Dvora Meyers | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,722 words (23 minutes)
A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.
The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.
They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.
Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.
That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing. Read more…
In 1912 two musicians were playing near the Union Depot on the corner of Elm Street and Central Track in a pocket of Dallas, Texas where, if you believed what the local papers wrote, you’d be wise to keep your money in your shoe. One was 24, likely playing his signature 12-string guitar. The other was 18 or 19 and blind with an acoustic guitar strapped across his imposing frame.
People passed by, some dropping change they could afford to part with. To hear the older one tell it, their music sent women running over to give them hugs and kisses. From there, they’d head a few blocks down Elm Street or Commerce, talking about women, music, and survival, the 24-year-old with the 12-string leading the blind man. They’d stop outside of local businesses, most likely pawn shops, and play. The older one would learn plenty about the blues from the blind one. Their little pocket in the middle of Dallas is known as Deep Ellum. You could walk the whole area in 15 minutes.
Around 1915 the two would part ways and never see each other again. The older one left Dallas with his 12-string. In 1918 he went to prison for murder. He spent the next 20 years in and out of incarceration and was dead by 1949. His name was Huddie Ledbetter, but he went by Lead Belly. The blind man would purportedly die in a Chicago blizzard in 1929. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly’s records with getting him into folk music. George Harrison stated that without Lead Belly there would be “no Beatles.” Kurt Cobain would make similar sentiments about Nirvana. In his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, B.B. King wrote that he “flat-out tried to copy” Blind Lemon Jefferson. That line of influence traces directly through Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.
Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years. Anyone with an ear for musical history would hear Crockett’s stories-disguised-as-songs and his blues style as an homage to men like Jefferson and Lead Belly and to a long-ago era of music, but Crockett wasn’t standing in that spot for its history. He was there for a particular kind of foot traffic; the kind where feet were attached to bodies that found street music endearing. By that point in 2014, he had survived for nearly a decade as a musician living on the streets. He’s said to be a distant relative to Davy Crockett, and he’s covered more of the United States, hitch-hiking and hopping trains, than the Texas legend ever did.
Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years.
While the journey reflected in his songs has since garnered him national acclaim and landed his music on both the Blues and Americana charts, Crockett is barely a chapter in the story of Deep Ellum. Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink. You won’t find plaques commemorating Blind Lemon Jefferson or Lead Belly’s time there, though it’s more responsible for Texas Blues than any one place could claim. It was a haven for punks and counterculture in the ’80s and breakout stars in the ‘90s. A “Deep Ellum act” can mean anyone from T-Bone Walker to the Old 97’s to Erykah Badu to St. Vincent to Leon Bridges.
For over a century, Deep Ellum has been a spot where Dallas has put either the people it didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with. Crockett fit right in. There’s no way to quantify how different modern music might sound if Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson never spent that time together. But Crockett’s journey to Deep Ellum is as good a start as any to try to explain how music has managed to keep returning to this neighborhood whose own city has never fully understood.
***
By the early 1920s, one third of eligible male residents in Dallas were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the few blocks of Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce that made up Deep Ellum were a center of activity for African Americans in the heart of a city that some claim was run by deep prejudice. “Dallas was an intensely racist place,” said Alan Govenar, co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, the most exhaustive text on the history of Deep Ellum.
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Technically, Deep Ellum has never really been a neighborhood. Rarely have many people lived there. Recently immigrated Jews opened up pawn shops. The Model Tailors sold suits. Black-owned movie theaters and vaudeville houses opened. Places like the Gypsy Tea Room and Park Theater, managed by Ella B Moore, offered live jazz, gospel, blues, and vaudeville shows.
All this happened based on a confluence of realities. Deep Ellum was about a half mile from downtown Dallas. African Americans who had to venture to the heart of Dallas, perhaps for an errand at City Hall or to purchase something, would find few places where they could eat or even use the restroom. “Segregation was formal,” said Jay Brakefield, who co-wrote Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas with Govenar. “It was legal.” African Americans could buy clothes most places in Dallas, but in Deep Ellum they were allowed to try them on beforehand. And once there, they could enjoy live music. It was within these circumstances that a Black and Jewish business and entertainment district formed right under the Klan’s nose.
It was only natural that musicians found their way to the streets of Deep Ellum, many trying to escape a life of manual labor, singing about the harshness of the world around them. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lyrics covered the spectrum of human suffering, as mundane as mosquito bites and as crushing as destitution or incarceration. “The lyrics that he sang were about the breadth and depth and scope of human emotion,” said Govenar. Jefferson was from East Texas, and his ability to move around Deep Ellum and in and out of greater Dallas on an apparently daily basis is a testament to how much people loved hearing him play. Jefferson claimed that he could get around just fine by himself, but Lead Belly isn’t the only guitar player who is said to have led him around Deep Ellum. T-Bone Walker claimed that, as a young boy, he used to pass Jefferson’s cup around and collect tips. Walker would have been only 19 when Jefferson died, but it was in that same year that Jefferson would release two recordings that showed Jefferson’s influence and an evolution of his style. Walker’s electric blues guitar innovations and his brand of showmanship became commonplace with live guitar music. Chuck Berry cited Walker as his influence.
But Jefferson is the Father of Texas Blues. In the ‘20s commercial recording scouts found Dallas, and Jefferson’s songs were impossible to miss. Paramount Records sent him to Chicago for numerous recordings, and he became a radio star. “He was the first commercially successful solo blues artist,” Brakefield said. His songs reached the Delta and helped inspire the modern blues movement. “It was like him and his guitar were part of the same being,” B.B. King wrote of hearing Jefferson as a child in Blues All Around Me. “You didn’t know where one stopped and the other started.”
***
The city of San Benito, where Charley Crockett was born in the 1980s, is in Texas, but it was worlds apart from Deep Ellum. Also the birthplace of Tejano music legend Freddy Fender, it’s about 20 minutes from the Mexican border and eight hours from Dallas. Soon after his birth, Crockett and his mother moved 11 miles east to Los Fresnos, a city with less than 6,000 residents, more than 90 percent of them Latino. Crockett’s arrival coincided with his father’s departure. “He was living a rough life,” Crockett said of the man whose last name he claims. “He was pouring concrete and working on shrimp boats and ending up in ditches on the side of farm roads instead of making it home. He wasn’t around.”
Crockett, his mother, and eventually his grandmother shared a small trailer parked on Old Port Road with nothing to see but the oranges, grapefruit, and sugar cane growing around them. Most of his memories of his time in South Texas fall under two categories: poverty or music. Tejano singers like Freddy Fender and Johnny Canales would perform nearby, and Crockett’s mother would encourage singing while doing chores or just to pass the time. “Music was really kind of everywhere in that rural area,” Crockett said. “I think it was just part of the culture.”
Looking for more opportunities, Crockett and his mother moved north to Irving, just outside Dallas, when he was 9. His mother worked non-stop in those days, but their lives didn’t seem to be improving as Crockett grew old enough to understand their struggle. Sometimes a “city of opportunity” only paints a clearer picture of one’s poverty by contrasting it with the expensive shops and generational wealth that’s flaunted in Dallas. In the summers Crockett would go to New Orleans to live with his uncle, who worked in a restaurant in the French Quarter. Before Katrina there was still a heavy street culture in the city. Bands played everywhere. Crockett arrived in New Orleans for the first time as a 10-year-old who had spent much of his childhood in isolation. Suddenly he was immersed in a city of diversity, music, and mischief, playing cards for his uncle in bingo halls. The food, jobs, and agriculture weren’t unlike Los Fresnos. New Orleans had the soul of the Gulf Coast he was born into but injected with vibrancy.
Back near Dallas, his mother lost her job while Crockett was still in high school, but still managed to buy him a guitar from a pawn shop. By the time he was 18, he was completely purposeless. He took that guitar and just started “hobo-ing” around Texas. He’d squat with people he’d meet without a thought or plan for the next day, let alone the next week. “I really felt limited by what I thought my future had to offer me,” he said. He was learning how to steal to survive, “and just kind of becoming a delinquent, getting into trouble, doing stuff I shouldn’t be doing.”
One day, he was sitting on a park bench near a baseball field in the town of Farmers Branch when a woman walked by and threw him 50 cents. In those days, music wasn’t an ambition as much as an introduction to other musicians he could pass the days with. Jamming with street musicians in Carrollton, Crockett met a man who was planning to drive to Northern California the following day. Crockett begged the man to let him join. He knew nothing about the area and had no real reason to want to be there. “I just wanted so badly to get out of my situation,” he said.
So, Crockett rode along on the ride west, but as they neared their destination, the driver decided he had no intention of bringing a new friend to his town, so he stopped in Vallejo, California and let Crockett out in a parking lot with nothing but a guitar.
***
Pre-World War II Deep Ellum served a purpose to the future of music by putting musicians in physical proximity to each other before they went their separate ways and made their names elsewhere. “There was a cross-fertilization that occured between musicians and among musicians who got together,” Govenar said.
It wouldn’t be the last time those same streets would play that role, but as would be the case in later eras, its real lifeblood were musicians whose music was never recorded and whose names were never written down. In a preview of “Exploring 508 Park,” a yet-to-be-released documentary directed by Govenar about the recording studio about a mile from Deep Ellum where Robert Johnson recorded a significant portion of his catalog, 508 Park committee member Carol J. Adams said that, in the area around Deep Ellum, the 1920s and 1930s were, “a time of displacement that created musicians who were practically homeless traveling around with their guitars.”
Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink.
The Great Depression hit some of the local businesses hard, and Deep Ellum’s deterioration became apparent. In the 1950s, Elm Street was converted into a one-way street heading into downtown and away from Deep Ellum, and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, making it much less convenient for drivers to happen upon the largely Black and Jewish area. A collection of merchants came together to carry a coffin down Elm Street in a mock funeral for Deep Ellum.
By 1969, an elevated Central Expressway was built directly over the 2400 block of Elm Street, plowing over what was once the center of gravity for what used to be Deep Ellum and making a distinct line between downtown Dallas and a place where something else once existed. By that point, Deep Ellum had long died its first death under the traffic of a rapidly growing Dallas.
“For me, the sound of the cars rattling overhead evokes the ghosts of Deep Ellum,” Govenar said.
***
The parking lot where Crockett was dropped off wasn’t far from Vallejo’s town square. It seemed as good a direction as any to start walking. He and another musician who was dropped off with him started playing music in front of local businesses and met some young musicians doing the same. They were heading to Santa Rosa and had room in their van, so Crockett hopped in, discovering a culture that would dictate the way he lived the next few years of his life. “Kind of immediately, to be honest with you, there was this acceptance of the drifter thing I was becoming,” Crockett said. “There was no judgement from a bunch of people I’d never seen before.”
As he met more people, he wandered and played in more environments. There were hikes in the hills of Santa Rosa. There were jams on rural open land. There were open mics in town or trips to San Francisco when someone was heading that way. He stayed in Northern California for about a year. In that time, he worked on farms, slept in pastures or barns or spare rooms, lived on communes, did co-operative work or work-traded for food and board, and hitch-hiked with everyone from musicians and hobos to Hare Krishnas. “That’s where I really got comfortable hobo-ing,” he said. “Then I took that [skill] to the rest of America with me.”
The transience that followed Crockett’s time in California might have you believing that the country is far less vast than it actually is. He traveled east and eventually north to New York City where he played on the streets and subway platforms. He still wasn’t much of a musician. “I had a couple songs, but I was comfortable on the streets. I knew how to blend right in with street culture.”
Crockett continued this lifestyle for the majority of his 20s. There was strategy and deliberateness to his survival. It required an ability to befriend people and a willingness to sleep on floors or on benches outside. Seasons dictated what city he might be in. New York City in the summertime. Heading back to North Carolina as it started to get cold. Try to make it to New Orleans by October and potentially stay there until May and try to move along before the hottest months. There were stretches of the New York trains where he could get a few hours of unbothered sleep. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, he was regularly sleeping and living in parks, not because he was part of the movement but because “it was a window when that was being tolerated,” he said.
If the itinerant musician sounds like a relic of the past, Crockett would invite you to look at the current statistics for poverty in the U.S. He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences. “I saw an enormous amount of homelessness traveling around this country,” he said. “I’m talking about homeless people with disabilities, veterans, people from outcast sections of society, people with mental problems, deep systemic multi-generational poverty, [and] drug addictions. It was never lost on me how close I was to that, sharing the same space.”
He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences.
***
Plenty of people have their own stories about Jeff Liles, but no matter who’s telling the story, they all seem to agree that he’s someone who’s lived many lives. He’s a guy who could refer to founding NWA member Easy-E as “Eric” (he was also the first DJ in the country to play an NWA song on the radio, in Dallas, and was fired the next day for it). He’s likely booked more ultra-famous bands in Dallas than there are albums in your record collection. He performed an alternative spoken-word act on the same Lollapalooza tour as Snoop Dogg and Devo.
But in 1985 he was just a kid trying to convince a guy named Russell Hobbs at the Theatre Gallery, a rundown venue Hobbs had just opened up in an even more rundown stretch of warehouses, to let his band perform there. In-between booking the show and the date of the performance, Liles’ band broke up. He went back to Theatre Gallery to tell Hobbs.
“I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t walked through those doors,” Liles said, parked outside of where Theatre Gallery used to stand, over 35 years later.
Hobbs asked him if he’d be interested in a different task: helping him book bands. Together, Liles and Hobbs would become the early architects for what some would refer to as the “golden age” of Deep Ellum. It wasn’t called Deep Ellum then, in the sense that a place where no one went to with nothing to offer didn’t need a name. It was Hobbs who had read about a bygone era of music in a place called Deep Ellum. Liles was originally afraid to use that term as it was essentially a reference to an African American pronunciation of Elm Street. Liles lost the argument.
Theatre Gallery was a refuge for musically inclined misfits as much as it was a concert venue. Everything about its early days was DIY and, in all likelihood, very illegal. “We just gave away free beer,” Liles said. “You paid $5 and got beer all night. There were no licenses.” The Republican National Convention was held in Dallas in 1984, and the Dead Kennedys performed outside the convention in protest. According to Liles, when the police came to break it up, they mistook Hobbs, who was simply watching the performance, as being involved and demanded he get the stage off the property. That stage made its way to Deep Ellum and became the Theatre Gallery stage.
Soon, Hobbs opened up the Prophet Bar and Club Clearview in 1985, Club Dada in 1986. A new Gypsy Tea Room opened up in homage to the old Deep Ellum. Liles says a movement started with three specific bands from three Dallas suburbs: Three On a Hill from Carrollton, Shallow Reign from Richardson, and End Over End from Highland Park. “Those three bands were bringing in suburban kids,” he said. “They were hiding from their parents. Those kids started the music scene in Deep Ellum.”
Those bands were eclipsed by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, arguably the first great band to come out of modern Deep Ellum — The New Bohemians would break up after the release of their second album, in 1990, and Brickell would marry Paul Simon. Liles and Hobbs hired Jim Heath to be the “sound guy” for Theatre Gallery and Prophet Bar despite his lack of experience. Heath would form The Reverend Horton Heat, a modern “psychobilly” band with a large cult following.
In the mid-80s, Deep Ellum was a scene with no rules and no definition of cool. It was the height of J.R. Ewing’s Dallas and rebellious teens were being suffocated by the images projected on their North Texas lives. It coincided with radical punk movements also manifesting in New York and Los Angeles. In a 1987 story in D Magazine, Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Deep Ellum, “The little underground scene, mostly centered in new-music nightclubs, was so ephemeral that by the time mainstream Dallas had heard of one of these clubs, it had already shut down and another had opened somewhere else.” Deep Ellum became a place where Dallas parents were terrified their children would be exposed to drugs, crime, skinheads, and violence. None of those worries were unfounded.
Still, it was growing rapidly, partially on the strength of Liles’ bookings. Dinosaur Jr. played Theatre Gallery for $50. The Replacements played and hung out in Deep Ellum for three days. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips. Liles has a story of Michael Stipe of REM doing yoga naked on the Theatre Gallery roof. It was a mixture of bands, kids, punks, and misfits walking the streets in the shadow of downtown Dallas.
Then Trees opened in 1990. “Trees took it to the next level,” Liles said. A venue on Elm Street with a capacity of about 500, it would book Radiohead, Soundgarden, Elliott Smith, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, and Geto Boys, all at the height of their popularity. Pearl Jam performed for less than 40 people at Trees and played basketball in the parking lot beforehand.
But to some people, Trees, and Jeff Liles, will always be known for the night they booked Nirvana in 1991. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had come out four months earlier and there were more people outside trying to get in than had tickets. Trying to accommodate Nirvana’s label, Liles hired more bouncers to prevent the crowd from rushing the stage, but a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.
…a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.
One thing was clear to everyone there: If Nirvana didn’t finish their set, there would be a riot in Deep Ellum. Liles had to convince Cobain. He found him hiding in a broom closet sniffing heroin and managed to get him back on stage.
“The rest of the show was great,” Liles said.
***
By 2008, Crockett had mastered survival, but he was just starting to master music. He’s a self-taught guitar player, originally unable to play the most basic G or C chords. Instead, he would wrap his thumb around the top of the guitar’s neck to hold down strings, “like choking the neck of a chicken.” He wrote his first song (“Fool Somebody Else”) this way, by experimenting with this finger and thumb placement, moving up and down the guitar’s neck until he’d found enough strums that sounded right. He went 10 years before recording that song.
“Why don’t you fool somebody else.
Do it to yourself. Tell me how it feels.
When you hold somebody tight
And the trust is gone
In the middle of the night
Got to fool somebody else.
Do it to yourself, tell me how it feels
When you hold somebody tight
Then they gone
Like the middle of the night.”
To this day, he has almost never used a guitar pick for a live show or recording. His travels and the musicians he met influenced his music. Older musicians heard him play open-mics and told him he was playing the blues, something he was barely conscious of. He realized that Robert Johnson’s lyrics sounded a lot like the life he was living.
It was in Manhattan, in Lucky Jack’s, that Crockett got the invitation to go to Europe. A regular there from Denmark had heard him play multiple times and told him he’d be a hit there. He offered up his place in Copenhagen and said he’d set him up with gigs at bars and cafes. Crockett took him up on the offer but ended up making as much playing on the streets as he did in bars and cafes, and before long, he’d overstayed his welcome. So he took the money he’d made and bought a train ticket to Paris without knowing a word of French.
He started playing the streets with a surprising amount of success. Perhaps to the French, there was a novelty to this American playing his version of the blues. “They could hear the Louisiana thing in me, which obviously the French have a big connection to that culture,” Crockett theorized. Remarkably, Crockett survived in Paris for almost a year without ever learning the language. “The language barrier was a surprising gift in that it separated me from the culture and put me in a place where I lost all fear,” he said. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying about him, anyway, so he just played with confidence.
American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become. “I think in the streets of Paris, I killed that person,” Crockett said. “When I hit New York stateside again, I was a changed person. I just had no fear.”
American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become.
Back in America, he was starting to expect to make money playing on the streets, and he was getting results. He’d mapped out cities like New Orleans and figured out where to play and when in the day to move from Royal Street to jostle for space and ears in Cafe Dumont before finding a blues jam later that night. He was playing at least eight hours a day, whether in New Orleans or New York. “Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?” he asked. “And as soon as that money goes out I could just make $30 more right then.” Some of his music might lean toward country, gospel, or even jazz, but now he could command a room or a block of street, which was more important than any technical skill he’d learned. Even now, he won’t commit to a traditional genre of music, coining the term “Gulf Coast Boogie Woogie” for what he does.
One day in 2010, Crockett was busking on the subway platform at the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn. Riding the G-train was a 19-year-old street musician named Jadon Woodard, rapping to passengers for tips. When the doors opened, Woodard could hear the rhythm of Crockett’s guitar playing and thought he could rap over it. He convinced Crockett to move from playing on subway platforms and get on actual trains with him. Crockett had a song called “You’re So Strange” that Woodard loved. Together, they each started making more money than either had on his own.
The next time Crockett returned to New York the following year the two linked up with another guitar player and a trumpet player. The group would play on moving train cars for 12 hours a day. “We were making hella money,” Woodard said. On a good day they’d pull in $600 or $700. They called themselves the Train Robbers.
The four band members and a videographer who filmed their performances split a $500 apartment in Bushwick and paid the deposit in small bills. Crockett convinced them to play folk and blues rhythms and Woodard found them easy to rap over. New York runs off the subway system, and thousands of people were seeing them perform each day, some of them in the music industry. They were getting interest from record labels and getting offered residencies to play a few hours a night. A lost Train Robbers album was recorded in the women’s bathroom of a rehearsal space in Brooklyn. Eventually they were making enough money to split two apartments among themselves.
‘Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?’ he asked.
Thinking they’d finally made it, they signed a management deal that would ultimately tear them apart. Looking back, Woodard and Crockett agreed that the management was determined to change their sound to something more mainstream and was unfair in terms of publishing rights. That same management arranged a deal with NBC that would largely increase their visibility but would surely push them in a different direction musically. As they walked into a Manhattan office to sign the deal, Crockett backed out and disavowed the management label. “The band didn’t even know how I was feeling,” Crockett said. “I just dropped the bomb on them in that office.” They were still technically handcuffed to the management deal, but Crockett’s decision essentially ended the Train Robbers.
“I harbored some [negative] energy for a while,” Woodard said. “But we were all young and we were all caught up in everything.”
***
The first time Ken Bethea, guitarist for the Old 97’s, went to Deep Ellum was in the fall of 1987. He’d just graduated from the University of Texas. In Austin, he had been indoctrinated to believe that everything in Dallas was lame, but his favorite band, the Butthole Surfers, was playing at Club Clearview on Main Street, just off of Elm. “I thought, ‘I bet that’s in the Deep Ellum place they talk about. Elm? Ellum?”
He left the show with a black eye and a notion that there was something special about the area. “I went there on a Wednesday night and had the best time that I’d ever had in my life going somewhere solo,” Bethea said.
After that night, Bethea ended up living in Denton, Texas for a year, where he’d meet the drummer Philip Peeples. When they moved back to Dallas, Deep Ellum was evolving quickly and driven by music. Bands were meeting other bands, breaking up, and the best members of each band were forming newer, better bands. Rhett Miller and Murry Hammond were hanging around the scene, playing in bands or individually. Eventually the four of them would meet and form the Old 97’s.
The Old 97’s didn’t originally try to play Club Dada or the early days of Trees. They aimed lower than that and played in places without cover charges. One of those places was a cowboy/country bar called Naomi’s Lounge about the size of a Starbucks. “I’d be standing right next to the door as people would come in and I’d have to lean away while playing guitar to let them in,” Bethea remembered. They were winning over fans, and the physical area that made up Deep Ellum was so condensed that the whole scene could hear about a great performance in the same night. “We were playing all the time,” Bethea said. “Rhett was writing so many songs.”
The seeds of Deep Ellum that were planted in the ’80s were growing uncontrollably in the ’90s. Suddenly, along with national acts that Liles and others were bringing to the area, homegrown bands were catapulting from Deep Ellum to national success. Tripping Daisy was a Deep Ellum act that became a household name. Toadies, a Fort Worth band that broke into the Deep Ellum scene, released Rubberneck in 1994, which would sell over a million copies. The Old 97’s would go on to have an enormous national following — one they enjoy to this day. In all likelihood, each member of each of those bands saw each other perform multiple times in Deep Ellum. “The butterfly effect of hearing that things were working out for Tripping Daisy was huge for us,” Bethea said. “We thought, ‘if they can do it, and Edie Brickell can do it, we can do it.’ You want to keep up.”
Every North Texas band with any semblance of success that decade had to play Deep Ellum. The band Funland was an area favorite. Deep Blue Something and Bowling For Soup would be loosely affiliated with the scene. A young St. Vincent saw Tripping Daisy perform at Trees multiple times before eventually joining the Polyphonic Spree, a large choral rock band founded by Tripping Daisy front man Tim DeLaughter.
Meanwhile, when the New York rap duo Mobb Deep came to Deep Ellum, a local singer named Erykah Badu opened for them. Badu’s 1997 debut album, Baduizm, has sold over three million copies. Labeled “the queen of Neo-soul,” Badu has mostly remained in Dallas for the past two decades, almost like she’s looking over its music scene, popping up for surprise performances or guest DJ sets in Deep Ellum and hosting a birthday concert event there every year.
But as Deep Ellum’s streets were packed every night, the crime didn’t seem to be receding. The depiction of crime in Deep Ellum over its various eras has usually been exaggerated but rarely unfounded. Fights broke out, and rich kids were mugged, and for the first time, perhaps ever, greater Dallas was paying attention. A shift was happening in the early aughts as devotees to the scene grew frustrated seeing it be co-opted by polite society, and polite society was just as quick to label it dangerous.
Things came to a head in 2004 when the Old 97’s, by then a popular national act, returned to Deep Ellum for a show at the Gypsy Tea Room. A man named David Cunniff attended the show with his two teenage daughters. Cunniff got in an altercation with a man that quickly turned violent. It would end with Cunniff temporarily immobile, his neck broken in front of his children.
The man who Cunniff fought had affiliations with skinheads. By most accounts, any legitimate skinhead presence in Deep Ellum was long gone and largely an ancillary product of the ‘80s punk movement. But greater Dallas had heard the stories. “I remember people saying, ‘If you can’t be safe at an Old 97’s show, something’s wrong,’” Bethea said. Within a year, Deep Ellum was basically a ghost town.
“This area went dormant in the 2000s,” Liles said. “Trees closed. Dada closed. Bomb Factory closed. Clearview was gone.”
***
Crockett’s journeys can sound like a romantic ode to a simpler time, but outrunning poverty can bring mistakes, and risks can seem smaller when you have almost nothing to your name. Even before Crockett left Dallas his half-brother got him in legal trouble by getting him involved in stock manipulation. “My brother got me into some under-world Dallas stuff when I was younger,” he said. “All that stuff blew up and everybody went to prison.” His brother was sentenced to seven years. Crockett says he had to defend himself in court but wasn’t convicted based on his apparent ignorance of the scheme’s machinations.
In 2014, he says he’d find himself on the wrong side of the law again, when Virginia police caught him with a considerable amount of marijuana. A sentencing was pushed back and jail time was a possibility, but even probation could prevent him from traveling state to state and ending the musician’s life that he’d adopted.
Photo credit: Bobby Cochran
With that hanging over him, he realized he hadn’t seen his mother in nearly four years. He decided it was time to go home. While in Dallas, he decided to check out a blues jam happening in Deep Ellum. He met a guitar player named Alexis Sanchez, who currently plays guitar in Crockett’s band. That same night, Sanchez introduced him to a guy who had been performing in Deep Ellum named Leon Bridges. This was before Bridges would release his debut album with Columbia Records and win a Grammy, but his name was bouncing around those few blocks. “Something about meeting Alexis and Leon allowed me to realize that there was a renaissance happening in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.
Crockett was as confident in his abilities as he’d ever been, but his publishing rights were still controlled by his old managment foralmost another year. So he went back to Northern California and worked manual labor, waiting out his contract with a head full of songs. When the time came, he recorded an album on his own and received donations from locals up there in order to print copies of it. He called it “A Stolen Jewell.”
In 2016 he faced a judge who held his future in his hands. Crockett told the judge about his musical journey, his progress, and his determination to make a real career of it. He even had a record he could show as proof. “They were going to take everything away from me,” he said. “I begged him. Told him I wanted to be legit.” Crockett’s plea resonated with the judge, who spared him any serious punishment for the 2014 marijuana charge. Armed with a guitar, an album, and a second chance, he went to make a name for himself, and he knew exactly where to go.
“It was from that moment,” Crockett said. “I hit the bars in Deep Ellum [as a performer] harder than I ever had.”
***
Kendrick Lamar was performing at a re-opened Trees in 2012, and Cam McCloud just wanted a minute of his time. “I was at the front of the stage at the dead center,” McCloud said. “I’m watching him and turning around and watching the whole crowd, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’” After the show, he freestyled for Lamar, who validated his skills.
A few years later, McCloud was fired from his job at Olive Garden for missing a shift to open for Florida rapper Gunplay at Trees. In 2015, McCloud would become the rapper and visionary behind Cure For Paranoia, a genre-defying hip-hop/soul group that D Magazine deemed “the poster boys of the new Deep Ellum.”
Trees had been reopened in 2009 by Clint and Whitney Barlow — Clint was a former drummer for Vanilla Ice. They also reopened Bomb Factory, a 4,000-plus capacity venue that books national acts. “The Barlows, as far as I’m concerned, are responsible for the revitalization of Deep Ellum,” said Pete Freedman, the president and co-founder of CentralTrack.com, a daily cultural guide to Dallas named after the street that Central Expressway demolished and separated downtown from Deep Ellum.
Freedman has witnessed and chronicled nearly every step of that revitalization, which represents the most eclectic era of Deep Ellum. Hip-hop had never gotten much substantial coverage or attention in Deep Ellum. Bands ruled the golden era. But hip-hop is arguably the most popular genre in America now, and it’s helping carry today’s Deep Ellum with acts blowing up and being surpassed before mainstream Dallas even hears of them, like the punk acts of the ’80s. “Deep Ellum always reflects the zeitgeist of whatever’s popular,” Freedman said.
A Dallas collective of individual hip-hop acts known as Brain Gang made waves in Deep Ellum at the beginning of last decade. From that group, Blue, the Misfit would go on to have a collaborative relationship with Kendrick Lamar, Bobby Sessions would sign with legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, and the producer, Justus, signed with Interscope and was pegged as Dr. Dre’s protege.
Cure For Paranoia reached a turning point when McCloud snuck backstage at Bomb Factory for a performance by West Coast rapper The D.O.C. and saw Erykah Badu and her entourage walking towards him (Badu and D.O.C. have a child together). McCloud approached her and freestyled, impressing her. The next week he got a call. Badu wanted them to open for her birthday concert. The group played at Three Links on Elm Street every Tuesday before bars temporarily closed due to COVID-19, typically packing the venue.
“Deep Ellum is just all over the place,” McCloud said an hour before opening for Houston rapper Bun B, his hair dark purple with a strip of lavender running through it. “I think that’s why it definitely shaped me as an artist. Because you can put us anywhere. We can literally play anywhere. We’ve opened for rock bands. We’ve opened for country bands. You name it. It’s the ultimate domino effect.”
The variety in Deep Ellum, which has expanded in size over the years, but still mostly extends to about six blocks of Elm, Main, and Commerce, is staggering. Every weekend there are hip-hop, punk, country, blues, jazz, folk, and metal shows. “The Deep Ellum music scene is the Dallas music scene,” said Freedman.
“I’ve been to every town in the U.S. and played gigs,” Bethea said. “There are very few places like Deep Ellum in the United States. It’s singular.”
***
Freedman can tell you exactly when Crockett came back to Deep Ellum in 2016. “I couldn’t go to a bar without sitting on one of his CDs,” Freedman said. Crockett had taken his signature hustle, as well as the guerilla marketing he and the Train Robbers had learned, and applied it to the streets of Deep Ellum. Unlike New York, he could canvass all of Deep Ellum in an hour.
“The first night I met Charley I saw copies of his CDs on toilets,” Liles said. “I grabbed them and said, ‘Is this you?’ He said, “Yeah, man.’ I said, ‘C’mon man, have a little respect for yourself as an artist.’ I gave them back to him and told him to just hand them out to people.”
“I put them on top of urinals in every bar in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.
Crockett was playing two sets a night all over Deep Ellum. On Commerce is a New Orleans-themed Cajun/jazz bar called The Free Man — about the same size as the now-closed Naomi’s where the Old 97’s got started. It’s hard to imagine a crowd more suited for Crockett’s music. Next door is Adair’s Saloon, a tiny dive bar Crockett could play for hours. It cost nothing to walk in and hear Crockett play and sing in rooms where he wouldn’t even have needed a microphone. After Leon Bridges broke as a national sensation, a collection of lucky Wednesday night patrons in 2015 at Twilite Lounge on Elm Street saw Crockett perform with Bridges providing backup vocals.
When he was playing in Deep Ellum he let customers name the price they wanted to pay for a copy of “A Stolen Jewell.” It wasn’t the first time people were appreciating his music, but something was happening on those streets that was new to him: He was gaining reputation. “‘A Stolen Jewell’ was the break for me because Dallas writers and Dallas musicians and the Fort Worth community started championing me immediately.”
Soon, Crockett moved from cleared out corners of bars to stages in venues all over Dallas. He was drawing paying crowds and things were snowballing behind his work ethic. Since 2016, Crockett has released seven albums to critical success with another album Welcome To Hard Times, coming out in July. He toured Texas, and then the United States. Last summer, he headlined an international tour, returning to Europe with his name on marquees in Spain, Sweden, and Paris.
“He didn’t start recording until he’d had all this time on the streets,” said Thomas D. Mooney, a music critic for Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly. “So he had a late start actually recording, but once he started making albums he had this hard-working, hustler mentality that’s in his songs. And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.”
And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.
In June 2019, he was invited to headline the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, arguably the most legendary country music venue in the world. For someone who’d played the streets and “backdoored” bars and clubs all over the country, it’s a surreal accomplishment. “I believe that stage was built up by a lot of artists back in the day who came at it like I have, with the real hard work,” he said. In November, Crockett headlined The Troubadour in West Los Angeles, a stage that’s helped make countless stars.
“[Being in this industry], you know when people are the real deal or not,” said Liles, who now books shows for The Kessler, a venue in a different Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff. “Charley Crockett is the real fucking deal.”
“I’m really happy that my brother blew up,” Woodard said. “Make sure you tell Charley he owes me that song, ‘You’re So Strange.’ I’ll come to Texas and we’ll record it.”
Crockett once begged a man to take him to Northern California just to get away from Dallas. At the time, he didn’t understand that the music he’d travel the country and world learning owed such debts to the place he was trying to escape. Knowing what he knows now, having become an obsessive historian of music, he doesn’t waver on its impact. “Deep Ellum is as important to American music as New Orleans or Memphis,” he said. It’s only fitting that when he returned, Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce were ready for him to come back and play his part in bridging Deep Ellum to its past. He represents both the street musician whose name you never heard and the nationally touring acts that began in those same streets.
“Areas that have a micro-culture of music are based on a foundation of artists who didn’t necessarily ‘make it out,’” said Mooney. “They keep the scene what it is. I think why Charley’s been able to transcend that area and still have such respect in Deep Ellum is that he’s a lifer. He’s lived his music.”
“I feel like Crockett is the human embodiment of Deep Ellum,” McCloud said before taking the stage to rap for an audience of hundreds.
***
In 2022, Uber plans to operate over 3,000 employees out of a soon-to-be-constructed 23-story tower with adjacent parking garage on the westernmost edge of Deep Ellum. The project officially broke ground last November. “The live-work-play environment of Deep Ellum, honestly, it just has us psyched out of our minds,” Uber spokesman Brian Finch reportedly said last fall.
What this means for the culture of Deep Ellum going forward depends on who you ask and what they think about the current commercialization happening there. There’s been an influx of boutiques, restaurants, breweries, and bars with waitresses who dress like they’re catering to a college fraternity clientele.
These aren’t unique developments for an American city. “Creative people create an identity for the neighborhood, they give it a cool factor, then the real estate developers come in and price them out of the neighborhood,” Liles said. Few people have traditionally lived in Deep Ellum (though that is currently changing), so it’s not people who are being pushed out. It’s places, and if you believe those lamenting the death of Deep Ellum, it could be the music. “A building that’s committed mostly to local bands and the local music scene isn’t going to generate a whole lot of revenue,” Liles said.
It won’t surprise you to hear that this isn’t the first time that Deep Ellum has been pronounced dead, and while it’s certainly changed over the years, devotees of the scene were panicking over its changes during the height of its most exciting movements in the ’80s and ’90s. Freedman believes that Deep Ellum operates in 30-year cycles and attributes much of the hysteria over its current changes to “good ol’ days syndrome.” He points out that Uber is building its tower over four vacant lots and that most of the trendier places popping up are doing so in empty building spaces or struggling businesses that the frustrated parties weren’t supporting anyway. “Deep Ellum of today shouldn’t be the Deep Ellum of 1988,” he said. “Under what guise should it be? There were skinheads.”
Deep Ellum’s music survived during the racism of the 1920s (and the less transparent racism since). Will it survive the capitalism of the 2020s? Prior to the restrictions due to COVID-19, the streets of Deep Ellum were flooded with people every weekend, even as crime in the area remains a talking point. Deep Ellum’s cool factor is built on the credibility of places like Trees, Bomb Factory, Twilite Lounge, Three Links, The Free Man, Club Dada, Adair’s Saloon, and so many more. Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum. “I think it’s amazing,” said McCloud, the last person to be accused of conforming his music to anyone. “It just means more money coming in. The music will be fine. That’s what they’re coming for.”
Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum.
The rapper Post Malone, from the Dallas suburb Grapevine, is not a Deep Ellum artist — prior to his national ascent, he was characterized as a soundcloud artist — but after his single “White Iverson” went viral in 2015, making him a household name overnight, his first Dallas show was at Trees. He played “White Iverson” two times during a 25-minute show, latching on to a bit of the neighborhood’s credibility. “These things don’t happen by accident,” Freedman said. “Deep Ellum is still unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, the proving grounds.”
The story of Deep Ellum is the story of music’s relationship to physical space. It can feel like there are no traceable links of influence or even knowledge between the various musical eras of Deep Ellum. Whenever an era ended, it must have been impossible to imagine music ever coming back. But it always did, behind musicians and the people who wanted to hear them play. “In 25 years there won’t be anything wrong with [Deep Ellum] turning over a little bit,” Bethea said before smiling. “As long as they’ve got a statue of the Old 97’s down there for people to worship.”
“Maybe one day all this will go away,” Freedman said from a dark booth in Twilite Lounge. “But for now, I’m still going to play in it.”
***
Now, imagine it’s a Friday night at some point in the future when public gatherings and live music are allowed and deemed safe, and you just saw a show at Trees that you’ll talk about for weeks, exaggerating whatever details you still remember. You’re walking out the front door onto Elm Street with about 400 other people. It’s entirely possible you haven’t been sober since halfway through the set list. It’s 11:30 and the streets are packed with people, some of whom are probably going to manage to find a little trouble to get into, and you haven’t yet determined if you’ll be one of them. Maybe you aren’t ready for the night to be over. You could grab another drink somewhere or find some late-night food. Or you could walk around the area and settle for the first place that’s playing the kind of music you want to hear.
As the Trees crowd pushes you about 50 feet down Elm Street and you try to determine your immediate future — the only future that seems remotely important in that moment — you might look up and see a mural facing you from the brick wall across the street. It’s a tinted image of a man dressed in black with sunglasses and a cowboy hat standing in a field of bluebonnets. The man’s name isn’t on the mural, which is fine. A mural like that in Deep Ellum is for the type of person who already knows who Charley Crockett is.
Or maybe, you’re ready to go home and bask in the buzz of the performance you just witnessed. You’ll have to find your way to the designated ride-share pickup zone on Commerce — the necessity of which is a testament to just how much Deep Ellum has changed. It’s two streets over, so you’ll probably want to cut through Radiator Alley to get to Main Street. As you breeze through the alley, you might see another mural of a stout man wearing a suit and holding a guitar with two musical legends flanking him on each side. Their names are Freddy King and T-Bone Walker, and little crowns are painted above their heads. But those two are clearly in the background. It’s the stout man who’s front and center. No crown is above his head; only a bright circle, almost like a halo. The image is a recreation of the only known photograph to ever exist of this man. His name was Blind Lemon Jefferson.
The people and businesses that make up this era’s Deep Ellum have been drastically impacted by COVID-19 and its attendant restrictions. If you would like to support and help keep this tight-knit and historical community vibrant in the future consider donating to Deep Ellum 100, an organization giving grants to workers, musicians, and artists who have helped make Deep Ellum what it is.
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Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas Monthly, The New Yorker, VICE, New York Magazine, Slate, and McSweeney’s.
There’s an old chestnut that says the older you get, the more you like country music. Even if you don’t relate to the guitar twang or the singers’ white rural experience, age lets you relate to the stories of struggle, heartbreak, and loss.
My dad raised me on old jazz and country, and his talented pianist brother Rick played country music professionally, from the dive bars of Phoenix, Arizona to Waylon Jennings’ touring band. Dad’s family were rural people from Oklahoma farms who moved to rural Arizona, then to the city. No matter how long he lived in Phoenix, he never lost his love of country humor or oration. Dad always said: People in country songs are either cryin’, dyin’, or goin’ somewhere. He also told an old joke: What happens when you play a country song backwards? You get your horse back, you get your wife back, you get your job back, and you sober up.
Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys were his favorite because they had the danceable, upbeat rhythm of jazz, but Dad loved different types of country. He didn’t like Johnny Cash, though. Cash didn’t swing. I’ve always owned old country albums, including Johnny Cash. My rock ‘n’ roll and jazz albums just got more play until time proved the old wisdom. Dad’s been sick for a few years. The blue chords of jazz resonate with me more than the saddest country ballad, but as I lose him in stages, and as I’ve labored and lost through the years, I’ve reached that age where I relate to country’s heartbreak more than I would like.
Country is a rich tradition that deserves an equally rich literary tradition. Collected here are some of my favorite stories that explore and celebrate it. Too many of my favorites do not appear online, like David Eason’s Oxford American “That Same Lonesome Blood,” about singer Steve Young, Barry Mazor’s “Make Me Wanna Holler: Loretta Lynn” from No Depression, and John Biguenet’s “The DeZurik Sisters: Two farm girls who yodeled their way to the Grand Ole Opry.” You can find them in copies of Da Capo’s Best Music Writing anthologies. The online pieces here should leave you shopping for copies.
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“Constant Sorrow” (David Gates, The New Yorker, August 13, 2001)
Ralph Stanley was one of the architects of Bluegrass whose band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, revolutionized American vernacular music and took them all the way to Carnegie Hall. Born in southwestern Virginia, the legendary banjo picker still lived out there at age 74 when David Gates profiled him. Gates is a journalist and novelist who used to work for Newsweek, but he’s also a skilled country musician who can stay up jamming into the wee hours. I briefly played drums with his Bennington College country band one semester, and he’s as lively a musician as he is brilliant a music writer. For this story, Gates accompanied Stanley on a tour and joined him at services at Hale Creek Primitive Baptist Church. It’s a fascinating read from a person who loves country music so deeply he wants to understand it from the inside.
Texas multi-instrumentalist Doug Sahm was a legend during his 50-year recording career, and he remains a legend now, long after he died. Hailing from San Antonio, Sahm embodied Texas’ multicultural identity, playing everything from fiddle to steel guitar, and honky-tonk to Cajun to 60s psychedelic music. He’s known as a country musician, but his interests and abilities make him more of an American mutt, spanning genre, and bigger than Texas. Writer Mitch Myers untangles the myth from the musician, and finds good reason for the self-destructive Sahm’s enduring stature. Sahm was what Myers beautifully describes as a “redneck-hippie“ and “fast-talking cosmic cowboy,“ back when country musicians could have more fluid identities than the modern, stifling big hat/American flag/pickup truck strictures. Sahm’s body of work is all over the place, and Myers worked hard to make sense of it all. “In a world where American music martyrs like Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons command respect in terms of comprehensive reissues,“ he writes, “there’s no retrospective boxed set being planned for Sahm.“ This story led me to Sahm’s music, which I’m still discovering.
Those who love Southern literature know Tennesse’s William Gay as a singular gothic novelist and short story writer. He published his first book at age 57. I’ve read his collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down multiple times, and I rarely do that. Thankfully he wrote nonfiction about music for the Oxford American, which he rarely did. His 2000 music piece “Sitting on Top of the World“ is not online, but his essay “Imaging the Delmore Brothers“ is equally fine work that imbues the musical past with life, and includes a surprising family connection to these musicians.
There was a great deal of Southern music recorded in the ’20s and early ’30s, until the Depression threw the skids to it. There were string bands beyond counting, and in Mississippi everyone seemed to have a guitar, and the blues seemed to be seeping out of the earth itself. This early Southern music had a common ancestry: endlessly recycled lines of poetry that had become a sort of archetype, or a code you could decipher with a guitar and a little skill.
The Delmores fused all these elements and brought something new to the mix—a tight, sweet harmony that had never been recorded before.
A long time ago I asked my mother, “What were they like back then?“
“Well,“ she said, “they were just nice soft-spoken country boys. Except when they played music. Then it was like they were…taken over or something.“
When Chicago musician Robbie Fulks got invited to play at Nashville’s venerated Grand Ole Opry, the Carnegie Hall of country, he couldn’t figure out why. A self-described “pop-punk-hillbilly obscurity,“ he uses the opportunity to tell the Opry’s story, how this sacred institution shaped American music, diverged from modern mass-market country, and why its culture of authenticity and respect still matters. This is a fun, on-the-ground story about a place whose history is alive and kicking.
LMPC via Getty Images
”Push Play” (Chris Dennis, Guernica, April 6, 2020)
Dolly Parton is pure country but bigger than country, because she is bigger than life, and yet, you can’t talk about country music without talking about her. And are more sides to her career and influence than a hundred stories can contain. In this personal essay, one young man looks at his past tastes to explore the role Parton played in his ideas of masculinity and difficult coming out. “I think part of my magic, if I have any at all,” Parton once said, “is that I look totally fake but am so totally real.”
Parton’s music and persona are easy to love, but they are not always easy to love publically, and as our tastes change with time, we often see our favorite musicians’ flaws. Like Chris Dennis in Guernica, professor Jessica Wilkerson reconciles with Parton and her own past fandom, asking difficult questions in this very probing piece: “I needed to confront Dolly Parton’s blinding, dazzling whiteness.“
Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.
This would be a trio of Parton stories, but Kimberly Chun’s excellent “Touched by a Woman: Dolly Parton Sings ’bout Peace, Love & Understanding” in Creative Loafing is not online, but it deserves a shout out, because it’s fantastic.
Lots of legends aren’t on this list: George Jones, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff. As with Dolly Parton, you can’t talk country without talking Willie Nelson. I’ve put these three Nelson stories in chronological order, to see him age, though in a sense, Nelson always seemed old to me. The country-stoner legend marked his milestone birthday with the two-CD The Essential WillieNelson. Musician and critic Gene Santoro took the occassion to assess Nelson’s career, his appeal, and his enduring legacy. This is what the best reviews do: start small and go large, from a timely peg to a timeless exploration. An Austin-based source told Santoro: “Willie is the Buddha. He’s also a duet whore.” “In terms of consistent quality,“ Santoro writes, “he’s right, but Nelson’s duets, which have included outings with Charles, Cash and Dylan as well as U2 and Julio Iglesias, if nothing else do reveal Nelson’s prismatic musical curiosity.“
The life story of the country music great, now 81. “Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, ‘a bit of a mystery.‘”
The ranch and surrounding area are known to locals as Willie World. Nelson also owns Pedernales Cut-N-Putt, a nine-hole course you can see from his house. Next to that is a recording studio, and condos for friends, family and longtime crew members. Poodie’s Hilltop Roadhouse, a burger joint full of old Nelson posters and stage props, opened by his late stage manager Poodie Locke, is down the road on Highway 71; Nelson has been known to drop by for a surprise set. Drive to downtown Austin, and you’ll find the new Willie Nelson statue on Willie Nelson Boulevard.
With his youngest kids, Lukas and Micah, grown up and out of the house, Nelson spends his rare nontouring days driving around, listening to his Sirius XM station, Willie’s Roadhouse, sometimes going off-roading and carving out paths. “I’ve thought I was going to die a few times with him in the truck,” says his daughter Paula. “He’s like a kid, doing the whole cowboys-and-Indians thing. It’s his playground.”
“Trigger” (Michael Hall, Texas Monthly, January 21, 2013)
Since buying it in a Nashville guitar shop in 1969, Willie Nelson has played the same Martin N-20 classical guitar. He named it Trigger. “Trigger’s like me,” Nelson told reporter Michael Hall. “Old and beat-up.”
Willie became the guitarist he is by playing this instrument, which he has worn and shaped with his own hands, working his very personality into the wood until it sounds like no other guitar on earth. Most nylon-stringed guitars have a rich, round tone, and they are difficult to tell apart. Trigger is so distinctive—low tones that thump like they have mud on them, high ones that chime like glass—that you can hear one or two notes on the radio and know immediately whom you’re listening to.
No guitar is as beloved—or as famed. On Trigger’s face you can see the topography of modern music, the countless hours Willie has spent playing country, blues, jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, swing, folk, reggae, thirties pop, forties pop, and eighties pop. Trigger was there at the very beginning of outlaw country. He was there at the first Farm Aid. And he was there when Willie serenaded President Jimmy Carter. He has shared stage and studio with Ray Charles and Bob Dylan. He has hung from Willie’s neck as tens of thousands of fans sang along to “Whiskey River.” And he has sat in Willie’s lap as Willie comforted friends, such as the time the two of them played “Healing Hands of Time” to Darrell and Edith Royal in their home after their daughter’s death, and then again nine years later after their son’s death.
Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton backstage at the 53rd annual CMA Awards, 2019. Robby Klein/Getty Images for CMA
The first story I ever wrote for Longreads was about country music. It uses a night at Trout’s, the last original honky-tonk in California’s rural San Joaquin Valley, to explore the unique sound and origins of California country music, particularly Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. I’d traveled to Bakersfield to do some reporting for a book about the region, and I started my two-week reporting trip at Trout’s. Instead of living country music history, I found a tightknit, fun-loving community of karaoke singers who revealed as much about this evolving region as it did about country.
“Branded Man” (Andy McLenon and Grant Alden, No Depression, November 1, 2003)
Speaking of Bakersfield: When you sing ”Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys,” let’s never forgot Merle Haggard. Yeah yeah, this song’s not about him, but country wouldn’t be country without him. For No Depression, the magazine that celebrated outlaw and underground country, two writers celebrated California’s rural poet, the son of cotton pickers, who brought a lot of poetry and rebellion to country, and made California a place for serious country music, as much as others had made it a place for pop songs and folk tunes. Here writers Andy McLenon and Grant Alden make a serious case that, in their words, ”Merle Haggard is our greatest living singer and songwriter. Country singer and songwriter, if you must limit him. Just do not argue the point.” Take that, Waylon and Willie.
“If Maybelle Carter — mother of country music, without whom country and rock and roll guitar would not exist — can’t make the great guitar player list, how can women musicians expect to be seen at all?”
Despite her many decades in the business and so many records sold, Maybelle Carter hardly received any honors during the peak of her career. Today, decades later, many, many more women are on the road; I imagine that would make Maybelle deeply happy. Women managers, women running production, sound and lights, women booking venues, women playing bass, women drummers, women rocking, women raising children on the road: We are Maybelle’s spiritual granddaughters. In the next 20 years, we will continue to bloom in music. But more and more, the world listens to music without context, without credits — no players, no provenance, no lineage — despite that information being readily accessible to us all. Social media allows everyone their own center stage; self-aggrandizing without depth perception — without a deeper sense of context in the present or in the history that has come before us — is an accepted way of moving through the world. This makes it even more essential to note how deeply the work of Maybelle Carter contributed to the music that follows her — for both women and men. Acknowledgement for the work of women — seen and unseen— is the only way to push this story forward for the daughters to come.
Every genre has its iconic songs. Country has countless. One of them is called ”Wichita Lineman.” Although the title suggests football, the lineman in this song worked on electric lines along a highway. Written and recorded by Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell, this is one of the most iconic songs of the 20th century, surprising as that sounds, and author Dylan Jones wanted to understand why, and how it came into being. The book he wrote about the song, Wichita Lineman, tells an incredible story of hard work, musical brilliance, and pure luck. We ran an excerpt.
Trans activist Karla Avelar poses for a portrait in San Salvador, El Salvador in 2018. (Danielle Villasana)
Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)
“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar
* * *
Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.
When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.
On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.
Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism. Read more…
He wasn’t even two years old; a tiny thing, really, hardly even a person. Alfred was the ninth son of King George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, their fourteenth child. But his numerous siblings didn’t make Alfred any less beloved. Portraits of the boy show him as rosy-cheeked and handsome, with light eyes, a pronounced Cupid’s bow, and soft folds of neck fat. His royal parents loved him dearly, and when he died on the 20th of August, 1782, Queen Charlotte was said to have “cried vastly.” The king, too, was bereft. Later, when he went mad, he reportedly held conversations with his lost little boy and his brother, Octavius, who’d also died as a child.
Often, upon losing a family member, 18th century mourners would send the dead to their graves only after giving them one last haircut. They would harvest their locks to create elaborate weavings. Sometimes, the hair would be fashioned into floral wreaths. Sometimes, it would be made into jewelry. Frequently, the hair was plaited and pressed into lockets, which were then worn close to the heart. Prince Alfred didn’t have enough hair on his small blonde head for a weaving, but a tress did make it into a locket — a single soft curl. It sits behind glass, in a gold and enamel frame that displays the dates of his birth and death. The other side of the locket, a delicate piece of jewelry shaped like an urn, is decorated with seed pearls and amethysts. It is now part of the Royal Collection Trust. “Due to his age, there was no official mourning period for Alfred,” notes scholar and collector Hayden Peters at The Art of Mourning. “But his death came at a time of the mourning industry being a necessary part of fashion and a self-sustaining one in its own right.”
When it comes to mourning jewelry, there’s no piece quite like the locket. Whether urn, round, oval, heart, or coffin-shaped, it’s an item that telegraphs absence. I love is the message the locket sends. Or perhaps more accurately, I have loved. Even today, we understand that lockets are meant to show allegiance to someone who is not present, whether the loss is through death or just the general isolation of modern life. A grandmother might wear a locket with pictures of her far-away grandchildren. One half of a long-distance couple might keep a locket with a bit of their partner’s hair. I know a woman who wears a locket with a picture of her dead sister; she plays with it sometimes when she’s drifting in thought.
It’s a beautiful piece, but it’s impossible for me to divorce the beauty of the silver pendant from its significance. Once you know someone’s greatest wound, it’s hard to look at them the same way you did before. And once you know an object’s terrible provenance, it’s difficult to covet it without feeling at least a little guilty, a little angry at your own sinful schadenfreude.
Before the ritualization of mourning in the Victorian era, wearable containers were a discrete way to keep an item close, usually something that had significant personal meaning or an intimate purpose. These pendants, brooches, or rings were visible and sometimes highly ornate, but their contents weren’t typically meant for public consumption. As emotions have slowly become more public (and more performative), so too have lockets gone from being highly private objects to functioning as a means of displaying big sentiment in a socially acceptable way. Like generational trauma tap dancing through DNA strands, jewelry transports sentiment from one person to the next. It holds, in its tiny little chains and clasps, evidence of our most devastating emotions, from fear to grief to existential despair. It makes those things small, palatable, pretty. But in the shrinking of emotion, we run the risk of losing touch with the expansive and all-consuming reality of grief. We risk losing the opportunity to come together as a community, to hold not jewelry, but each other.
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For as long as we’ve been aware of our bodies, we’ve adorned them. Adam and Eve donned fig leaves to cover their nakedness, and thus clothing was born. But we just as easily could have covered ourselves with other objects, for other reasons. It’s possible we wore furs to stay warm. It’s also possible we wore them to look cool. (We’ve come a long way, sartorially, from the hides-and-leaves days.)
If this conflates clothing and jewelry, it’s because the line between the two is actually quite thin. Clothing is typically made of fabric, leather, or fur, while jewelry is made of metal. Yet some jewelry is made of leather and fabric, and some clothing is made from iron and gold, so the difference isn’t about materials. It’s about function: Clothing covers and protects the body, jewelry adorns and enhances it. “Jewelry has been a constantly evolving product of its time for centuries, and looking at the styles of a particular age is a great way to discover where people’s heads were,” says jewelry historian Monica McLaughlin. “Over time, jewelry has served as a form of talisman or a personal item of reflection, as a way to support one’s country in a war effort, or as an outlet for people — rich or poor — to memorialize their loved ones or proclaim their latest enthusiasms, It really is a tiny, exquisite little window into history.”
I love is the message the locket sends. Or perhaps more accurately, I have loved.
The word locket, most likely derived from the Frankish word loc or the Norse lok, meaning “lock” or “bolt,” first appeared in the 17th century, but the concept of a diminutive, wearable container dates back much further. The earliest examples of container jewelry — a category that includes lockets, rings, bracelets, broaches, and even chatelaines, a kind of metal belt that allowed the wearer to carry keys, scissors, good luck charms, and a variety of small containers attached to one central decorative piece — come from the Middle East and India, though it’s proven difficult to tell exactly when or where the locket was born. Until recently, jewelry wasn’t as rigorously studied as other art forms, says Emily Stoehrer, jewelry curator for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “Maybe it’s the materials,” she muses. Or maybe it has something to do with the newly gendered nature of jewelry (diamonds weren’t always a girl’s best friend, if you get my drift).
The Museum of Fine Art has built up a substantial jewelry collection over the past century. One of the MFA’s most popular and most written-about items is the Hathor-headed crystal pendant, a piece that has been dated to 743-712 B.C.E. It’s also the earliest example of container jewelry that I’ve found, though I strongly doubt that it was the first of its kind. Just over two inches tall and an inch-and-a-quarter wide, it consists of a hollow crystal ball topped with a tiny gold sculpture of a serene, long-haired Hathor. The goddess wears a headdress featuring a pair of cow horns and a sun disc. The woman’s face looks composed, kind, and brave — fitting, since she’s the deity of beautification, fertility, and a protector of women. Hathor, according to Geraldine Pinch, author of Egyptian Mythology, was “the golden goddess who helped women to give birth, the dead to be reborn, and the cosmos to be renewed.” Later, during the Greco-Roman period, she became known as a moon deity, and the goddess of “all precious metals, gemstones, and materials that shared the radiant qualities of celestial bodies.”
This pendant was found in the tomb of a queen who lived in Nubia. We don’t know what the crystal originally contained; the MFA website says it “probably contained substances believed to be magical.” Stoehrer doesn’t have much more to add, saying that it is “believed to have had a papyrus scroll inside it with magical writing that would have protected the wearer.” The mystery, she says, is part of the appeal. “People love the story of what might have been in it, what it might have said.”
According to Stoeher, wearable prayers and early receptacle jewelry were created around the globe, but were particularly popular in “non-western” countries; historians have found evidence that people in ancient India and Tibet carried magical wardings on their bodies, pieces of prayers and words for good luck. Christians eventually began to wear small containers holding devotional objects a bit later, sometime in the Middle Ages. But some devoted followers of Christ weren’t satisfied with writing down a few words of worship and calling it a day. Instead, they hoarded pieces of people, bits of bone and hair and blood.
Relics are one of the grisliest forms of Christian worship. Although the belief in relics, defined by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the “physical remains of a holy site or holy person, or objects with which they had contact,” has been part of the religion since its beginning, the trade in relics truly began to pick up steam during the reign of Charlemagne. According to historian Trevor Rowley, the body of a saint could act as a stairway to heaven, providing a “spiritual link between life and death, between man and God.” Relics were typically stored in decorative cases called reliquaries. Made from ivory, metal, gemstones, and gold, reliquaries had places of honor in churches, monasteries, cathedrals, and castles. The most revered relics were objects that Jesus or Mary had touched or worn (including purported pieces of the True Cross, his Crown of Thorns, or scraps of woven camel-hair believed to have been worn by Mary as a belt) but there are plenty of relics that belonged to lesser figures, like saints. Many of these aren’t lifeless objects like shoes or hats, but bits of hands and arms and hearts and legs. (There are also secular relics, like three of Galileo’s fingers, on display at the Galileo Museum in Florence, or the supposed 13-inch-long alleged pickled penis of Rasputin housed at the Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburg, though these objects aren’t worshiped in quite the same way.) Since there are thousands of recognized saints in Christianity and it’s hard to tell one disembodied leg or desiccated kidney from another, there are a lot of possible relics out there to be unearthed, sold, and displayed.
Fascinating as these grim objects may be, they’re still less strange than the reliquaries once worn by medieval Christians. It’s one thing to inter a body in a church and allow visitors to pray over it on a Sunday, and quite another to take a fragment of finger bone, stick it in a tiny silver case, and wear it around your neck, but that’s exactly what people did. One personal reliquary housed at the British Museum, dated to 1340, is made from gold, amethyst, rock crystal, and enamel. Inside the colorful locket nestles a single long thorn believed to come from the holy crown. Many reliquaries held splinters of bone, though later analysis often found that the bone was unlikely to be from a saint (and sometimes wasn’t even from a human). Merchants sold reliquary pendants stuffed with teeth, hair, blood-stained fragments of cloth, drips of tomb oil, and other supposedly holy items. The practice continues to this day, but Peak Relic was during the Romanesque period, which ended around 1200 CE.
As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, container jewelry was used more and more often for mundane (and hygienic) purposes. There are many examples of people keeping scented materials in little wearable containers in attempts to mask their natural smells. Known as pomanders, from the French pomme d’ambre (apple of ambergris), these perfume balls were packed with musk oil, ambergris, and other less costly plant-based fragrances. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has ten in their permanent collection, including an incense ball from 13th or 14th century Syria and a skull-shaped pomander from 17th century England. There are intricate silver many-chambered balls and basket-shaped pendants that would have once housed fragrances like neroli, civet musk, ambergris, rose oil, and myrrh, a shell-shaped gold pendant that still has “traces of a red residue” inside its chambers, and even a pomander bead that was part of a devotional necklace or rosary and contained pictures of three female saints hidden behind spring mechanisms.
