I started this blog in 2004 to write about things like this photo of my father and James Baldwin in Birmingham, AL in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

James Baldwin and my father, Paul Greenberg, at the AG Gaston Motel, Birmingham, Alabama, August 4, 1963. (Photo credit: Robert Adamenko)

In time, however, blogging led to investigative journalism about unpunished lynchings and other violence from the civil rights era.

In the summer of 2007, I returned to Mississippi to look into violence that had taken place near Woodville in the southwest part of the state. After I interviewed an NAACP official, a black woman in her early 70′s who owned a shop in the town center stopped me on the street. “You a reporter?” she asked. Before long, she and her husband were sharing stories of violence against blacks in Woodville in the ’50′s and ’60′s. They asked if I had ever heard of Man Walker whose given first name was Clifford or Clifton. He was shot in his car on Poor House Road and they thought his children lived nearby in Louisiana.

Since I was on my way to Hattiesburg to do research in the McCain Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi, I couldn’t stick around to learn more. Yet at the archives, I found a number of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol reports on the Clifton Walker case. The reports were riveting. I had to investigate.

I’ve located a number of Walker’s family members and have been working closely with three of his children since 2008. One daughter, Catherine, has joined me in questioning those with possible involvement in her father’s murder. On one occasion there was a surprising moment of reconciliation between Catherine and a member of a white Woodville family. Walker’s murder had allegedly been planned at this family’s truck stop, and at the end of the interview with the elderly business owner and his daughter, Walker and the other daughter hugged. Catherine had not expected to meet whites from Woodville willing to talk about the murder. This small but significant step toward the closure that she and her siblings need gave us a taste of what might be possible for her family and for this small backwoods Mississippi community that is still largely committed to silence and to protecting murderers.

I tell this story in the Fall 2011 issue of Nieman Reports, which is devoted to cold case reporting. The issue also includes stories by my colleagues from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project:

• David Ridgen, It Takes a Hard-Driving Team to Uncover the Truth of a Cold Case, The Bonds of Our Reporting: The Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• John Flemming, Compelled to Remember What Others Want to Forget
• Jerry Mitchell, The Case of the Supposedly Sealed Files—And What They Revealed
• Stanley Nelson, Who Killed Frank Morris?
• Hank Klibanoff, Here’s What People Want to Know: Why Do Journalists Tell These Stories?
• Robert J. Rosenthal, The Enduring Ambition of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• Paul C. Johnson and Janice L. McDonald, When Lawyers and Journalists Share Common Cause

The issue also includes stories by Simeon Booker, Bill Minor and Jan Gardner.

If you’re following me on Twitter or Tumblr, you know that I’ve been heavily preoccupied with the situation in Wisconsin.

So much is at stake for Wisconsin and the country, and the labor movement legacy runs deep in my veins.

But I’d like everyone to take their eyes off Wisconsin for long enough to take in what is happening to Detroit, Michigan.

(AP) DETROIT – State education officials have ordered the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools to immediately implement a plan that balances the district’s books by closing half its schools. The Detroit News says the financial restructuring plan will increase high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidate operations.

I haven’t been watching the situation in Detroit closely enough to understand the ins and outs of the underlying politics, but this simply cannot be justified. Half the schools? 60 student high school classes? I don’t see how one can even call this policy.

The crisis in Detroit has captured the attention of the White House, but rather than devise an immediate response to effect some semblance of stability for Detroit’s young people (not to mention for the untold number of teachers and staff who will presumably lose their jobs), US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has declared that Detroit’s best hope is to compete with other districts for a new round of so-called “Race to the Top” funds.

President Barack Obama and Duncan are pushing for a third round of his hallmark Race to the Top competition, outlined last Monday in the president’s budget proposal.

Unlike the first two rounds in which states competed for federal dollars based on education reforms (Michigan lost in both rounds), the proposed $900 million third round would be targeted directly at school districts.

“It would be a huge, huge, huge opportunity for Detroit,” Duncan said. “We would love to see them put forward a fantastic application. Nothing would please me more.”

DPS, steeped in a more than $300 million deficit, wants to compete.

“Detroit Public Schools would look forward to an opportunity to apply for and win Race to the Top funds if another round is approved by Congress,” DPS spokesman Steve Wasko said in an e-mail….

“The district has made real progress,” Duncan said. “(But) the district frankly has an extraordinarily far way to go. If you look at some of the results from different cities around the country, Detroit’s at the bottom in a lot of the results. So the work is nowhere near done.”

Added Duncan: “I would love to see Detroit leapfrog other districts in five years from now (and) be in a very, very different place than it is today.

The students of Detroit don’t have time for Duncan’s unproven, destructive notions of education “reform.” In five years the remaining public schools in Detroit will be nothing better than holding pens for young people who have been deprived of their right to education.

Gregory Isaacs has died.

I was first exposed to Gregory Isaacs in 1982 at age 13. The story begins with my cousin, Alan—a story I recounted here several years ago.

When I was thirteen, my dad took me to the Film Forum, just outside the West Vilage in NYC. My cousin Alan’s first film was being shown there, a film called Land of Look Behind, a documentary about Jamaica just after Bob Marley’s death. At the time I did not know Bob Marley’s music and I knew nothing about Rastafarians or Jamaica.

All I really knew was that when I was five Alan lived with us in our house in Teaneck, NJ. He and my dad used to take photographs together and process them in my dad’s darkroom. We converted our attic into a bedroom for him. Alan photographed me there. He somehow limited the available light to a shaft coming in from a single window.

He left us to go to Europe, where he studied with Roman Polanski, worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, and began his lifelong association and sometime partnership with Werner Herzog.

On the screen were astounding images of poverty in Jamaica, Bob Marley’s funeral, Rastafarian reveries, live reggae performances, prisons and military police, incredible landscapes, marijuana smoking, and English made strange by unfamiliar accents that often seemed hypnotic. It was a ninety minute cinematic poem, a dream that has stayed with me for almost twenty-five years.

Included in Alan’s beautiful film is this extended sequence, featuring Isaacs talking and performing live in a little Jamaican club.

I wrote my recollection of Alan’s film in 2006, as it was about to be re-released on DVD; I’m pleased to see that it still seems to be available. You can also watch the film on YouTube, in parts. More on the film in the rest of my 2006 blog post and here.

Related Reading

• Christopher Campbell, “Gregory Isaacs in ‘Rockers,’ ‘Land of Look Behind’ and ‘Made in Jamaica‘” (Spout)

Aunt Esther at age 96

Last winter I drove to Providence, RI full of trepidation and sadness. My incredible Aunt Esther, my maternal grandfather’s sister, had pneumonia. I was going to see her to make sure I had the chance to say goodbye.

To everyone’s, including her own, surprise, she pulled through. “I saw the pearly gates—and they shut!” she said to us bemusedly. Thus we were able to have the pleasure of gathering together in Providence this summer to celebrate her 99th birthday and the start of her 100th year.

And thus WRNI had the opportunity to take an audio snapshot of my sage, spunky and inspirational great aunt. You can listen to it right here.

You can’t grow up in in the home of a political radical from the 1950s and 60s without hearing Peter, Paul and Mary. I’m very sad to hear of the death of Mary Travis. She raised the roof for freedom and justice her whole career. If there’s a heavenly place where great spirits celebrate together Mary is surely whooping it up with them now.

• NY Times Obit
• Bio of Mary Travis from peterpaulandmary.com
• Statements from Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey

Sometimes I think I´m gonna lose my mind
But it don´t look like I ever do
I loved so many people everywhere I went
Some too much, others not enough

I don´t know, I may go down or up or anywhere
But I feel like this scribbling will stay

Maybe if I hadn’t seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people´s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone
Just say, well, another man´s done gone

This clip is from the fabulous documentary, Man in the Sand, about the making of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue record. Mermaid Avenue is the first in what has become a small series of recordings by artists tapped by Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora to set unrecorded Guthrie lyrics to music. After his death, it was discovered that Woody had left behind 1000 some lyrics that had never been recorded as songs with music.

I watched Man in the Sand last night on Netflix. I’ve loved Mermaid Avenue since it came out in 1998 but did not realize this documentary about the making of the record has been around nearly as long. It’s really, really good. It’s a like a diamond in the rough. So many sparkling, unpretentious moments of beauty. (Though it also grapples with the pretentiousness of Guthrie and of the artists who participated in the Mermaid Avenue recordings.)

The film worked on me emotionally on so many levels. The movie begins with Billie Bragg’s quest for Woody’s America, in an attempt to understand Woody well enough to approach the daunting responsibility of giving musical life to his unrecorded lyrics. These scenes and others throughout the film are deeply evocative of the times my father lived through and the left politics that shaped my family’s experience and world view.

Then there are all the approaches to Woody.

Bragg’s approach to Woody’s America, which I already mentioned.

Woody’s daughter Nora’s approach to her father—how she has used her work as her father’s archivist and as the midwife to the musical rebirthing of his songs to come to know him better and in ways that were not possible for her during his short lifetime; he was ill with Huntington’s disease most of the time she knew him and he died when she was 17. Inter-cut with scenes of Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and others recording Woody’s lyrics are scenes of Nora speaking intimately, often fighting back her tears, about her family life, both her childhood memories of it and what she has come to understand later as a historian.

Arlo Guthrie appears in just one brief sequence—to recount how he learned that This Land Is Your Land was by his father one day when it was taught to him at school. He recalls running home in tears because the other kids knew his own father’s song better than he did. Woody was already ill and not playing much music. But Woody, with physical difficulty, showed Arlo the chords and helped him learn to play it. So much of Woody’s tragic complexity is in this brief story, which Arlo caps with a slightly coy rendition of one of the now famously long suppressed verses of the song.

Another tragedy that the film is now echo for is the untimely death of Wilco’s Jay Bennett, who died very unexpectedly this past May at age 45. While there are many other evocative scenes from the film that I wish I could have found on YouTube, this one is lovely, with Tweedy’s vocal more spare and plaintive than on the Mermaid Avenue version, accompanied just by Bennett, whose lovely piano playing is out of frame until the camera tracks around to the position where you can see the both of them in frame.

In many of the scenes with Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy and the others from Wilco and with Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris, it looked to me like they, as well as others involved in the project, kept getting these jolts, as if they are repeatedly startled by beauty they are finding in Woody’s poetry and in the music it has inspired in them.

The film coveys the often painful contradictions among noble human values, the exultations of human creativity and the flawed humanity of the people who fight for equality and freedom and try to make enduring, beautiful things. It shows these many dimensions in Woody and in the people who came together to make more of his songs known and make him more knowable to us as an artist, as a social conscience and as a man.

This is very funny—and it is an absolutely brilliant bit of musical improvisation from Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye. I think my favorite moment is when Louis says “but don’t forget Fats Waller” to rhyme off of Danny’s Gustav Mahler, and without missing  abeat Danny replies “I wouldn’t do that” in what to my ear sounds like a Waller imitation. Genius stuff, this.

Long time readers of Hungry Blues will know that my love of Louis Armstrong began with his deep importance for my dad. I also grew up listening to and watching the movies of Danny Kaye, who was another of my dad’s artistic heroes.

You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).

In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.

I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.

But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own WordPress setup, I wrote:

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.

The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.

Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.

Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.

It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)

Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.

—

(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)

Today The Kid turns 5, and we’re having a party. We have a number of activities planned for the kids that will be occurring at different stations in the space where we’re celebrating. One of the stations will be for music and dancing. When I asked him what music, he quickly replied: Matt Ward, Pete Seeger and the Beatles. I’ve got all of Matt Ward’s recordings on my iPod, and Pete Seeger’s Children’s Concert and 1963 Carnegie Hall concert have long been on the iPod as favorites on car rides, but most of our Beatles are on LPs and CDs around the house. We’re not bringing LPs, of course, but The Kid insisted we collect all of our Beatles CDs for the party: Let It Be, Let It Be … Naked, The White Album, Yellow Submarine, Revolver and Help! And then The Kid said, “will you post Eleanor Rigby on your blog? The one from Yellow Submarine…”

I was up late getting a few things done and hanging out on twitter when …

I was feeling sad that way you do when loss catches you by surprise. Then I figured out what I’d do.

The older poems are all in the archives, along with a few others.

Now I’m trying to decide if I should also post one of Dad’s autobiographical sketches. I just might.