moon traveller herald

 Adding Pete Welding's interview with Al Wilson to our Blues Poetics Collection. Rolling Stone Interview Just Those Five Notes: An interview by Pete Welding To those fortunate enough to have known him, a conversation with the late Al Wilson could be a stimulating experience. While best known as Canned Heat’s rhythm guitarist, harmonica player, chief arranger-composer and occasional (but always completely satisfying) vocalist. Alan was a keen and perceptive student of the blues whose comments on the music, its stylistic development and esthetics were always penetrating and full of insight. The illuminate, for example his meticulous, extensively documented musicological studies of country bluesman Son House and Robert Pete Williams, which must stand among the finest products of recent folksong scholarship. And too, they reveal Alan’s deep compassionate concern with the people behind the music. He was above all, a humanist. Nor were his activities confined solely to the blues, for his...

 Picture of Big Walter Horton Lookin like a bird rockin back and forth Flaps his arms as he blows his harp lookin out cross eyed over a hawk nose His harp sing Like a bird Walter at twelve was playin in Handy Park Recorded with the Memphis Jug Band in a hotel room in the '30s had a hit with Sun Records in the '50s and hit Chicago Birdlike rockin he played a whoopin harp and he was only one in the same league as  Little Walter Could blow your mind the nights he felt like it.

  Acme Oyster House - Circa 1996 [APRIL 4, 2024] - White Panther Party Activist, jazz writer, MC5 band manager and poet John Sinclair, famously and unfairly imprisoned in 1969 for marijuana use, died Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82. His cause, as potently sung in John Lennon’s It Aint Fair John Sinclair [in the stir for breathing air] became an important rally point in the fight to legalize pot. His influence was also important in helping to create a politically radical school of high-powered rock n roll. That notwithstanding, he also diligently promoted a school of writing known as Jazz Poetry. The school could also be called Blues Poetry. In the '80s Sinclair moved to New Orleans, started doing a radio show, and started writing and performing poetry, mostly about blues.  His masterwork Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," took the lives of the 20th Century American blues artists and applied a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form to its representation. Si...

  The Friends Basement book sale was an occasion to thin out the books around here – many which basically overfill the space, un-re-read. Said good ‘buy’ to this grimy tome: The Dream Songs (1972) by John Berryman. Before I knew it, I got to thinking. John Berryman today is probably in the category called cancelled, where he hangs out with Hemingway, the king of cancelled, and others. Like Hemingway his father shot himself, and like Hemingway he would commit suicide, jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis. Back in his day, pre-1972, he was a hard drinking big-ego professor poet full of confessional angst, in my humble opinion. His songs were an endless song of hisself in an un-understanding world. Great bearded poet who spilled out his guts at poetry readings, and later, probably, fell into the punch bowl, to be saved for a while, in my dream song,   by a caring co-ed. You see in his poems his battle with drink, which I should say does demand some sympathy. In his writing...

  This artifact from my bedroom bureau shows how lively the Chicago Blues Scene was in 1978. Every night in July, boffo!  What a line-up! Sunnyland Slim, Otis Rush, Magic Slim, Detroit Jr. Son Seals, Erwin Helfer and Mama Yancey - it just goes on and on. I got to a couple of these nights - hot but it was great to be there. This happened while I worked with Sunnyland on the Prose Poem "Sunnyland Blues." Most of that was Sunnyland conversation - and what testimonies they were. Here below instead I include some excerpts from the book that touch on my impressions of Chicago. These and some verbatims by other musicians weren't particularly received well by the critics. I get it, they were jarring, and might have worked well in a longer more rambling presentation.      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FROM CHICAGO AND ACROSS KING DRIVE - Distended lights of the northwestern trestle. Buses this burden their scores. Ice chests in the gas stations wait for Sat...

  i searched the graveyard all over trying to find where kerouac lay i searched the graveyard all over trying to find where kerouac lay just me and my racine buddies on the hottest august day they had come out in a rambler and we were out on a spree to play they had come out in a rambler and we were out on a spree to play but when came sunday  went looking for kerouac's grave he was a lonesome traveller who showed the world another way on the road and in the dharma the holy poet sadly prayed we thought he'd send a message an eminission from the grave then a dove rose in the meadow where the peoples memories must stay and we went in the direction the spot from where it came the bird like a flying beer can showed the place where ti jean laid  on the hottest august day.                         -jack vaughan This opened up upon listening to Champon Jack Dupree - a song where he searched a graveyard for his motherl. W...

March 12, 2022 – “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” - Marking here the fact that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s writing is not known – or remembered -- to the extent that it should be. His cultural impact (leading the Beats who begat the Hippies) proved greater than his literary impact, and that should be fixed. This is a good year for you to visit the writing of Kerouac, and to share your impressions with others, so the magic carries on. It is both joy and sorrow to re-read On the Road, his epic of searching American travel, in which every word rings true. There is his experimental work Visions of Cody, which in a way is the explosive palette from which On the Road and other works were semi-precisely detonated There are touching novels such as Visions of Gerard, about his saintly doomed young brother, and Maggie Cassidy his high school girlfriend living by the river. I’d like to point out that many of our local librari...