It’s one thing to inter a body in a church and allow visitors to pray over it on a Sunday, and quite another to take a fragment of finger bone, stick it in a tiny silver case, and wear it around your neck, but that’s exactly what people did.
If you didn’t want to carry around perfume, you could pack your pomander with an opium-laced mixture known as “Venice Treacle” in late medieval and early Renaissance England. (Opium was believed to be effective against the plague, so its usage was medicinal as well as recreational.) If you were really ambitious, maybe you’d wear a poison ring. It would be an easy way to defeat political rivals: Pour them a goblet of wine, flick the locking mechanism, and let the poison drop from your hand into their cup. Voilà, no more pesky Venetian cardinal or aggressive Flemish countess. According to legend, multiple members of the infamous Borgia family wore poisoned rings filled with cantarella, a custom concoction made by 16th century Italian merchants from either the juices of rotting pig entrails sprinkled with arsenic or the froth that accumulates on a poisoned pig’s mouth after it dies from arsenic poisoning — fables differ in the details.
Pomanders and poison rings weren’t truly that far from reliquaries in their design or their purpose. All of these things — saints’ bones, prayer snippets, rancid pig poison, sweet-smelling whale bile — were precious and private. They all afforded the wearer some sort of protection. Protection against the plague, protection against evil, protection against embarrassment. Even pomanders were about protection; it was often believed that illness spread through bad smells. According to the miasma theory, scents were a matter of life and death. A whiff of “bad air” could fell even the halest traveler. A pomander kept your smells from invading the rest of the world, and the world’s smells from infecting you.
There are examples of container jewelry from almost every era of human history and almost every corner of the globe. Perhaps there is something primal about our desire to squirrel away objects, to keep some precious little things on our bodies at all times. Maybe we need small things to feel big. I think, sometimes, that humans are drawn to things that are oversized and things that are terrifically undersized. Like Gulliver, we want to see worlds of both giants and manikins. We like dollhouses and lockets, giant nutcrackers and too-big wineglasses. These things remind of us childhood, and of dreams, places where reality is slippery and true faith is possible.
And maybe we hoard little parts of things in order to feel whole. Maybe prayers need something physical to attach to, hope needs something tangible to ground it, and grief a placeholder for an unspeakable absence.
* * *
Trends tend to grow slowly at first, bubbling under the surface of the collective consciousness. They simmer, sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few hundred, until some precipitating event when suddenly, the once-obscure trend is everywhere.
Queen Elizabeth I Ring, c. 1560. Found in the collection of the Chequers Estate. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
That’s how it was with mourning jewelry. Since the 16th century, people had been commissioning jewelers to make them little mementos for their lost ones, rings and bracelets and lockets like the Chequers Ring, which has been dated to the mid-1570s and was worn by Queen Elizabeth I. The gold locket ring is in the shape of an E and adorned with white diamonds, rubies, and mother of pearl. Behind is a secret compartment with two enamel portraits believed to represent Queen Elizabeth herself and her mother, Anne Boleyn, who was executed when Elizabeth was nearly three years old. Pieces like the Chequers Ring are thematic siblings to the memento mori jewelry that was popular at the time, which often featured jeweled coffins, delicate gold skeletons, and other macabre bits of shiny symbolism. Instead of reminding the viewer that they, too, will die, mourning jewelry reminded the people that the wearer had experienced a loss, that they harbored great grief. Perhaps they also reminded the wearer that they had a right to their sadness. Mourning jewelry made absence visible and tangible. It made sadness present on the physical body.
Queen Victoria didn’t come up with the idea of mourning jewelry, but she did mourn more visibly and publicly than anyone else had, or could. Following the death of her husband Prince Albert in December 1861, Victoria entered a state of permanent mourning. She had the means to grieve decadently, and she did. She didn’t have just one locket for Albert, but several. She wore these charms on bracelets, broaches, and around her neck. It was her style; according to historian Claudia Acott Williams, Victoria’s first piece of sentimental jewelry was a gift from her mother and contained a lock of her deceased father’s hair, as well as several strands of her mother’s hair. During her very public courtship and wedding, “She and Albert would mark so many of those ubiquitous human moments that endeared her to the public with jewelry commissions that were widely publicized in the popular press and subsequently emulated by her subjects.” After Albert was gone, Victoria commissioned a gold memorial locket made with onyx and diamonds. Around the outside of the pendant, enamel letters spell out Die reine Seele schwingt sich auf zu Gott (“the pure soul flies up above to the Lord”). Inside, she placed a lock of Albert’s brown hair and a photograph of her deceased love. Victoria left instructions that, upon the occasion of her death, this locket be placed into Albert’s Room at Windsor Castle and left on display. It must have meant so much to her, that locket. It must have felt like a piece of her broken heart, an emotional wound made wearable and beautiful.
People of all socio-economic strata wore mourning jewelry of some kind. After all, you didn’t need to use costly gems; you could just give the deceased a post-mortem haircut and use the strands to create a bracelet or a ring. Some jewelry even featured bones in place of jewels (Victoria had a gold thistle brooch set with her daughter Vicky’s first lost milk tooth in place of the flower), though this wasn’t nearly as common as jewelry that featured woven, braided, or knotted hair. “If you’re poor, you wouldn’t have access to photography. That’s too expensive,” says Art of Mourning’s Peters. “But you could cut your hair off and pop it in a locket and give it to someone you love. That way, you can be with them always.”
Peters also notes many jewelers trying to capitalize on the trend played a bit fast and loose with the sources for their hair weavings. Sometimes you’d go to a craftsperson and ask that a locket be made with your beloved’s hair, and you’d return home with a piece made from their hair — and then some. “A lot of the hair they used was from nunneries,” he explains. Some customers knew that the hair was being supplemented, but not everyone was aware of this practice.
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Even more disturbing to Peters was the role that advertising played in the promotion of mourning goods and rituals. “Exploitation of death through grief is as certain as death itself,” writes Peters in an essay published in A Miscellany of Death & Folly. “In particular, fashion has been a focal point through which death has been exploited, due to its highly emotive nature.” Department stores stocked solely with mourning paraphernalia began to pop up. Peters makes it clear that these items weren’t necessarily all that personal. Often, each mourner that attended a funeral would be gifted a simple ring, and people tended to judge the lives of their peers by the type and quality of jewelry they left behind for grieving friends and neighbors.
The sentimental jewelry trend wasn’t confined to the Continent. It was also fashionable in America to wear hair brooches, silver lockets, and other personal pieces. After the Industrial Revolution, people from most social classes could buy mass produced lockets, which they could then fill with photographs of their beloved or bits of their hair. Many of these were made in Newark, New Jersey, the jewelry manufacturing capital of the United States. The industry got its start there in the early 1800s, and by the late 1920s, Newark was producing 90 percent of the 14-karat gold jewelry in America. Alongside the full-color images of filigree gold pendants and colorful “fruit salad” bracelets and the essays about the shifting trends in American consumerism, The Glitter & The Gold: Fashioning America’s Jewelry tells tales of abuse and exploitation. Though the journeyman jewelers were fairly well paid, conditions in factories were generally grim and child labor was commonplace. Paid far less than their male coworkers, girls were often employed to do the most precise handwork, like fashioning gold watch chains or hand-painting enamel, because of their thin and dexterous fingers. “The jewelers work, in all its branches, is particularly trying to the eyes, and it not infrequently happens that defective sight compels men to abandon the trade,” reported chief of the state’s Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries around the turn of the twentieth century. Smead adds that “respiratory disorders were also common — common enough to be the leading cause of death among jewelers.”
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By the time the Civil War came about, many middle class Americans were purchasing costume and fine jewelry that was made in Newark (though often factories would mark their goods “London” or “Paris” since U.S.-made items wouldn’t come into vogue for another fifty years). Lockets, heart-shaped and oval, were particularly popular during this socially chaotic period, and showed up frequently in literature and art. It was common practice for soldiers and their sweethearts to exchange sentimental trinkets before the man marched off to battle. A posthumously published and mostly-forgotten short story by Kate Chopin makes one such piece a central player: “The Locket” switches perspectives between a young Confederate soldier and his sweetheart. He had been wearing a locket, given to him by his girl at home, which he refers to as his good luck charm. After the battle, the same gold necklace is plucked off a corpse and mailed to the girl, who assumes that her love was killed. At the end, he returns home to find his lover dressed all in black. Another boy died, one who stole the locket believing that its “voodoo” would keep him alive. Our ersatz hero lives, thank the gods of love.
It’s a sentimental story about a sentimental piece of jewelry, and I can’t say I liked it much. It reminds me of a Nicholas Sparks story, or a Thomas Kinkade painting, or any other corny, sappy work of art. It drips with tears and snot. It has a hollow core: too much emotion, not enough meat. The story is set up as a tragedy, but at the last minute, Chopin pulls the rug out from under the reader and wraps them in a cozy blanket. Here, she says, here is what you wanted.
As for the boy who died? Well, we’re not supposed to think hard about him. Surely he deserved to die, for he was a thief and a coward. Like most sentimental works, it follows pat beats: a problem is set up, an exchange happens, a resolution is reached. In the end, the titular locket is revealed to have had no power — except to trick the woman into believing her love was lost, and perhaps to trick the robber into thinking he was safe on the battlefield.
That’s the dirty heart of the story. Maybe it’s not about the character’s great love, but the reader’s great fear. Fear that there is no protection from death, that there is no charm to keep away loss. Fear that unlike the boy in the story, your boy won’t come back.
Twenty-first century mourning has gone in two very different directions. It’s either become entirely intangible or deeply physical, almost to an obsessive degree. There are online guest books to mourn the dead, ghostly Facebook pages that live on “in legacy,” and online grief support groups, or you can buy diamonds made from the hair and ashes of a dead loved one. “Cremation diamonds are forever since they are diamonds made out of human ashes,” reads the website for Lonité, a Switzerland-based company that pressurizes the carbon-rich remnants of a body in order to “grow” amber-colored jewels that start at $1250 per quarter-carat, significantly less than most mined diamonds but slightly more than the average lab-grown diamond. Other companies will turn your ashes into glass beads or encase them in clay or metal. And while hair jewelry isn’t quite as fashionable as it once was, there are still hair artists who can weave a lock of hair into a keepsake.
It’s tempting to conclude that the ugliest part of lockets is what we put inside them—the poison, the remnants, the evidence of adultery, and the perfumed animal oils. But I think the worst part is how desperately we try to shrink down our emotions, to make them small and private and containable. Instead of sharing our fears aloud or wearing our sadness on the surface, we place it into jeweled containers, objects that latch and close and can be tucked under the shirt, inside the dress. We sublimate our emotions, turning gray flat ashes into brilliant, sparkling diamonds.
It must have meant so much to her, that locket. It must have felt like a piece of her broken heart, an emotional wound made wearable and beautiful.
“If we can be called best at anything,” writes mortician and author Caitlin Doughty in From Here to Eternity, “it would be at keeping our grieving families separated from their dead.” She goes to a village in Indonesia, where dead bodies are paraded through the streets while mourners keen and wail and cheer; Mexico, where mummies sit on altars waiting for families to come and give them gifts; and Japan, where family members visit a high-tech crematorium to gather up fragments of their lost and loved with chopsticks. To Americans, she admits, these customs may seem disrespectful. But they are not. They’re ways of working through grief. Giving mourners a task grants them purpose and a sense of control. Giving mourners a public space to celebrate their dead offers much-needed moments of physical and emotional catharsis. Giving mourners access to the dead body provides a sense of closeness and closure.
American culture lacks these rituals. Instead, we have single-day funerals. We have mass-produced headstones, mass-produced urns, mass-produced lockets that allow us to minimize loss without moving through it. There is no federal law that grants paid bereavement leave, not even for the death of a spouse or a child. Your interior world may have collapsed, but you are still expected to prove your worth. Grieve, but be productive.
Peters argues that hair art isn’t morbid, but rather a healthy sign that people can “live with” grief. I’m not so sure. I tend to agree more with McLaughlin, who stresses the locked-away part of the locket. “Lately, I feel like everything is about control,” says McLaughlin. “The world is bursting into flames around us and there’s basically nothing we can do about it, so instead we cling harder to the tiny things that mean something to us.” And maybe, she adds, the act of keeping these things “close and hidden away from others heightens that feeling of safety and control.” We don’t come together and howl in grief. We don’t keen at the sky or wail around the pyre or hold our dead tightly and brush their hair.
