I collect echoes. Blues echoes mainly, but you can savor echoes with all five of your senses, you know. Take Famous Dave’s Bluesfests. The last one was about 15 years ago, and it’s still echoing in my head with all kinds of sensory residues. Include the following: the feel of cool grass on a hot day or my bare feet swishing in a diminutive waterfall, the smell of wood smoke, the tang of succulent ribs and coleslaw, a fascinating kaleidoscope of visuals in a vivid afternoon, and of course music – full senses five echoing, echoing, echoing…

It was a macking good blues festival, that last one. Heard 7 bands in 5.5 hrs. Didn't leave till it got really packed, but there were never fewer than several hundred aficionados merging from every walk of life at Peavey Plaza. Two stages, sort of alternating, and you could sit there with your feet in the cascades or dance in the shallow pools. I hung out mostly where you could talk to musicians off to the side of whichever stage was live. You’d think you were sitting next to a homeless person, and next thing they’d whip out a harmonica, plug into a small player, and amp out a few licks.  

Great quality bands, though I only saw two sax players, and one sucked (even though he was blowing -- har-har). To be fair, he was an octave too low, trying to play under a guy with a bugle, which damn near wipes out an alto sax. There is no cure for the common bugle. The other, a T-sax female from Detroit, was really solid. Not the most finessed, but she was a romping good phraser with incredible power. Reminded me of Dutch T-saxer Candy Dulfer who is superb and eye “Candy” to boot. 

Saw a barefoot drummer from Texas, and a few legends of blues who looked to be at death’s door, packed in zoot suits or spangled gowns as if for their funerals. After they were helped onto the stage, you stopped feeling bad for them because the first notes kick-started their pulses all the way to over-drive. Bands fed off crowds, crowds fed off bands, and so a lot of the show was out front.

A Damon Runyon gallery of characters showed up each year for Bluesfest. Picture Colonel Sanders in a Peter Max psychedelic suit with red suspenders. Picture an ancient woman with white gloves, frail but dressed like Shirley Temple in pale blue chiffon and swaying to the music as she twirls a white parasol. Picture a denim-clad rocker, festooned with key chains, jerking spasmodically to the beats. Frowzy femmes in gingham. A shirt that reads, “Suck, Bang, Blow.” All ages, including babies at the breast. Only three sexes: male, female, hybrid. Street people, wheelchair invalids and the nouveau riche letting it all hang out in one melting pot. Famous Dave’s Bluesfests rivaled the atmospheres of Monterrey, Altamont or Woodstock.

What? You don’t like blues? But blues are just about every kind of music played every which way through every kind of instrument. Check that. Never saw a slap base or a steam calliope. Apologies to the fried rice and vegan crowd, but I did my best to pay Famous Dave back by eating porcine ribs till I oinked. Chasers were chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, burgundy black cherry ice cream, mocha expresso ice cream, et al (and I did et all). Every spring has a seminal weekend, and that was it for me: air palpable with passion and music, a perfect temp that practically commands all creatures of nature to spawn or do some related activity, fascinating people, dancing in the water at dusk. Shame the Festivals came to an end. Seven kinds of fun.

Must switch gears here to something not even one kind of fun. Want to address the alarm a lot of you are having over abusive tactics to load America’s children up with guilt in some 3,500 school districts and counting. “White fragility” it’s called by Critical Race Theory proponents who are jamming extreme racism into classrooms under the guise of “equity.” Here’s how I put it, somewhat sarcastically, in my response on FaceBook:

I know, I know, we’re talking about the last gasp of slavery in the holdout Southern states that officially ended 9 generations and a couple centuries ago, but how dare you resist having your little tykes indoctrinated and scarred with guilt before they’ve even lost their baby teeth! And where do you get that ridiculous 1776 date? Just because we shed our blood to free ourselves from another nation’s ownership and pursue our separate values in a Declaration of Independence? Piffle.

Don’t you know that a reporter for the New York Times says ignore all that. No surprise that the politically correct Pulitzers tossed her a prize for declaring that America began with the arrival of the first African slaves in 1619. That would be when we were actually still a part of the British empire, ruled by British law and tethered to the interests of a succession of kings and queens. Never mind that Britain branded us traitors in 1776 or that we achieved control by 1783 and, having fought and died for freedom, began seeing our states abolish slavery almost immediately. Never mind that by 1808 all importation of slaves was abolished in the United States – this in a world where slavery was still the rule (know any other new nations that did it that fast?). There were thousands of white slaves in the Barbary Coast for instance, millions in every culture world-wide. My starving Irish ancestors were brought here as indentured servants, not unlike the circumstances of many African slaves. But our politicized schools focus on slavery like it was an American invention, and so now in the 21st century, all whites, regardless of how, from where or when they got here, should get over their white fragility and embrace guilt. There were an estimated 12.8 million Black slaves sold by other Blacks or taken out of Africa by non-Black profiteers, but only 1 out of every 33 African slaves – 388,000, to use the number Black historian Henry Louis Gates uses – came to the United States. That is a horrendous number in a global low point of human suffering, we can all agree, but portraying it centuries later as uniquely and lastingly American reveals the motivations of those who want to use it as cover, self-empowerment and personal gain. Is projecting 1619 into 2021 on young people of any color, nine generations removed, a benefit to them, or does it extend mental enslavement? 

By the time our first Republican president Abraham Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation to free every slave and launched us into a Civil War in 1861, 19 of our 34 states had already freed all slaves whether owned by white or Black land-holders. With the end of the Civil War in 1864 at a cost of 600,000 deaths, mostly white, owning slaves was abolished sea to shining sea. The toll of wounds was horrendous among survivors, and the year following the war, Illinois, as an example, spent 75% of its budget on prosthetic limbs. Peonage and prejudice lingered, but you might wonder if -- going on two centuries and nine generations later -- remnants of racism come as much from a race-baiting industry that has underwritten the careers of some politicians, be they white or people of color. Nah, couldn’t be. No one would be so heinous as to perpetuate the horrors of slavery on the consciousness of generations of young people, white or Black. Would they? How cynical, how self-righteous to even suggest it. It would cripple young people psychologically and feed counterproductively into more racism! It would mislead noble intentions and ill-inform generations of any color. It would produce alienation and racist divisions. It would become an excuse for crime, drugs, poverty and cultural negatives. It would be giant steps backward in the family of humans. But none of that is happening, right? So, get over your white fragility and embrace Critical Race Theory flooding through your classrooms and inculcating innocent young minds in, lo, these times of “wokeness” centuries removed from historical precedent. Dump law enforcement of any color and censor/cancel/cleanse dissenting voices that don’t follow the “woke” dogma. Follow the dominant liberal media and our revisionist school boards (they are our de facto government)! Unless, of course…you think America is worth saving.

I hope you do. May our voices in harmony reaffirm America’s true legacy this 4^th of July! A dozen photos from my recent haunts below.

 

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan