago neighborhood.  Magee had pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.  The judge chastised Magee for showing no remorse, but the defendant’s attorney claimed he advises clients not to apologize during the trial.

Karen Toering, founder and director of the ninth annual Gary International Black Film Festival, greeted me with a VIP pass since I donated 20 copies of the latest Steel Shavings.  Friday highlights included “Bakoso: Afro Beats of Cuba” and the feature film “Truth” written and directed by Gary Roosevelt grad Charles Murray, about a man whose cousin took her own life after an affair with the church pastor. Tomorrow I plan to wear my black “Straight Outta Gary” t-shirt while viewing a documentary about the Sin City Disciples, a biker club founded in Gary in 1967, the year Hatcher was first elected mayor.  Karen told me that a hundred Sin City Disciples have purchased tickets and that the filmmaker will be in attendance. I’ll be happy to give the t-shirt to any biker who considers my wearing it inauthentic and wants it in exchange for one of theirs (fat chance) – or, more realistically, a selfie. The inspiration was the N.W.A. CD and biopic “Straight Outta Compton.”

In 1991 N.W.A.’s Eazy-E received an invitation from President George Bush to a White House lunch fundraiser.  Paying $4,000, he showed up in a suit and L.A. Kings cap.  Fifteen years later, Hanif Abdurraqib wrote: 

  I watched as a child who only knew that Eazy-E was a part of a rap group that scared people. But there he was, in the White House, with businessmen, senators, and a president who would likely prefer his music to be banned. It was at the time a rare access granted to any rapper, but especially one who was seen as too intense for some of rap’s younger, more eager fans.  Not everyone was impressed.  For some it was an item of shame and ridicule.  In the diss track “No Vaseline,” Ice Cube opens the final verse, repeating the same line, a thinly veiled shot: “I’d never have dinner with the President.”

  Above my desk now, a picture of Barack Obama, surrounded.  Rappers on every side of him, dressed however they chose to dress. Rappers with their honest sings about the people who live and die in places often used as political talking points, standing proud in front of their proud president.  All those smiling black people in the Oval Office.  Miles away from a past where none of them, I imaging, ever thought they’d get to make it this far. The door that Barack Obama pushed open for rappers to be seen and comfortable in his White House presented a new type of power dynamic.  What strikes me is that it may never be like this again.

The latest Traces magazine contains an article titled “The Weird and Wondrous Fiction of C.L. Moore.” Indianapolis native Catherine Moore (1911-1987) had an amazingly fertile imagination.  Most famous for stories published in the fantasy horror magazine Weird Tales, she also delved into science fiction and wrote TV scripts for the Warner Brothers series Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip.

Jim Spicer’s joke of the week:

    A new pastor was visiting in the homes of his parishioners. At one house it seemed obvious that someone was at home, but no answer came to his repeated knocks at the door. Therefore, he took out a business card and wrote “Revelation 3:20” on the back of it and stuck it in the door.
    When the offering was processed at the next worship service, he found that his card had been returned. Added to it was this cryptic message, “Genesis 3:10” Reaching for his Bible to check out the citation, he broke up in gales of laughter. Revelation 3:20 begins “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Genesis 3:10 reads, “I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid for I was naked.”

Diamond in the Rough

“Gary remains a diamond in the rough.  Some will say ‘very rough.’  That may be, but the best response is to keep polishing that diamond until it sparkles.” Calvin Bellamy

Civic leader Cal Bellamy wrote the NWI Times to take issue with its publicizing an obscure Business Insiderwebsite article written by two people who’ve never set foot in Gary labeling Gary America’s “most miserable” city – more mischief, in all likelihood, from editor Marc Chase, who has turned his dislike of Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson into a vendetta.  Bellamy cited Gary’s advantages of location and infrastructure and impressive recent developments, including Miller’s South Shore expansion and double-track project and IUN’s new Arts and Sciences Building.  He concluded: “Many fine people make their homes there.  Several neighborhoods show impressive vitality.”  Accompanying the column was a photo by John J. Watkins of Ryne Wellman kite surfing at Marquette Park.

