“Lake Placid Blues” – Tony Joe White

I have always admired Country music and discovered down the years that, in the USA, Country (sometimes, Country and Western) was more popular than rock ‘n roll.  One of the chief reasons, I imagine, would be the force of the lyrics.  Country does not have the elemental force of Rock ‘n Roll with its limiting effect on the lyrical line.  Characteristically, Country explores deep issues in a memorable way.  I think of a song like Ruby, don’t take your love to town dealing with a man crippled in that crazy Asian war who witnesses his wife going to “town” for her sexual gratification.  One of the greatest protest songs, in my opinion.  I can list many Country songs that cut to the bone.   

The music of Tony Joe White (1943-2018), fondly called the “Swamp Fox”, is an interesting blend of Country with a rock flavour at times, but always giving primacy to the lyric.  There is a melancholy which one could call the blues, a term that has been stretched in all directions.  I’d like to share my thoughts and feelings on a particular song that appeared on albums in the late-1980s, early-1990s, and which, in my opinion, grows in significance.  It is called “Lake Placid Blues”.

The lyric is framed in the post-Vietnam generation (“I was too young for the meaning”) that inherited the tragedy of that war.  In the lyric, he remembers the agony (“It’s not the silence that makes you crazy / It’s the sound of a heart breaking in two”).  I have always found it admirable in the way that profundity is expressed in simple words.

The song is a kind of narrative and suggests the poverty of Southern communities and their struggles. (“Of all the hard times I still remember / The repossession of the guitar hurt the most”)  There is a seriousness and a sadness in facing those hard times.  With each verse ending in the phrase Lake Placid Blues, the biding melancholy of this memory ballad, the song culminates with the death of a close friend. 

He has an offhand style of singing and with the crisp beat any sentimentality is avoided.  This is not an easy thing to achieve and takes particular talent.  In the shadow of other popular musicians, Tony Joe White made a lasting contribution.

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Les Semboules, Antibes

January, 2022

 

Sources 

Wikipedia : Tony Joe White, Lake Placid Blues

Images

My graphics

Tony Joe White – Wikipedia.org

 

Four poets

Winter clings freshly to my face when I go walking mornings.  And that after months of summer blew away in a few leaves.  I walk along boulevard Robert Desnos, flowing from André Breton and joining Guillaume Apollinaire.  These three streets circle the primary school named after Jacques Prevert.  I am surrounded by the street names of poets, and the avant-garde at that.  Where in my own country are contemporary poets honoured like this?

André Breton  1896-1966

He was the forerunner of the Surrealist movement and in the Manifesto of these otherwise minds he put into words what the essence of their beliefs was:  psychic automatism.  His work was controversial and, understandably, his work was banned by the Vichy government in the war years.  He fled to the United States and returning to France after the war without change to his revolutionary views.  His magnum opus is Fata Morgana (1938), a long poem in which the extended metaphor is the phenomenon of the mirage.

Robert Desnos, also part of the wayward writers, wrote poetry that soon gained fame.  He had a political disagreement with Breton and only in the naming of these streets was there reconciliation.  He joined the French Resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo.

Legend has it that, in the death camps, he read people’s palms and to the enjoyment of the German soldiers, foresaw rosy futures for them.  Soon after the liberation of the camps he died.

Guillaume Apollinaire 1880-1918

Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet of Polish-Italian extraction.  He was also a dramatist, writer of short stories and novels, as well as being an art critic.  He was involved with the theft of the Mona Lisa but was cleared soon after.

As a result he campaigned for the Louvre to be burnt down.  His poem Rain caught my attention when I was young:  the words of the poem are arranged like falling water on the page.  He died in the Spanish ‘Flu.

Jacques Prévert  1900-1977

Jacques Prévert was also active with the Surrealists.  Many of his poems were set to music.  The one that moves me most has been translated as Autumn Leaves.  He wrote film scripts as well as short stories.  His poem Breakfast struck me when I was a teenager, a masterpiece in a pared down style, poetry without imagery. 

And he goes

Into the rain

Without a word to me

Without a glance

And I put my face

Into my hands

And I weep

 

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Les Semboules, Antibes

January, 2022

 

Images

Bréton – wikipedia.org.fr

Desnos –  atlaneastra.fr

Apollinaire – internaute.fr

Prévert – wikipedia

 

See as well:  “Autumn Leaves”    http://www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com    29.8.2021

Pencil visages

First in a series of two

Art therapists would have something to say about my drawings.  Apart from what they imply about my spiritual innards, there is my need to share what I do, even if it’s not great art or even art at all.  This sharing … there has always been the story ‘And then they found his poetry in a drawer after his death’.  Well, I’m not dead and it won’t be poetry that they’ll find there. 

