About

by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 27, 2006

Hungry Blues - James P. Johnson and Langston Hughes [2:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Current

Writer, photographer, researcher, editor and activist.

In 2006 I was guest co-editor for the March/April Dollars & Sense magazine, a special issue devoted to the Gulf Coast region since Hurricane Katrina. I went on assignment for the magazine to Mississippi and Louisiana at the end of January, 2006.

My current research and writing is focused mainly on Civil Rights Movement history, racial violence in the South and current efforts to seek justice for those crimes.

Email me

Some clips:

The American Prospect
- Belated Justice for Civil Rights Era Crimes (feature)
The Black Commentator
- Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson? (feature; also archived here)

Dollars & Sense
- Gone to Mississippi (feature)
- "Ground Zero of Someone Else's Future" (interview)
- Excerpts from additional Gulf Coast interviews (D&S blog entries)

In These Times
- Voter Disenfranchisement By Attrition: With Friends Like FEMA Who Needs Jim Crow (feature)

Some photos:

Some of my poems are in the Hungry Blues archive.

Basics

This blog began in March 2004 as a way to pursue research and writing about my father's life and times. Studying political history and getting to know some of my father's contemporaries in the Civil Rights Movement radicalized me politically, and the focus of this blog quickly expanded.

Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.

Background

I was born in 1969 when my father was 41. From about age 18 to age 36 (1945-1963) he was directly involved in many of the political struggles that shaped the American left—labor, disarmament, civil rights.

From about age 14 to age 41 (1941-1969), my father had close relationships with some of the finest jazz musicians of the swing era—Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Rex Stewart and, especially, Frankie Newton.

By the time I was born, many of the pursuits and relationships that had so defined my father were drifting into the past. Growing up, I heard bits and pieces of my father's experiences in politics and on the jazz scene, but he was not one for keeping track of details or keeping chronologies straight. My father's stories were largely nostalgia pieces, not oral history.

I was born in New York City, but I mostly grew up in Delmar, NY, a suburb of Albany. My neighborhood was pleasant, somewhat conservative, predominantly white, middle-class: a typical bedroom community for people with jobs in state government and at the local universities and colleges. The public high school, which I attended, had only the smallest handful of African-American students or other students of color.

Back at our house, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was simply Martin, my dad's old boss. You could hear stories about New York jazz clubs like Minton's and the Cafe Society and talk about labor unions, nuclear disarmament, socialism. African American literature and music and civil rights activists were constant reference points. My father's good friend William Douthard, a Black youth leader in the civil rights struggles of Birmingham, AL and elsewhere in the state, lived with us in our house in the suburbs for some months, when he first moved to Albany in 1978.

When my father died in 1997, I had no command of this history. To commune with him, I started collecting the jazz recordings of Frankie Newton. Collecting recordings led to researching Frankie Newton, which led to learning more about my father's brief stint in the Communist Party and his introduction to the labor movement in the 1940s. Which led me to learn about Bayard Rustin, disarmament, Civil Rights Movement—and much more.

Everything followed from those Frankie Newton recordings.

Everything followed from a love of jazz and the act of writing.

Epigraph and recording

The name of this blog comes from the title of a song written by Langston Hughes and James P. Johnson for an almost lost jazz opera, called De Organizer. I fell in love with the work of James P. Johnson, one of the creators of jazz piano, through his brilliant collaborations with Frankie Newton on a handful of recordings from 1939.

1939 was also the year that James P. Johnson and His Orchestra made two commercial recordings of "Hungry Blues." The singer Anna Robinson performs a slightly different improvisation on the lyrics in each recording. The text of the epigraph and the audio (podcast at beginning and end of this page) are from the session on June 15 (the other was on March 9).

Here's the lineup: