Hootenanny

According to Todd Gitlin in “The Sixties,” “Folk music was the living prayer of a defunct movement, gingerly holding the place of a Left in American culture.” A socialist party organizer named Myles Horton ran the Highlander Folk School in the hills of Tennessee from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, where workshops were given for civil rights workers, and folk and gospel songs were learned and spread around. Striking North Carolina tobacco workers had a song called “I Will Overcome,” which, spread through the Folk School to Pete Seeger, became the anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

All this would have been news to my parents. Staunchly anti-Communist as we all were during the Cold War, they nevertheless warmed to folk music. The earliest records I remember were folk songs by Marais and Miranda on old 78’s. Josef Marais was from South Africa and once he met his wife Miranda, they had a successful partnership singing and playing South African traditional folk ballads as well as others. How well I remember “Train to Kimberly,” with its sounds imitating the train, a song made by native South Africans who watched the first trains running up to the diamond mines. I find here http://www.maraisandmiranda.com/, that the lullaby I’ve always used “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” may also have come from them!

One of the few things on television my Dad came out of his study to watch was the Tennessee Ernie Ford variety television show, which ran from 1956 to 1961. I see it as a pre-cursor to the folk music hit scene in the 1960’s. Like his earlier radio show, it included country and western and pop songs and a gospel song at the end of every evening. We owned some of his gospel albums and I can still hear Tennessee Ernie’s voice singing songs such as “Faith of Our Fathers.”

Ian & Sylvia

Folk music came out of the woodwork and spun a hit show across the television networks called “Hootenanny” from 1963 to 1964. My Dad set up a reel to reel magnetic tape recorder above the television set and taped all the shows! We kids learned how to use it and I remember many evenings holding my littlest sister as she fell asleep to the music of Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, The Chad Mitchell Trio.

Looking back, I find that “Hootenanny” sparked controversy in folk circles, unbeknownst to those of us out in the hinterlands. Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie were the first to publicize the term “hootenanny,” but Seeger was asked to perform only if he provided information about his past involvements with the Communist Party. He refused and many folk singers boycotted the show as a result. Seeger’s first appearance on network television was on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1969. By then I was long gone. I heard the legendary Seeger in the flesh only once, hosting and singing in impromptu folk/blues concerts below the Lincoln Memorial at the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. in 1968.

Connecting the Dots

Perhaps it was appropriate that I was much more involved in literature than politics as a young person, as in northeast Iowa we were far from the seats of power. Nevertheless, American politics did have its effect on us. We avidly listened to news discussions and debates on television on winter afternoons, read what we could in magazines and discussed current events in school. It just felt so far away!

Thus I was delighted to run across someone only slightly older than me, who had lived and worked in Washington, D.C. from 1966 through 1974. Judith Nies published The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties in 2008 as an explanation for her daughter of the political life she had led and why she left it. In direct, vivid prose she describes her education and her work, telling stories of the people she met and her growing understanding.

She had three very interesting jobs in Washington, first working for The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she met some of the activist women who had campaigned for and finally won the vote for women in 1919. Telling their stories, she connects their influence to the amazing women who were instrumental in preventing atmospheric nuclear testing and stood up to the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1961 saying, “We are a movement, not an organization,” and then to the “second wave” of feminists.

From 1968 to 1970 Nies worked for a coalition of ten congressmen who were opposed to the war in Viet Nam, coordinating hearings on the war which resulted in two important books which she edited with Erwin Knoll, War Crimes and the American Conscience and American Militarism. Her last job in Washington was for congressman Don Frazer and the Women’s Equity Action League, working on examining how American leadership is selected and trained. The book wonderfully describes her growing understanding of privilege as it relates particularly to those who develop America’s foreign policy.

Judith Nies’ book connected many dots for me on the atmosphere of those early days as well as what it would have been like to be smart, working class, and yet have aspirations toward foreign policy work. My family had a strong, empathetic interest in foreign affairs. My parents housed Displaced Persons after World War II. We were always interested in what missionaries traveling through our area had to say. And perhaps the literature that we read so avidly opened us to the understanding of others as well. But no amount of study could give me the insights Judith Nies received from being on the scene. I recommend her book.

Fit Company for Themselves

In addition to editing “The Pastor’s Kids,” I’ve begun to let the sequel creep into my consciousness. I know what will be in it to some extent, but I haven’t let myself imagine the actual incidents. In a way, this, the “making up” part, is my favorite part of writing. First though, I’m dealing with the title.

For a while the second book has been called “Bound Away” from the American folk song “Shenandoah.” Bruce Springsteen has a version I’ve been listening to:

            “Shenandoah, I love your daughter

            Away, you rolling river

            I’ll take her across the water

            Away, bound away

            Cross the wide Missouri.”

But if you don’t hear it as part of the song, you might think it was a matter of “bounding away” like a rabbit across a meadow. My characters actually make the transition from a 19^th Century to a 20^th Century world view in this second book. But it isn’t without a certain amount of anguish. No one bounds away with delight. It is more a matter of being dragged, taken away.

I toyed with phrases from Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, which show the pain of beginning to be your own person, such as in “Kathy’s Song”:

“And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true.

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you.

And as I watch the drops of rain

Weave their weary paths and die,

I know that I am like the rain

There but for the grace of you go I.”

Or the lightness and attempt to hold the sweetness and irresponsibility of youth in “The 59^th Street Bridge Song” (if you can’t hear the melody as you read these lyrics, look the songs up on YouTube!):

“I've got no deeds to do,

No promises to keep.

I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.

Let the morning time drop all it's petals on me.

Life, I love you,

All is groovy.”

But Line, Marty and Paul just aren’t there yet. In the second book there is still a formality which hasn’t fallen away from their lives. Intellectually they are moving into open space, but tradition holds them. In the second book, Line and Marty go to college and Paul finishes high school. They are full of ideals inherited directly from their European ancestors, and they know no others. The epiphanies that come to them they don’t yet understand.

An English proverb states, “Learning makes people fit company for themselves.” A liberal arts education doesn’t help one earn a living as much as it helps one’s understanding and love of life. Line, Marty and Paul were treated to such an education in the early 1960’s. Thus, I believe the title “Fit Company for Themselves” reflects the cultural story space in which we will find them in the sequel to “The Pastor’s Kids.”

Editing

This is an editing month and it is every bit as engrossing and time-stopping as writing. I find that as it first comes out, I have a dense, rather viscous style. So, the first thing I do to edit each chapter is to search for all the descriptors using “had”, “which he had given her” for instance [thank you, Anna, for this one]. It’s a past perfect tense, but it certainly slows narrative down, and often the phrase isn’t even necessary. I need to be careful of redundancy of any kind, though there is a use for it, like the refrain in a song.

I also am on the lookout for the adverbs “really,” “quite,” “always,” “just” and so on, which qualify statements. It’s “always” hard for me to commit to statements, as I know there are “often” cases in which they are not “quite” true. But in writing fiction, you can afford to be definite.

My sister Naomi’s notes are invaluable in sharpening the memory picture. She is consistently encouraging, but also she sometimes says: “The fishing trip made me uneasy. I kept wanting to know where Dad was in the boat.” We both know that, though she had a slightly different perspective, we experienced the same sensual details. Whether someone outside our family will find the culture described in the book as vivid remains to be seen.

Don’s ideas about writing help me a great deal as I work with my characters. He suggests:

-                     When introducing a character make sure they are indelible, inevitable in the context of the story, and move the story along.

-                     Make sure an action could only have come from that particular character.

-                     Make the character’s feelings clear by gesture. What is the character doing?

-                     What does the character think as they do things?

Don also reminds me of analogies in filmmaking. He likes to the let the actor he is filming wander around in the frame. He feels this gives the character authority to tell his own story. If you follow a character too closely with the camera, it becomes more about the filmmaker using the character to tell the filmmaker’s story. We’ve seen a lot of that lately!

I want to free my characters to tell their own stories, allowing them plenty of context in which to move about, to play. If we are, to some extent, created by the families we live in, by the widening circles of church, school, community, and country, when we look at an individual we are seeing the culture out of which he came. How often, when we learn something about someone’s background do we say, “Oh, of course, now I understand.” Fiction gives me the freedom to build up the thick culture in which my characters live and act. Editing allows you to reframe, heighten contrast and sharpen the picture. Yes, it’s a little like Photoshopping, but with more infinite possibility, since language lets you work with the mind’s eye.

Color Photographs

Color snapshots start appearing in my photograph albums beginning in the early 1960’s. We were still using black and white photos for portraits. Both my high school and college senior pictures are black and white, probably because the annuals they appeared in were in black and white due to cost. But snapshots, taken by small Kodak cameras, begin to show the colors of our dresses, of the decorations at my senior prom, of our lake. (I remember my chagrin when I first saw my husband Don’s toddler photographs. They were in color!)

I’ve been fascinated by the complete reproductions of Life magazine which Google Books has provided us with at http://oldlifemagazines.com/ . You can buy the magazines here, of course, but you can also click on the year your want, and then the particular magazine and, if you scroll down and keep clicking, the entire thing comes up! If you look at Life magazines from the 1950’s you will often find serious coverage of the news by excellent journalists. By 1951 and 1952, the covers of the magazine were beginning to be in color, and the ads (lots of cigarettes and cars!) used color, but the great news photographs and glamour photographs were in black and white.

My early awareness of the larger world is from photographs in National Geographic, which began to use color very early, and the Life magazine, which arrived almost weekly. Dad went to the post office to get the mail in our tiny North Dakota town, but the photographs in these magazines were like ticking time bombs spread out on our coffee tables. No wonder the kids in my story “set the controls for the heart of the sun"! I tried to read the books listed in Life as those kids my age were reading and started a penpal correspondence with someone who had written a letter to the editor at Life.

My earliest television memory is from November, 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and we watched Sunday afternoon news programs, mesmerized as winter brought the cold that kept us in. Our parents had rented a television to watch that year’s political conventions, and when they were over, could not give it up!

In the March 30, 1962 Life magazine, a huge spread entitled “Jackie Leaves Her Mark on India and Pakistan” is all in intense color, and the ads are all in color, but the other news articles, and seven poems by Robert Frost, are in black and white. I believe that by this time, Life magazine was beginning to cover more soft news, especially in photographs, as they were unable to compete with television for hard news.