Here the glass plates wonder about this rather smug individual shutting his eyes. The caption is “Do you think he’s just ignoring us?”

‘Do you have ears on your head?’ the little man asks.  I hear my mother’s voice when I was a child.  I’ll use that as a caption.

This is an illustration for a story of three young ones going to the wise man to ask what makes us happy.  While he is wise, he does not know about happiness.  I have always found old faces more interesting than those of the young. 

Okay, art therapist, here’s something more direct.  I’ve always found it easier to draw sad faces, with the conventional markings that we associate with sadness, especially around the eyes.

I tried to capture the difficult process of understanding things in life.  The caption is “Sometimes I don’t get it.” I think those eyes could’ve got a better treatment.

This drawing is a bit of a mystery to me.  Two mirror images and a clown.  What could this be saying? “I talk to my mirror and I ask, ‘Which of us is the clown?’ ”

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

January, 2023 

My drawings, published by RotsWolk Publishers.  (also found in the third drawer from the top)  

Politics

I have been disturbed by the rise of certain strains of politics, almost like a variant virus, in Western Europe and in the United States.  I feel charged to slam a fist down on a table and shout, Can’t you learn from history?  And the philosopher turns in his grave and murmurs When will you see that people don’t learn from history?  I feel helpless:  I’m 10,000 kms from my country.  So, what can I do?  Well, the official Confinement in this country doesn’t leave me with much choice.  How would it be if I shared a few of my cartoons on politics?

©  Will

http://www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Les Semboules, Antibes

January, 2022

 

My drawings, published by RotsWolk Publishers

 

 

Living history

It is a strange sensation to think that I am writing a kind of time capsule which I will bury until the 9th January, 2022. We don’t always realize that the time we are living through may be considered most significant by future historians. With Covid-19 the story is different. We have lived through this period for almost a year. Where will we be in a year from now? We know full well that things may become far worse than they are.  Much is said about the “Third Wave”, but what of a fourth wave, a fifth?  South Africa and the United Kingdom are linked in a variant of the virus.  In the last 24 hours more than 1,300 people have died in France alone, a record number.  Debates about vaccination rage.   

What awaits us?  Shall we be jolly and optimistic?  As with everyone I have great uncertainty.  The range of this uncertainty is as wide as life and death.  It is not beyond reason to wonder how many of us, myself included, will survive this year?  

Still, I comfort myself.   The world of 1918-1920 and the world of 2020-2021 are very different.  I made some rough calculations which would have to be verified.  The so-called “Spanish ‘Flu” claimed between 50 and 100 million lives.  If I take the lowest figure for deaths, a comparable period shows that they were 13,6 times worse off than we are.  A great factor is communication:  they had newspapers;  we have radio, television and the internet.  Research in virology has made some advances in the last century.  

 Thus, I could have published this post today, but I feel that it will say more in a year.

©  Will

http://www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Les Semboules, Antibes

Written 9.1.2021.  Scheduled for 9.1.2022

 

RANDOM HEADLINES from BFM, France’s on-going television news service, on 9.1.21

Curfew at 18h causes upset

Curfew:  the locally-elected are angry

Vaccine:  the objective is to move fast

Vaccine:  Between 25,000 and 30,000 to receive vaccination. Next week the rhythm is accelerated.

Images of empty city streets

“Paperback Writer” – Beatles

Somehow there seems to be more of Lennon than of McCartney in the lyric Paperback Writer.  The tragi-comedy that we recognize, the sad absurdity, is distinctively his.  I may be wrong, of course;  it was most often their combination that delivered the product.  But here he is, the character of the song, the quietly desperate writer, who effort is doomed from the start, like Sisyphus.

He has no concept that style has nothing to do with length;  he has claims to have “based” his work on somebody else’s novel, not understanding the principles of plagiarism, not knowing that (Edward) Lear didn’t write novels.  The very character he writes of bears his own ambition to be a paperback writer – a story within a story.  Desperately, he resorts to porn (“it’s a dirty story of a dirty man”)  to get into print.  He begs the publisher to heed him with the driving rhythm of the song, the lines culminating in the multi-harmonies of his longing (“Paperback writer, Paperback writer”).  This lyric must rank as one of the most sophisticated in the late-1960s.  And it is exceptional in that it doesn’t fashionably deal with the politics of the day or the age-old themes of love and loss of love.  It gives us a well-crafted cameo of a writer’s desperation.

 

… Dear Sir or Madam

Will you read my book?

It took me years to write

Will you take a look

It’s based on a novel

By a man named Lear

And I need a job

I want to be a paperback writer

Paperback writer

 

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Les Semboules, Antibes

January, 2022

 

Sources

Lyric  –  Sing365.com

 

My graphics

Lennon and McCartney –  telegraph.co.uk