Times correspondent Joseph Pete, who addressed me as sir when he phoned for background information about the 1919 steel strike, wrote an impressive feature article about the important and traumatic event in Gary’s past, which split the city along class and racial lines. On my advice Pete consulted “Black Freedom Fighters for Steel” author Ruth Needleman,  who asserted that during the work stoppage almost all of the 3,000 black workers hired during the war refused to break ranks with their comrades, mostly unskilled foreign-born laborers. “US Steel Board Chairman Elbert Gary’s strategy to divide the workforce along racial lines,” Needleman concluded,  “did not work.  Strong inter-racial solidarity built intentionally to avoid the conflicts developing elsewhere [in Eastern mills] prevented trouble.”

 union march down Broadway

Pete obtained four photos from Steve McShane to go with the piece, but the paper neglected to cite the Calumet Regional Archives as the source and instead simply wrote “Provided.”  After 4,000 army troops rounded up and jailed strike leaders branded as “Reds” and forbade public assemblies, skilled workers gradually broke with the rank-and-file, crippling the effort for an 8-hour-day and decent wages and working conditions.  Pete quoted extensively from “The Autobiography of Mother Jones,” written by a participant in the struggle.  She described World War I veterans marching in solidarity with the workers:

  Some 200 soldiers who had come back from Europe where they had fought to make America safe from tyrants, marched.  They were steelworkers.  They had on their faded uniforms and the steel hats which protected them from German bombs.  In the line of march, I saw young fellows with arms gone, with crutches, with deep scars across the face – heroes they were!  Workers in the cheap cotton clothes of the working class fell in behind them.  Silently the thousands walked through the streets and alleys of Gary.  Saying no word.  With no martial music such as sent the boys into the fight with the Kaiser across the water.  Marching in silence.  Disbanding in silence.

  The I saw another parade.  Into Gary marched U.S. soldiers under General Leonard Wood.  They brought their bayonets, their long-range guns, trucks with mounted machine guns, field artillery.  Then came violence.  The soldiers broke up the picket line.  Worse than that, they broke the ideal in the hearts of thousands of foreigners, their ideal of America.  Into the blast furnace along with steel went their dreams that America was a government for the people – the poor, the oppressed.

I interviewed Patrick O’Rourke about his 50—year union career representing teachers in Hammond and at the state and national level.  A born storyteller, O’Rourke had interesting anecdotes about such personages as American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker, Bechtel Corporation CEO Riley P. Bechtel, and conservative Indiana governor Mitch Daniel. Appointed to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on Shanker’s recommendation, O’Rourke solicited a significant contribution from Bechtel, the nation’s largest construction and engineering company, and so impressed its executives that they offered him a position in public relations that would have made him a millionaire.  He turned it down since as a lifelong Democrat he foresaw irreconcilable conflicts between his philosophy and theirs.  Appointed to the Indiana Governors Education Roundtable by Democrat Joe E. Kernan, O’Rourke expected to be replaced when Mitch Daniels succeeded him but so impressed the governor-elect with his candor and wit that he was re-appointed.  “Daniels and I disagreed on almost all aspects of public education,” he recalled, but added that they respected one another’s intelligence and integrity. At O’Rourke’s recent retirement celebration, Daniels, now Purdue’s president, honored him, as did Cal Bellamy, Mayor Tom McDermott, AFT president Randi Weingarten, and State Representative Vernon Smith, a close friend.

