Texas Johnny Brown at Houston’s Shakespeare Pub — Photo-Artistry by kenne (Click on Texas Johnny Brown to see archived blog posting on TJB)
Texas Johnny Brown is a major talent who simmered on the blues scene longer than all the beef stew cooked in the ’40s, the decade when he first began playing and recording. Like pianist Johnny Johnson of St. Louis, Brown is an artist who did not get a chance to record a full album as a leader until he had been in the music business more than half-a-century. Also like Johnson, the results of coming in so late in the game have been a pair of highly acclaimed, prize-winning albums including the righteous Blues Defender. Brown can take plenty of the credit, since he has taken over almost complete control of his ow arranging, production, and mixing, as well as the string bending and blues moaning. He began his career as a sideman for the Duke and Peacock outfits in the ’50s about which discographers make comments such as “… the record keeping at that time was less than desirable.” As a result, some of Brown’s playing on releases by artists such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Joe Hinton remains uncredited. The guitarist, singer, and songwriter began his professional career as an original member of the great Amos Milburn band known as the Aladdin Chickenshackers. Brown’s picking is killer on early Aladdin recordings by both Milburn, and on Ruth Brown’s first Atlantic sides. Atlantic allowed Brown to make a few recordings of his own in 1949, buoyed by the enthusiasm the label had for Milburn, who played behind his sideman on these sessions along with the rest of the Aladdin Chickenshackers. T-Bone Walker is the dominating force in Brown’s stylistic palette, an influence that was considered something of a driving permit for any guitarist venturing out of Houston during this period. Before finally getting the biggie recording opportunities in the late ’90s, Brown did an ARC session in Houston in the early ’50s that was never released. He also performed regularly with Junior Parker during that decade, remaining based out of Houston. As a songwriter, Brown’s most famous work is “Two Steps from the Blues,” a big hit for Bobby “Blue” Bland, with whom he also toured as a lead guitarist in the ’50s and ’60s. By the ’80s, he was considered only sporadically active on the blues scene, but this turned out to be only a temporary brown-out, so to speak.
. . . I have been following Thomas Davis’ blog since 2012, and feel so fortunate to have found his blog. “With billions of humans on this earth, it’s not easy to connect with poets who express the human experience so worthy of being a poet’s poet. Thomas can open the door to why we exist!”
Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings — The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium Poems was recently by Tribal College Press. Davis sees the book of poems as “an introduction to the tribal college movement and the world of Indigenous nations.”
These poems tell the story of the tribal college movement. Davis writes, “They record history in a different way. History is not just made up of facts and events, as momentous as those events may be, but also of emotions, dreams, striving, failing, tragedy, struggling against long odds, laughter, joy, and personalities that make significant differences even as those contributions are lost when historians begin to shuffle through dust bins of primary sources.“
In March, 2003, Robert Martin invited Davis to Tohono O’odham in southern Arizona. While there, he wrote “A Visit to Tohono O’odham Community College as It is Being Born, 2/6/03.”
Thomas Davis Source: Green Bay Press-Gazette
The poem begins:
Perry Horse said, looking out to saguaro cactus, palo verde trees, bone- white trunk of an eucalyptus tree, brown dryness of desert, steep dirt sides of an arroyo, “can you smell this place? It smells different from your country with its trees, big water, and winter’s deep cold.” The arroyo channeled toward large skirts of a mountain that raised brown earth, dark rock into rare clouds that looked as if they might hold rain. Green smells of Tohono O’odham Nation were as pale as trunks of the palo verde trees.
The last paragraph in the poem reads:
American has always been a nation of peoples, of nations. In desert air at night stars hover bright and close to dark mountains that shine and breathe as we sing into another time.
Davis, 74, lives in Sturgeon Bay and is the author of the award-winning novel “In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams,” and other works. He still serves in leadership roles at several tribal colleges.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword, The children of the prophets of the Lord, Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state, The West refused them, and the East abhorred. No anchorage the known world could afford, Close-locked was every port, barred every gate. Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year, A virgin world where doors of sunset part, Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here! There falls each ancient barrier that the art Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”
a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind— But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested— the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.
The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.
Hunters in the Snow– painting by Pieter Bruegel the Eider
As we experience the shortest day of the year, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, “Hunters in the Snow,” is an almost perfect picture of the contrasting scenes we experience this time of year, depicting isolation and melancholy producing a sense that we are being pulled into a silent landscape where the deep drifts of snow where you can “feel the cold and sense the audible dullness as the landscape sucks the sound from every little human vignette.”
His paintings are beautiful because his compositions make one of the opposites, based on Eli Siegel’s principle of aesthetic realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making of one of the opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
winter’s sun casts long shadows on the shortest day creating contrasting values of shape between objects and the wall in turn capturing my eye as darkness wins
— kenne
(Nōtan (濃淡) is a Japanese word, meaning dark-light, there is no English language equivalent. It embodies an ancient Eastern concept, in which all things exist as inseparable and in perfect harmony.)
“As the poets and painters of centuries have tried to tell us, art is not about the expression of talent or the making of pretty things. It is about the preservation and containment of soul. It is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation. Art captures the eternal in the everyday, and it is the eternal that feeds soul—the whole world in a grain of sand. Leonardo”
Fallen Leaves On Mt. Lemmon — Photo-Artistry by kenne
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes, And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone. The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl.
Near Hutch’s Pool in the Santa Catalina Mountains (11/18/11) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
For what is the moon, that it haunts us, this impudent companion immigrated from the system’s less fortunate margins, the realm of dust collected in orbs?
Mastro’s Ocean Club Gourmet Restaurant In The Shops at Crystals at Aria Resort and Casino — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy— it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed— and then one woman, she is about to come, peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does.