By 1963, I was off to college, which effectively ended my Life magazine and television news watching for quite some time, except around the death of President Kennedy. A television in our dorm lounge provided viewing of the continuous coverage of this world tragedy. By this time, however, my arrow was pointed out at the world, on a trajectory that would carry me further than I expected, though not perhaps so far after all.

First Draft

This week I finished a first draft of “The Pastor’s Kids”. It feels rather pedestrian at the moment, quite far from what I hope it will be. But I will wait until September to read it and see what it looks like as a whole. I do feel I have gotten into it most of what I hoped. The editing process will involve paring away the inessential, making it more “visible” to others and sharpening the characters and events.

This means that my musings here will be less about the times and places of the novel, perhaps, and more about narrative prose and writing. I picked up my old friend Hemingway this week, a book which came out recently, his “Africa book” which was cut in half, edited and published by his son Patrick as True at First Light. I loved it! I’m not sure he was always so funny, but reading this book I often found myself laughing!

Hemingway chose a two month period, November and December 1953, a time when his wife Mary was hunting a particular black-maned lion in Kenya. The ceremony of the safari had changed a great deal from his experience of twenty years before in 1933. Much of his amusement comes from looking at these changes in both Africa and himself. Hemingway relished his relationships to the Wakamba, who worked on this safari, and felt as though he were becoming one of them. Though some of them kept up the forms and ceremonies established earlier, when the term “Bwana” was used in 1953, he realized it was sarcastic, a form of abuse! Another source of comedy was his banter with the Brit in charge of Game Control (otherwise known as G.C., or Gin Crazed), who came out from Nairobi to help.

The relationship of fiction to non-fiction in Hemingway’s memoirs was always complex. I’ve heard he regarded A Moveable Feast, which many people take as gospel truth about his years in Paris, as fiction! Neither A Moveable Feast nor True at First Light had been published when he died. But, as he says, “there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In both of these books, Hemingway’s narrative precision is inspiring, as is his reproduction of dialogue with all of the flavor and spice of life.

The Life magazines I pored over in the late 1950’s were full of stories of Hemingway’s life and his writing. I doubt if I read the full text of his essay “The Dangerous Summer” about bull fighting, but his powerful persona as a living writer certainly influenced me.

Civil Rights 1960

In the long fight for civil rights, two events in the spring of 1960 led to a turning of the tide of world opinion against the segregation of black and white people where it was still occurring. On February 1, four black students sat down at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina. According to Connie Curry, “The sit-in movement spread like wildfire during the spring of 1960. … By Easter, more than 70,000 mostly black southern college students were involved in demonstrations.”

March 21 in Sharpeville, a South African township, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators against the hated passbooks which were used to enforce segregation, killing 69. Life magazine for April 11, 1960 reported on “South Africa Torn by Fury”, and noted that “The United Nations took a hand and white South Africans began to realize how isolated they are at the bar of world opinion.”

In the corner of northeast Iowa where Line, Marty and Paul live, these events didn’t make much of an impact. At that point, they had only met one black person, a black pastor from Madagascar who spoke at their church. But these events did foreshadow the social change that would affect the years in which the kids came of age. The last two chapters of “The Pastor’s Kids” are set in 1960.

Ella Baker

For years now, I’ve been reading memoirs by young people who helped effect this social change. I keep coming across the name of a woman whom everyone speaks of with love and respect, and whom I didn’t even know about. Her name was Ella Baker. She was a bit older than most of the young people she influenced. She had begun her work in New York in the Harlem Renaissance, and worked with the NAACP and the SCLC. But she resisted the messianic leadership which she saw in the black churches, where the pastors were men and the members women. She thought that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” and developed an idea about participatory democracy. Tom Hayden says, in his book Rebel, “Such decentralized and essentially voluntary forms are inevitable whenever movements erupt with the seemingly endless energy as they did during that decade.”

The early workers in what everyone called “the Beloved Community” formed by civil rights workers, all knew Ella Baker. Connie Curry recalls her “deep friendship with Ella Baker” and Casey Hayden writes, “Whether Ella Baker was shaping the direction of the civil rights movement by advising the southern student movement to remain independent of adult organizations or listening to the dream of one child, her whole being was concentrated on and dedicated to the struggle of eliminating the barriers and injustice of racism. Being around someone like Ella Baker put me in contact with focused purpose and true greatness.”

The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, also begun in 1960, was the result of Ella Baker trying to get various students she knew who were working on civil rights all over the country together. She thought they should have their own organization. A wonderful article which traces the legacy of this group fifty years later can be found at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/25/860631/-Never-Turn-BackReport-on-SNCCs-50th-Anniversary. "For all of the youthful energy and commitment to challenge and change that erupted in 1960," said Charlie Cobb, a SNCC Field Secretary, "the reason for SNCC's existence comes down to one person - a then-57-year-old woman, Ella Baker, one of the great figures of 20th-century struggle. In a deep political sense, we are her children and our 50th anniversary conference is dedicated to her."