"A Great Day in Harlem"

" A Great Day in Harlem"

About the Photo

Art Kane attributed his famous photograph to being young and naïve. In August 1958 he was hired by Esquire magazine to come up with a photo to open an article about jazz. He figured he would contact every major jazz musician in New York to show up on 126th street in Harlem at 10am to take a group portrait. Getting jazz musicians anywhere together at 10am seemed impossible, but to everyone's surprise 57 musicians showed up. It was Art Kane's first professional photograph.
Perhaps the most famous jazz-related photograph, Art Kane's image has been reproduced in countless books and posters. Recently, it played a key role in Steven Spielberg's 2004 film "The Terminal."

About the Film

Jean Bach's 1994 film, "A Great Day in Harlem" is one of the best documentaries about jazz music. It is filled with anecdotes, history and clips of classic performances. The film shows how jazz is a musical language that a network of artists developed together. While individuals had iconic personalities (such as Charles Mingus or TheloniousMonk), everyone in the portrait performed and recorded with each other.

Excerpt cited from: www.harlem.org

John Henry: Steel Drivin' Man

I clearly remember hearing folklores of Paul Bunyan and John Henry....these stories now feel so different to me...as I think about the railroad and western expansion, industrialization, workers' rights, ethnosexual mythologies of black men...etc. However, problematic these stories may seem now-what remains so alluring to me...is that at one point in time folks were all hearing the same stories...passed down from one generation to the next that had nothing to do with fanfare, Harry Potter, or Pixar. I like ancestral stories...where 'real' people are the icons, heroes and villains wrapped up in one...with songs and hand-drawn pictures to match...Call me old fashion.

I will probably post folklore/mythologies to remind myself...to re-tell the story of who I used to be...when I first learned of John Henry, Babe the Blue Ox, Johnny Appleseed...and how it feels to look at them now...knowing a bit more of the story.

The soundtrack: John Henry by Mississippi Fred McDowel (on Youtube)

Below is Excerpted from: http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/bunyanhenry/background.html

SEE NPR FOR MORE:http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/johnhenry/)

The contrast between Paul Bunyan and John Henry could not be greater. John Henry, the “Steel-Drivin’ Man,” was a truly popular folk hero whose famous contest is attested in popular folksongs dating back to the late 19th century. It is generally acknowledged that “John Henry” is the best known and most recorded American folk song. As you will find out this week, it is actually many folksongs, attested in many different versions sung by very different sorts of singers.

It seems fairly certain that the John Henry legend derives from a historical incident, although scholars disagree about where the event might have taken place. Some argue that the contest between John Henry and the steam drill took place near Birmingham, Alabama during the building of the Coosa Tunnel for the C&W Railroad in 1887-8. Other scholars argue that John Henry worked on the C&O Railroad expansion into the Ohio Valley, and that the contest took place during the building of the Big Bend Tunnel inSummers County, West Virginia during the 1870′s.

Although it is not clear exactly where and when the story might have taken place, the substance of the story is the same. John Henry was a “hammer-man” whose job was to drive a steel drill into the rock, building tunnels through mountains to allow the railroad to pass on through. The hammer-man was helped by a shaker (or turner), whose unenviable job was to bend down and twist the drill after each blow of the hammer. After the hole was deep enough, explosives would be placed inside and the rock would be blasted out. When the railroad company proposed using a steam-drill to replace the hammer-man, John Henry agreed to a day-long contest, man against machine. John Henry won the contest, but died as soon as it was over.

Many of the folksongs tell us that John Henry was married, and they emphasize his role as a husband or as a father. Other songs focus on the grief of John Henry’s mother after his death. Still other songs tell us that there were many women who mourned John Henry’s passing. Clearly, for many of these folksingers, John Henry was a symbol of both physical prowess and potency. Some of the folksongs also include the story of his birth, and his own prediction that the “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me.” Other songs protest the brutal working conditions or the poor pay that the railroad workers received. Geoff Edgersprovides an excellent overview of the different meanings of John Henry’s legend as expressed in the many different folksongs that tell the story:

A hero becomes what you need. So in the ballad, John Henry’s makeup depends on who is telling his tale. Is he a strong, black man driving the railroad west? A husband and father? A sweaty, sexual dynamo swinging the hammer? A symbol of futility because he died on the job or an inspiration because he beat the white man’s steam-drill?

Considering that John Henry did clearly exist – and that we know the color of his skin – it’s surprising how rarely his race is mentioned. [...] It’s likely that the black singers, whether prisoners or blues men, took his race as a given, seeing no need to mention it. He is their Paul Bunyan. In the case of Johnny Cash, race had nothing to do with the ballad. This was a union song, not a civil rights anthem. After all, John Henry, as ultimate working-class hero, has been embraced by disparate groups: black prisoners, white mountain musicians, college folk revivalists, elderly blues singers. Most Southern states have claimed him, as does Maine in Woody Guthrie’s version, even though he was likely born in North Carolina or West Virginia.

The connector is this valiant battle, man against machine, man against boss, man against the power structure that keeps his people (African-Americans? laborers?) in chains. He’s a hero to Woody Guthrie, a warning to Mississippi John Hurt, an inspiration to the chain gang. From verse-to-verse, generation-to-generation, the story changes to suit the singer. The name and steel-driving solitude stay the same.

The first printed version of “John Henry” appeared in 1900, based on folksongs that had been circulating in the late 1800′s. The first recording of a John Henry song is in 1924, by “Fiddlin’ John Carson“, a white musician from Georgia who was born in 1868. The first recording by an African-American musician was made in 1927 by RagtimeHenry Thomas, a blues singer from Texas. Thanks to the iBiblio website and NPR, you will be able to listen to a variety of John Henry recordings this week, including versions by Leadbelly, Uncle Dave Macon, Bill Monroe, Missisippi John Hurt, Woody Guthrie, and Johnny Cash.

This American Life: Frenemies (Originally aired 09.11.2009)

"Why not me...?": A Black Transman's Thoughts on Becoming a Birth Doula

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Today’s Challenge: Why not me?

If I am to be queer...that is to think queerly and abandon normativity, then I have to revisit my ideas of 'who gets to be what' in this life. If I am to be an activist who is truly willing to be transformed by moments, communities and the histories of which I am a part (and those that I am not)...then I have to embolden myself to think of myself as a healer, an artist, an educator and a student.... Internalized oppression, childhood physical and emotional abuse identity politics, and/or too much "My So-Called Life," what ever the reasons behind my deferring from a dream or entertaining a conceptualization of myself that seems too far gone, impractical, flawed, however magical...has no power today. Today there is just an audible enunciation of the statement: Why not me?.

I say this affirmation in preparation of my new doula training. That is to say my first. Being a doula is something I have thought on and off about for years now...never allowing my mind to settle long enough for the idea to take root. Being a healer of any kind seemed like the work of those who were already healed. Me, a survivor of several lifetimes of “over exposure to under living” seemed too broken, too tired, too scare and doubtful to even heal myself. Healers were people who had reached a nirvana, liked all kinds of herbal teas and spoke in gentle wave-like voices always findings its way to receptive people who were comforted by their presence.

I am a queer black female to male transexual of working class origins, who is a feminist, anti-capitalist, activist with able-bodied, lighter skin, and educational privilege. I am also a twin. I don't make all people comfortable all of the time and I was raised on Lipton-so that is what I drink. I am loud. Angry. Honest. Queerly gendered...an Aries. I am a fighter. And it is because of these reasons...that I can make room for women (etc.) who fight, curse, and proclaim that they are alive and birth life all around them, incessantly. After all, haven't brown folks, queers, indigenous communities been giving birth, healing and resisting forever?? Haven't we been birthing ourselves through healing practices and community building? Doesn't this delicious cycle then not posit birth as the ultimate act of resistance...knowing that, "we were never meant to survive?"

I was challenged by one of my housemates the other day (I live collectively in Greensboro, NC with several wonderful black visionaries/revolutionaries...those stories will come in later posts) when he arrived at the questions, "Isn't that kind of girly?" I appreciated the question and to some extent, I have asked myself that in one way or another before I had registered. As a black transman who passes more often than not as a Puerto Rican fag...does this women-sacred space still get to be mine?

In Arisika Razak's essay, "Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth," she refers to birth as the first act of magic...the primary numinous event. She employs Alice Walker's definition of a womanist, and presents patriarchy, capitalism and industrialization as the forces that have moved so many of us away from the practices of midwifery and the conception of the midwife as a person that is "holistically rooted within her community," while simultaneously inculcating messages of men (transmasculine and non-transmen) as devoid of nurturing attributes or any feelings at all.

She poses,

Birth is such a universal and central aspect of human existence that it can serve as the nucleus around which to build a paradigm for positive human interaction...Each of these elements-womb, birth culture, and family-has a profound effect upon the new human being. Each deserves our best thinking and analysis. What would it be like if we envisioned a society in which positive, lifelong, nurturing support-from old to young, and young to old-were the dominant theme of human interaction. What would it be like if the human quest for adventure were linked to issues of social justice and individual empowerment?"

p. 166-167

Now…who wouldn’t want to be a part of that…whatever your gender? I know that this journey will further connect me to the life of all living things, and those that have been recycled in universe. This work is a continuation of my need to preserve culturally specific practices of care, my commitment to reflection…the reverence of nature and the expansion of my spirit. Although at times her analysis is not always inclusive of the many ways gender is enacted by humans or how class, race, etc. compounds the birthing experiences of everyone in this country, her urgent proclamation of: Let the shared experience of childbirth reclaim the human soul (p. 172), resonates in me still.

When I think about being a doula, I think about my twin sister and our journey together at the age of twenty of bringing my niece into the world-not knowing whether we were coming or going, permanently misplacing the birth video before the baby got home from the hospital, and my sister immediately being counseled on the kinds of contraception she planned to use, henceforth. When I think about being a doula I think of how queers, brown folks, queer brown folks, have been made to move away from their traditions and their own resiliency and I would like to be a part of a new order to restore that faith in our own bodies, spirits, and communities.

Moreover, I know that trans people are having babies, cis-gender trans partners, my housemate, and hopefully many, many more people will also be blessed with a birthing experiences that resembles more of our hopes and dreams than our intentions manufactured and regulated. So I state...Why not me? Why not now? Why not us? "WE are the ones we have been waiting for."

Check the Blogroll for folks engage in amazing work around birth!