In Japanese,  haiku  are traditionally printed as a single line, while  haiku  in English often appear as three lines. There are several other  forms  of Japanese poetry related to  haiku , such as tanka, as well as other art  forms  that incorporate  haiku , such as haibun and haiga. The  tanka  is a thirty-one-syllable  poem , traditionally written in a single unbroken line. A  form  of waka, Japanese song or  verse ,  tanka  translates as "short song," and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count  form .   Short song of Sunnyland: Denton We had a lotta cane / rattlesnakes, bears, panthers / come up to you alot / we chewed the sorghum that grew on stalks / Cleaned up the land at six bits a day. Spann was bad / Im gonna tell you Spann put out a sound / he didn’t have nothing to do after he got with Muddy / If there’s whiskey there. That’s what killed him...

Jack Vaughan 3 · City Hospital Blues This "Talk Song" goes back about 10 or 15 years at least. The story is that my Uncle Charles was on Intravenous Feeding for 30 days in Boston City Hospital during the 1919 Influenza Pandemic. I had been listening to an LP of Cecelia's - the "Arhoolie Bad Luck N' Trouble" release, which included the haunting Essie Jenkins' "Influenza Blues"-- and came to re-imagine my uncle's illness, through the spectre of Essie's poetic rumination. So, it is her Influenza blues through the lens of a family history. I was reluctant to trot this out, though it came to mind as we are in our own COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. But I am glad to post it now along with some explaination. As we know it, the IV feed was new and experimental technology at the time. My uncle was obviously in very difficult straits. As we know it, my grandmother spent most all of the 30 days at Charles's bedside praying, and for us his rec...

[ View the story "Searching for the Blues?" on Storify ]

I came to know Sunnyland Slim through Harry Duncan and Paul DeMark. It was through Harry as well that I came to know John Sinclair. John was doing a radio show in New Orleans, and writing and performing what I called “Blues Poetry.” He heard of my book, “Sunnyland Blues” through Harry, and was very generous in compliments. Years later we were able to hook up, and to converse for magnetic media. The idea I had was to take John’s commentary on the art of blues poetry, and scribe that into a screed or broadside that he might add to the folio he would peddle as he conveyed his messages in the States and the world beyond. We met up multiple times, but usually briefly, and never quite pulled that type of thing together. But I talked to him via email just before he moved to Europe, and he was cool with the idea of me posting whatever it was I’d compiled anytime anyplace anyhow. Thinking way back - I described my work with Sunnyland as Blues Poetry. I thought, with John, there might be ...

You took my watch You took my watch You took my phone &  rent check first dear You took a walk & dint come back you put me under the bus here. In the dream upon a roof shattered the hopes to safely get down.                           - Jack Vaughan, 2014

How many beautiful bodies/can Dylan garner a night --/ 50 - 100? How many can James Dickey garner'/two - or three?/How do all the girls with beautiful bodies /who get aced out, for dickey or dylan feel? - Poetry & Beautiful Bodies (1970) Came to learn from Dave Murray recently that great Milwaukee poet Bob Watt died. It happened in January. It was old news to many, but it was new news to me. This set the mind neuros to popping. I think I’m going back to the time when Bob Watts’ poetry first blew my mind. I remember when I first heard Bob Watts poetry: it was sudden and familiar. Music of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Midwest. Most importantly it said that poetry was right here, where we were. Not far. Moreover it did not have to wear a sportscoat. One with leather elbow patches. Watt was an exterminator. On the outskirts. His obit tells us he was in the service in Japan. That gave him a jump on Zen, maybe.    In a local night club, a girl got drunk/ And yelled, “I...

For his birthday, my brother and I saw Mose Allison at Scullers in Boston. Second show, Oct 21. So glad we did! I have some of his records and consider him a great lyricist, and master of a true ethos. Quite influential. And blues oriented. But to see him! He is blues poet for sure He played so many numbers..moved quickly, getting stronger, but always cool. Did Who’s Loving You Tonight, assigning it to Robert Lockwood Jr; Seventh Son, citing Dixon. Did Buddy Johnson song. Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me. Of course his own numbers are totally unique. To hear them in essence was illuminating. This Aint Me [‘This old grey geezer”], I’m Getting There, Hello Universe, Mind on Vacation, Tell Me Something I Don’t Know... You say the world is mad You say that you've been had You don't like your part in the floor show You say it's all a bust There's no one you can trust Well, tell me something that I don't know Lefty Frizell’s If You Got the Money treated deftly. In fact, mo...