Several  “Country Music” episodes document the long, remarkable career of “diamond in the rough” Johnny Cash, known as the “Man in Black” whose deep baritone voice embraced rockabilly, blues, gospel, and folk music.  His signature song ”Folsom Prison Blues” inspired Merle Haggard, a prisoner at San Quentin when he witnessed Cash perform it, to change the direction of his life.  Embracing an outlaw image, Cash once explained that his decision to wear black was “for the poor and the beaten down, living in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, but is there because he's a victim of the times.”  Banned from performing at the Grand Old Opry when dependent of pills and booze, Cash cleaned up his life and went on to host a network TV show featuring such controversial guests as Bob Dylan (they performed “Girl from North Country” together) and Pete Seeger (despite threats of censorship).  Seeger sang the antiwar ballad “Osceola’s Last Words” by Floridian Will Mclean, about a Seminole chief imprisoned in a dungeon who declares: “I shall not live among such evil men, who mock the sign of truce, this flag of white.”   Invited by Nixon to perform at the White House in March 1970, Cash refused a Presidential request to sing “Welfare Cadillac” or “Okie from Muskogee” and ended the show with “What Is Truth.”  Here are the final verses:

A little boy of three sittin’ on the floor
Looks up and says, “Daddy, what is war?”
“son, that's when people fight and die”
The little boy of three says “Daddy, why?”
A young man of seventeen in Sunday school
Being taught the golden rule
And by the time another year has gone around
It may be his turn to lay his life down
Can you blame the voice of youth for asking
“What is truth?”

A young man sittin’ on the witness stand
The man with the book says “Raise your hand”
“Repeat after me, I solemnly swear”
The man looked down at his long hair
And although the young man solemnly swore
Nobody seems to hear anymore
And it didn't really matter if the truth was there
It was the cut of his clothes and the length of his hair
And the lonely voice of youth cries
“What is truth?”

The young girl dancing to the latest beat
Has found new ways to move her feet
The young man speaking in the city square
Is trying to tell somebody that he cares
Yeah, the ones that you're calling wild
Are going to be the leaders in a little while
This old world's wakin’ to a new born day
And I solemnly swear that it'll be their way
You better help the voice of youth find
"What is truth?"

At the song’s conclusion, Cash said: “We pray, Mr. President, that you can end this war in Vietnam sooner than you hope or think it can be done, and we hope and pray that our boys will be back home and there will soon be peace in our mountains and valleys.”

The earliest literary reference to “diamond in the rough” is in John Fletcher’s “A Wife for a Month” (1624): “She is very honest and will be as hard to cut as a rough diamond.”  The expression came to mean a good-hearted person of exceptional character somewhat rough around the edges and lacking in refinement. Literally, before diamonds are polished, they lack glitter and sparkle.  In Disney movie Aladdin Jafar addresses the title character in the song “Diamond in the Rough” by declaring that beneath the dirt and patches and under the filth and the fleas, “you’re a diamond in the rough”:

And though you might need finesse,
and perhaps some sniffs disinfecting
You'll be the one who succeeds 

when the lamp of their needs collecting

I met Ron Cohen at an IUN gallery reception for Willie Baronet’s exhibit “This Is Awkward For Me Too,” featuring signs used by homeless victims begging for money, work, or food.  Ron gave me the September 2019 issue of Journal of American History, whose cover features a rally for whistleblower Philip Agee, a former CIA caseworker whose memoir “Inside the Company” (1975) exposed U.S. support for authoritarian Latin American leaders that led to grievous atrocities.  The British government subsequently expelled Agee despite protests from students and Labor Party MPs.  At the gallery I ran into bridge buddy Barb Mort with husband Ascher Yates and Marianita Porterfield, coming from an aquatic exercise class.  Marianita recalled her son J.J. and Phil being in the same class at Marquette School taught by Willa Simmons.

In Fantasy Football I am undefeated since a week one tie with Pittsburgh Dave and in first place a half-game ahead of Phil, whose record is 4-1.  The primary reason is that Carolina running back Christian McCaffrey (above) is having an MVP season.  Last week against Jacksonville he gained 237 yards rushing and receiving and scored 3 TDs. Meanwhile, the overall number one pick, Saquon Barkley has been out since week 3 with a high ankle sprain. Injuries are a crucial factor, so knock on wood that my guys stay healthy.