I have a cousin who died young from suicide. He was a few years older than me, and I spent the first sixteen years of my life looking up to him. He painted his nails with sparkly blue polish and dyed his hair black. He could do an incredible Irish accent. He took drugs and defended me from the worst abuses of my older brother. He was protective of me, and I loved him for it. I have very few memories of the funeral. I was deep in a depression of my own, and hadn’t yet discovered the value of medication. Many of my memories from those years are foggy and insubstantial, clouded by grief, marijuana, and hormones. I sometimes re-read the guestbook at Legacy.com where people write him messages. I receive email alerts when new posts are added. I am glad it exists, but it feels terribly incomplete. In grief, everything feels incomplete.
I do not have a necklace with a locket holding his dyed hair, but I do have a tiny little pill container that attaches to my key ring. In it, I have three pills. They soothe me, they calm me, they give me a sense of control. It’s with me at all times. I have often dared to imagine a world where I didn’t need them. Where I could cry in public, wail on the street, get snot and tears on my good clothes. Where I could allow emotions to be as big as they needed to be. Until then, I have my version of the poison ring, the pomander ball, the little locket, designed to protect. Designed to contain.
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Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/ Ukrinform/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
In this article for Parenting magazine, Alex Bliss (all names have been changed), explains with complete honesty the process she went through in order to embrace her child being transgender; initially struggling to accept that her four-year-old daughter identified as a boy.
…My daughter, the nurse explained, had peed in her pants in the middle of the cafeteria.
I rushed to the school with a dry pair of pants and underwear.
“What happened?” I asked.
Isabel was silent.
“Did you wait too long? Are you feeling sick?”
It would be hours before she would tell me, “I couldn’t hold it.”
“Why do you think you have to hold it?” I asked.
“I can’t use the bathroom,” she said.
There was anger in my throat. What teacher doesn’t allow children to use the bathroom?
“I’ll talk to your teacher. This is crazy,” I said.
“No, mommy,” she said. “It’s not the teacher. I can’t go because I’m not allowed in the boys’ bathroom and I don’t belong in the girls’ bathroom.”
Even as I worked with the school to ensure that she could use a gender-neutral bathroom and even as I found myself saying “she might be transgender,” I harbored—and courted—doubts. My stomach turned whenever I thought of Boys Don’t Cry. How would I keep a transgender boy safe? How would a transgender boy find love? Happiness? Success?
Turning to therapy for answers, it became clear that this was not a “phase,” but reality.
Before our rear ends had even warmed the couch, I blurted, “I need to know if this is just a phase. If she’s transgender, I need to know for sure.” I wanted a test, a diagnostic tool like the Beck Depression Inventory, something definitive that would pronounce my child transgender or not. I learned that no such test exists.
Still, my husband and I left the room so the therapist could conduct an initial evaluation.
Twenty minutes later, we settled down on the same couch, my husband on one side of Isabel, me on the other.
“Your son said something interesting,” the psychologist said.
I heard the word “son” louder than the “your” and the “something interesting.” It was as if the therapist shouted that one word through a bullhorn and bolded and underlined it just before it traveled the distance from her mouth and to my ears.
“He said he didn’t think his parents were ready yet.”
Gradually, Bliss started to refer to her son Shane, rather than her daughter Isobel. Explaining to more and more friends and family about his gender. As she embraced the situation, she realized that she had a son — and that she loved him.
About halfway through fifth grade, just before he went to bed one night, I looked at him. Really looked at him. There was that short hair and handsome face, the deep-ish voice and abrupt mannerisms, a bare chest, and arms folded behind his head.
There was no doubt. He was a boy.
He wasn’t just any boy, either. He was my boy. My incredibly smart, funny, quirky, kind, just-plain-awesome boy.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images
“On psychedelics,” Dr. John Halpern, head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, told The New York Times Magazine, “you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now.” That rings true to me.
For the record, I’m not encouraging anyone to take psychedelics. Powerful substances such as LSD, D.M.T., and psilocybin are not for everyone, and they are illegal. That said, these substances behave in the body very different than opioids, alcohol, and cocaine, and they offer what many people view as the possibility for enlightenment, for constructive personal revelations, and insight into the cosmos. The stories collected here offer insight into this idea.
Not long ago, residents of affluent Western countries began traveling to the jungles of South America to have profound psychedelic experiences with the hallucinogen ayahuasca. And workers in Silicon Valley started taking small doses of psilocybin and LSD, called microdoses, to enhance their work and creativity in tech. Tripping got trendy. It also received more scientific attention. As Lauren Slater wrote in her New York Times piece, a new generation of researchers are studying the therapeutic effects of psychedelic substances and their potential for treating everything from depression, alcoholism, and PTSD, to confronting our own mortality. These researchers have differentiated themselves from the questionable, Timothy Leary-style drug studies of the ’60s. It’s exciting to live in a time when scientists are taking a serious, objective look at the way psychedelics work on not only the human body, but the human experience. After the legalization of cannabis in many US states, activists are now working to legalize psilocybin mushrooms. Like all outlawed psychoactive substances, psychedelics come with a lot of cultural baggage. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan stated that “anyone that would engage or indulge in [LSD] is just a plain fool.”
For those who haven’t tripped and want to understand the experience, or those who want to relive past trips without having to fit new six-to-ten-hour journeys into their adult work and parenting schedules, this reading list is for you. For those who prefer to never to ingest psychedelic substances, these stories will take that trip so you don’t have to. It’s nice to travel into another dimension from the comfort of your own couch, especially now that COVID-19 keeps most of us indoors at home. Anyway, shelter-in-place isn’t the best time to trip. Psychedelics are better suited to nature, if not a camping trip then at least a city park. Apartments are too small. They smother the cosmic consciousness we’re trying to expand. Also, things get weird in familiar environments, especially familiar environments where family portraits hang above piles of dirty laundry that need washing. (Hi Mom, my face is melting!) Maybe the best trip now is one others have already taken. Either way, safe travels my friends. See you on the other side.
The ancient South American hallucinogen ayahuasca has become America’s psychedelic drug du jour, with everyone from Baby Boomers and Millennials to the Silicon Valley set seeking its potent revelations about harmony and interspecies unity. To hear the plants speak, all you need is money and some strength of mind.
One at a time, we went into the front room to be smudged with sage on the wrestling mats by a woman in her sixties with the silver hair and beatific smile of a Latina Mrs. Claus. When she finished waving her smoking sage at me and said, “I hope you have a beautiful journey,” I was so moved by her radiant good will that I nearly burst into tears.
Once we were all smudged and back in our circle, Little Owl dimmed the lights. “You are the real shaman,” she said. “I am just your servant.”
When it was my turn to drink the little Dixie cup of muck she presented, I was stunned that divine consciousness—or really anything—could smell quite so foul: as if it had already been vomited up, by someone who’d been on a steady dieta of tar, bile, and fermented wood pulp. But I forced it down, and I was stoked. I was going to visit the swampland of my soul, make peace with death, and become one with the universe.
Before The New Yorker spotted ayahuasca as a subject, the Canadian quarterly Maisonneuve covered the increasing popularity of hallucinogen tourisism. Jeff Warren’s reporting makes a fascinating companion to Ariel Levy’s above.
As if on cue, the Estonian psychologist, Alar, vomited into his bucket, setting off a domino effect of throaty purges around the room. Susan began humping the air. The Mountie groaned and raised his arm, as if to ward off an assailant. Someone else started barking. The Finnish professor—also in his sixties—came spinning in from the sidelines, hair shocked upwards in an Elvis-style pompadour, and pranced around Susan’s undulating body.
It was all too much. I struggled to my feet, teetered, and fell sideways over a chair. On my hands and knees I managed to crawl to the bathroom, where I was noisily ill. I spent the next two hours slumped next to the toilet, disappointed by my lack of visions, but also giggling at the whole bizarre circus. Behavioural reality, at least, was beginning to shift.
Researchers are exploring whether certain drugs can help patients cope with fear of death. Pam Sakuda, who was given six to 14 months to live, was administered psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms.
Norbert Litzingerremembers picking up his wife from the medical center after her first session and seeing that this deeply distressed woman was now “glowing from the inside out.” Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: “I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity,” Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. “I started to cry. . . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having.” Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.
Emma Hogan reports that in Silicon Valley, microdosing LSD is the new “body-hacking” tool everyone from engineers to CEOs are using to boost productivity and creativity. Interestingly, while apparently everyone is doing it, users are reluctant to have their real names appear in print.
San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.” Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life”. In Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics.
As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage – or talking about trying LSD for the first time. According to Chris Kantrowitz, the CEO of Gobbler, a cloud-storage company, and the head of a new fund investing in psychedelic research, people were refusing to talk about psychedelics as recently as three years ago. “It was very hush hush, even if they did it.” Now, in some circles, it seems hard to find someone who has never tried it.
Research into psychedelics has been demonized and shut down for decades. But recent psilocybin trials from Johns Hopkins and New York University are helping researchers reconsider the therapeutic potential of the drugs.
Psychedelic substances show great promise treating everything from cancer to depression, anxiety to alcoholism. To help understand this burgeoning field of inquiry, one writer participates in a study. Tripping taught her as much about the promises as the dangers of medical psychedelics.
The brain on psychedelics is not only susceptible to cues, but it also exaggerates their meanings. And here’s the problem with that: We can debate what’s real and what is an illusion, but we can’t ignore the power of the drugs, or the power of the people who administer them to us, and we can’t ignore our own vulnerability to both. This is what chills me.
As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation. (Note that this piece, originally published at PLoS, is no longer available there. Some digging discovered it online at maps.org.)
Ayahuasca tea has long played a religious role in Brazil, but did it also contribute to the brutal death of a celebrated Brazilian artist? A dark twist on the question for enlightenment.
There have been many other reports of mental and physical healing following ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as occasional stories of delusion, cultism and worse. Early last year, Henry Miller, a 19-year-old Briton, died after apparently taking part in a shamanic ayahuasca ritual in Colombia — a terrible accident which played in the British press as a cautionary tale of a gap-year adventure that went horribly wrong. And then there is Glauco’s story, largely unreported outside Brazil, although it is one of the most curious cases of them all.
Valentina Valentini’s life-long role-reversal with her mother gets up-ended one psychedelic night in the Hollywood Hills, giving her the chance to become the daughter, once again.
She handed me the pipe. I politely refused. We went back to listening to the girl croon.
Not many minutes later I began to feel lightheaded. And warm. I knew it would get hot in that tiny room. My first thought was that I might be inhaling some second-hand smoke, therefore creating a bit of a contact high. I wasn’t altogether opposed to that, so I sat still a little while longer. Then my eyes started to feel heavy. Very heavy. I whispered to my mother that I was going to take a step outside and get some air. She seemed concerned, but only mildly. I assured her I’d be fine, snuck through the haphazard chairs with swaying wannabe hippies in them, and stepped out the shop door.
In the context of some reads on psychedelic drugs, Laura Miller looks at Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In it, Pollan says that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD got a bad rap after some flawed scientific experimentation and images of burned-out, ’60s counter-culture hippies soured Americans on exploring the medical benefits these drugs might offer, suggesting that their mind-altering abilities might help free us from cognitive patterns that are holding us back.
If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.” He felt that the experience made him more emotionally open and appreciative of his relationships. Both Waldman and Lin report similar effects, even though Waldman never actually tripped. The promise of hyperlight travel, revolution, and spiritual transcendence be damned: If psychedelics can help cure the midlife crises of disaffected baby boomers and Gen Xers, then it’s only a matter of time until we’ll be able to pick them up with a prescription at our local pharmacy.
MANHATTAN, NY - JUNE 14: Hundreds of people pack into Columbus Circle to hear speeches of protest against police violence with one protester holding a painted portrait of Floyd George. (Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images)
Dear Reader,
“Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day,” writes Laurence Ralph in an excerpt from his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The excerpt is written in the form of a letter to any and all future mayors of Chicago, endeavoring to explain to the mayor—to really explain—police torture in Chicago. “You likely have been briefed about police torture,” Ralph writes to the future mayor, a statement that could just as easily apply to you, or to me. We’ve all been briefed.
“Perhaps you have gotten assurances from the superintendent of the police department. You might have even met with survivors of police torture. But what I have found in studying this issue for more than a decade is that…a strict historical approach, or a policy-oriented approach, doesn’t actually clarify the full extent of the problem. To do that, we need not facts but a metaphor.
“The first thing you must know is that the torture tree is firmly planted in your city. Its roots are deep, its trunk sturdy, its branches spread wide, its leaves casting dark shadows. The torture tree is rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States.”
Ralph goes on to give the mayor the raw numbers; numbers like this have been circulating since the protests began, and they have not lost their power to startle me.
“Police misconduct payouts related to incidents of excessive force have increased substantially since 2004. From 2004 to 2016, Chicago has paid out $662 million in police misconduct settlements, according to city records. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that these figures will decrease. Hundreds of Chicago Police Department misconduct lawsuit settlements were filed between 2011 and 2016, and they have cost Chicago taxpayers roughly $280 million. When I was writing this letter in July 2018, the city had paid more than $45 million in misconduct settlements thus far, in that year alone. Keep in mind that misconduct payouts are only a fraction of what the city spends on policing. Chicago allocates $1.46 billion annually to policing, or 40 percent of its budget—that’s the second-highest share of a city budget that goes to policing in the nation. It trails only Oakland, which allocates 41 percent.”
Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day. Or as New Yorker Molly Crabapple puts it in her dispatch from the protests, “we, the broke and beaten residents and taxpayers, will be paying for their abuse of us.” In between her accounts of beatings and pepper sprayings and arrests, she recounts similar numbers, nearly the same numbers: “Last year, the city paid out nearly $70 million to settle police misconduct cases, up $30 million on the previous year; that number will swell beyond comprehension in 2020. Yet none of this comes out of the police budget.” These numbers are so malevolent to me; they have a sorcerous energy; when things are unbalanced, it is unnatural and disturbing.
“In the end,” poet Cameron Awkward-Rich writes in his account of a protest he joined up with in Massachusetts, at which chants of “Black Trans Lives Matter!” rang out, “the Northampton cops pepper-sprayed a group of demonstrators who got too close to the station’s doors.”
“The station’s been cleaned. The Black Lives Matter flag no longer flies from its post. The demonstration will recur and this time the station will be barricaded hours in advance. A video has circulated online that depicts the brutal beating of black trans woman Iyanna Dior by a group of black cis women and men. Intracommunity calls to defend black trans life have been met with affirmation, yes, but also derision and accusations of unduly diverting attention away from the present struggle. We only get so much access to the feeling of freedom.
“It’s impossible to know what the other side of this will look like, how this unfolding situation will crystallize into a narratable event. Whether a stretched-out moment of insisting that black trans life matters will, in the end, matter. Whether ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ will ever occupy the simple present tense. In the meanwhile, the Okra Project has begun and funded an enormously ambitious project to connect struggling black trans people with life-sustaining care. In the meanwhile, Dee Dee Watters of Black Transwomen Inc has raised nearly $10,000 to support Iyanna Dior. In the meanwhile, strangers and intimates alike have given Tony McDade’s family more than enough to put him to rest.
“In the meanwhile, the crowd is assembling again outside my window, louder this time, gathering force.”
Poet Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch, reflects on the intersection of blackness and transness while he protests outside a police station in Northampton, Massachusetts: “…transness, at minimum, is the insistence on the human capacity for once unimaginable change.”
Novelist Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, wonders just how much the now ubiquitous low-flying police helicopters of Brooklyn are recording; but once he joins a protest, it no longer seems to him like the helicopters are the ones doing the watching. “The rebellion…refuses obfuscation. Too many cameras to count—like the one Darnella Frazier tapped on her phone to record Floyd’s last moments—now point at the true sources of violence and brutality. It’s our turn to shoot.”
Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, co-author of Brothers of the Gun, observes the protests in New York, drawing what she witnesses, and recounting stories others have told. “In the Bronx, while boxed in and waiting to be cuffed, former congressional candidate Andom Ghebreghiorgis witnessed a woman going into labor. Another convulsed in seizures. Blood dripped from the baton wounds police left in protesters’ skulls. Ghebregiorghis himself spent at least six hours with his hands agonizingly zip-tied behind his back. On another night, Jason Rosenberg, a programmer for the 92Y, emerged from jail covered in blood, with a broken arm and a head wound that required six staples to close. A source familiar with the situation in the holding cells told me of a woman who had miscarried after being arrested. Another pregnant woman was beaten, left handcuffed, and denied water.”
An excerpt from Laurence Ralph’s The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Police torture, he writes, is best understood as a metaphor; a torture tree. And the nourishing roots of the tree are “this country’s enduring logic of threat.” Ralphs writes: “Frontier logic…is foundational…to modern-day policing. We can see it at work when one court after another acquits cops who gun down African Americans under the pretext that those cops felt threatened. In such cases, the violence enacted against Black people works to turn the police officers who actually committed the violence into the victims of those Black people. This is how the tangled and twisted logic of fear became rooted in the security apparatus of the United States.”
Oliva Rutigliano writes that Charles Dickens, despite having little regard for authority or social elites, fell into the narrative trap, common in all sorts of media for decades, that transforms fascination with police detectives and undercover cops into admiration. Rutigliano calls Dickens’ “strangely giddy” account of a police ride-along, called “On Duty with Inspector Field,” shockingly hypocritical because, by his own account, most of what he witnessed was the intimidation of the poor. Rutigliano is echoing George Orwell, who wrote that “the only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.” As Rutigliano puts it, “Dickens runs into what may be the biggest recurring hypocrisy in his career, as well as the history of popular entertainment: the insistence that police officers fighting crime provides exciting content, while avoiding that the vast majority of ‘crime-fighting’ is ultimately the continued oppression and convenient scapegoating of society’s most vulnerable people.” Rutigliano show how the multi-layered, formally complex book Bleak House finally allows Dickens to excavate his own misperceptions; many of the novel’s dizzying number of plotlines are touched by the same undercover agent, and only by gathering together the threads, and seeing the work of the police across many narratives, can one begin to glimpse the faulty machinations of justice.
6. “Look Who’s Watching,” Tracy O’Neill interviewed by Robert Lopez, Bookforum
Robert Lopez talks with Tracy O’Neill about how her new novel Quotients, which is structured around themes of surveillance and communication, relates to the pandemic and police brutality. “In the book I include several real events, one of which is the police slaying of Mark Duggan, a black man. After Duggan’s death, the Tottenham protests lit through social media. More protesters were caught using social media photos than CCTV, supposedly, and BlackBerry’s parent company gave the police information. So on the one hand, we can see how videos of police brutality have helped us in efforts to document police brutality and anti-blackness, yet the same devices that help hold law enforcement to account may be what provides the police with tools to identify and in some cases arrest protesters.”
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Jennifer Wilson writes that Ilze Hugo’s novel The Down Days is so eerily predictive of even the tiniest aspects of the pandemic—down to funerals taking place on Facebook—that “one can’t help but wonder—if these times are really as unprecedented as the government leaders and insurance companies tell us they are, why was this moment so easy for Hugo to imagine?” Wilson goes on to say that The Down Days has implications for the much-feared inevitable “onslaught of Covid-based fiction”; she writes, “It is a strange thing to have a dystopian work of science fiction suddenly read like a realist novel in the vein of Balzac, but that is what makes The Down Days such a bizarre (but wildly addictive) book. It has the telltale formal qualities of genre fiction…But its content could hardly be called dystopian—since its publication date has rendered it familiar, mundane…It promises an opportunity to see what our response to this moment might have been like if we had never seen it coming, and yet ultimately refuses to give us that satisfaction. Any fiction that accurately captures our so-called new normal, this novel shows, will have to grapple with the old one.”
Andrew Durbin writes about novelist and photographer Hervé Guibert, author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, “a stark autobiographical book about his desperate effort to gain access to an experimental ‘AIDS vaccine.’”
“To the Friend made Guibert both wealthy and famous, especially after an appearance on the French TV show Apostrophes. Posters of his handsome face went up around Paris, transforming him into a symbol of the intense suffering of seropositive men and women at the time. Though he promises in the opening section of his book to become “one of the first people on earth to survive this deadly malady,” he would die the following year, on December 27, 1991, only a few days after his thirty-sixth birthday, author of an additional five extraordinary books, all of which would be published posthumously.”
Lucas Iberico Lozada speaks with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about her book The Undocumented Americans, “a series of dispatches from what we might call undocumented America: a country within a country, one that overlaps and undergirds the other.” Cornejo says she was looking to rebut the DREAMer memoir:
“…I felt like… a crazy person who was able to articulate what her experiences had been would be a pretty good canary in the coal mine to talk about the American Dream. The way I define crazy is not just ‘mentally ill.’ It’s a radical term…When this Administration started comparing us to animals, it coincided with a moment when I started undergoing intravenous ketamine treatment for depression. For the first time in my life, I started noticing my surroundings. I noticed—in a purely unsentimental way—certain plants around me. I developed a relationship with this group of crows that lived in my neighborhood, and I began feeding them. I learned that my brain had had a lot of damage because of the traumas related to migration.
“In my interviews and research, I realized that the stories that came out and had become sort of popular about immigrants, undocumented or not, were stories from people who were pretty grateful to America. It seemed like the point in a lot of these narratives was to change racist white people’s minds about us. And that didn’t feel right with me, so I thought, what would it look like if a crazy person wrote this?”
Cornejo also talks about the insidious “memoirization” of women’s writing, especially women of color’s writing, that came up in the newsletter a few weeks ago. “My book is a serious work of literature. When I’ve done interviews, people don’t ask me about literary things, people don’t ask me about formal things, people don’t often ask me about my influences or whether I have any training in writing or who I studied under or things like that. People just ask me about my parents leaving me in Ecuador, or what I do for self-care, things like that. It’s very clear that I’m being seen through a sociological lens.”
There’s a lot more that’s worth pull-quoting from this interview but I suppose I should stop. Wait, there’s this: “I’ve always felt a telepathic connection to Stephen Miller. I wrote an article once in the New York Times, and immediately afterward I became aware that he became aware of me.”
Sam Kleiner reviews Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which “explore[s] the undertold story of the war in the deserts and mountains of the New Mexico territory (modern-day Arizona and New Mexico). The evocative title of her book comes from a soldier’s observation that what was playing out in New Mexico was, in fact, a ‘three-cornered war’ between Union, Confederacy, and Native peoples.” Nelson draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to resurrect the despicable reality of the conflict: that the antislavery forces were also genocidal exterminators.
In his forward to a new Penguin Classics collection of Yusuf Idris’s short stories, The Cheapest Nights, novelist Ezzedine C. Fishere writes that as young reader, his first encounter with a story by Idris “showed me what probably every good story can show: things fall apart for no particular fault of individuals who are just trying—and failing—to keep it together.”
A new poem from Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition. “It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands. / They have washed their hands for you. / And they take the bus home.”
Struggling with depression and shame over his bisexual identity, a young college student smokes an excessive amount of weed, trying, he thinks, to escape what ails him. Eventually, his visual and auditory hallucinations disrupted not only his college education, but his ability to live. In the gripping essay “Some Kind of Reality” for The Threepenny Review, Andre Bouyssounouse writes about how even after he stopped smoking pot, the voices grew so loud that he had to seek professional help. What begins as story of confusion, alienation, and what the author calls “stupefying depression and anxiety” becomes a chilling, detailed account of the mind turning on itself. It’s one of the most vivid accounts of psychosis I have read. As someone who struggled with the heavy psychological effects of cannabis dependence myself, back in college, Bouyssounouse’s story hit me hard. It also begs the question: Did the cannabis permanently awaken a latent condition, or would Bouyssounouse have heard the voices without his period of over-indulgence?
For that whole day, I carried on a dialogue with the voices, mumbling to my phone under my breath. There were two distinct voices: Sarah and Michelle. Michelle was the more practical and level-headed of the two. Andre, she said. There’s something wrong with Sarah. She’s obsessed with you, and I’m scared for both of you. I think she has a brain tumor or something. She stole your phone and she’s been listening to you for months. Ever since you got back from Santa Barbara. I heard Sarah: Give me the phone, you bitch. Andre, I want you to come over here right now. You hear that? Are you a man or what? Michelle begged me not to tell anyone. She’s my friend, Andre, I can’t let this get out. There’s something wrong and I’m trying to control her but I don’t know what to do anymore. Please don’t tell anyone about this. She’s a good person, there’s just something—something’s wrong…
The essay is behind the paywall, but you can purchase the essay in the Summer 2020 issue of The Threepenny Review.
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