Sunny but cold here in East Tennessee. How's your weather?

I'm tinkering with a posting. Till I get my shit together and get it in some sort of coherent order, do please go over and read my beloved niece's new post at http://missatheornery.blogstream.com. Too bad all the late night comics made separate deals with their writing staffs; she would willingly have stepped into the breach, and done a damned good job of it.

Till then, fair thee well.

Last night, as a background to the coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, there was news of severe weather affecting the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky. We're all right here, although we had rain so hard you could barely see to the road from our house; same at Willard's some twenty miles down the road. Some wind damage, a few trees down over roads and etc.

West Tennessee and north central Tennessee were not so lucky. At last report there are twenty-four reported dead, ten of those in Macon County, north of Nashville. The pictures from CNN and other news outlets are both horrifying and heartbreaking; trailer parks, a college campus in Jackson, over near Memphis, all but flat on the ground, although miraculously no dead there.

Local aid workers, backed up by FEMA teams dispatched by Homeland Security, are already beginning to try to clean up some of the mess, tend to the injured and homeless, and locate the dead. It'll be a long hard road ahead of everyone involved.

This should be a day when everybody offers up prayers and sympathy for all the victims, when politics, religion, gender, and all those other stupid labels we put on each other ought to be set aside. Imagine my horror, then, when I was scrolling through posts at The Newshole, and ran across this gem:

Tennessee hit by tornados after voting Hillary? Coincidence...?

The person who was crass enough to post this used a pseudonym.

For anyone to suggest that Tennessee brought down the wrath of God on ourselves in the form of tornadoes because the Democratic voters in our primaries chose to support Senator Hillary Clinton is monstrous. Nobody in their right mind could possibly draw a cause and effect between the vagaries of weather in the Southeast in late winter and early spring and a political candidate, but this person evidently thinks they're not only in their right mind, they think they just got off some delightful witticism, reminiscent of the "lady" in South Carolina who cost John McCain my consideration as a candidate when she called Senator Clinton a bitch.

Not only am I appalled at the sheer inhuman effrontery of this person; I am FURIOUS that whoever is moderating the board at The Newshole let the comment be posted at all. I think I have mentioned before that The Newshole is a messageboard/blog for viewers of COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN, a show I have watched for a couple of years now and in general find interesting and fun.

This is a disgrace. I frankly don't know whether I will be able to continue to watch COUNTDOWN or read The Newshole after this; how dare the moderator at the board allow a cretin to slap the people who have lost so much in the faces with such callous abandon? There is a point past which simple human kindness dictates that we give up that noble abstraction called free speech, especially when that speech is made for no other reason than to insult the living and the dead. I doubt very seriously that Saint Peter's going to ask the dead at the Pearly Gates whether they supported Clinton or not. If he does, then Satan has won the battle between good and evil; not because of who we support for our foolish political purposes, but because of the foul insinuations of moral morons.

Pray for the injured, the ones left homeless, and the dead. And until next time, fair thee well.

This is the Cable Mill in Cades Cove. It was a grist mill owned and operated by the Cable family, who were if I remember correctly the first family of German extraction to move into the Cove. This was not the only mill in the Cove, but it is the only one preserved by the Park Service, other than the "sorghum mill." This one, maintained in the same area as the grist mill, was used to crush juices out of sugar cane, which were then boiled to make molasses (or sorghum, which us hillbillies pronounce "sargum.")

The last time I was in the Cove, the mill wheel at the Cable Mill had been out of commission, ostensibly for repairs, for some three years; the flume, which is the long wooden canal sort of thing, has also been torn out because of rot and was in the process of being rebuilt. When both are operating though, the sounds are very distinctive. The water runs out of the flume and powers the wheel. The water hums and sings, and the mill wheel creaks merrily as it turns.

Occasionally during the summer months the mill is in operating order, and makes both corn meal and flour. Corn and wheat are ground in between millstones, very large round rocks powered by energy from the wheel outside (I'm no engineer, so I can't explain how that works). The millstones make an awesome rumble, and there's a fine dust in the air that has a distinct smell and settles on your hair and clothes like powder.

Probably my favorite place at the mill complex (which is located at the midpoint of the Loop Road, the eleven-mile, one way, single lane road through the Cove, with the visitors' center) is inside the mill and out a door onto a platform that overlooks the woods and the creek behind the mill.

I've got a really bad case of spring fever. Does it show?

Till next time, fair thee well.

Winter gets longer every day, it seems. Groundhog Day Saturday--but whether the little critter sees his shadow or not, it still means six more weeks of winter.

For all that I laugh about the South Pacific, and retreat to Hawaii when the cold breaks my laughter and my heart, my favorite place on earth is Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I've blogged about it before--about the baby's grave in the cemetery at the Primitive Baptist Church--but I've never blogged about the feeling I got standing at the window in the John Oliver cabin--one of the earliest surviving structures in the Cove--as if I were looking across a place that once belonged to me. I came back to the flatlands feeling that for the first time in my life, I had gone to my true home.

It feels that way every time I go back. Gonna be awhile this year; it's such a long trip, and hard to arrange things. But I can look at pictures and dream.

No illustrations for this one, friends: just songs and stories.

According to Wikipedia, the technical definition of a hobo is a wandering homeless person, usually a man, especially the ones who hop trains, riding on empty freight cars from place to place. A hobo would differentiate himself from a tramp--who would travel but not work--or a bum--who did neither. A hobo prided himself on doing both, but society at large seldom made such distinctions.

Although hobo culture (the derivation of the term hobo is hopelessly intricate, and I won't even attempt to untangle it) began to develop in the years after the Civil War, as a phenomenon its glory years were during the Great Depression, which began in 1929. Coincidentally, those years spanned the career of Jimmie Rodgers, a former railroad man himself, who met hoboes in the course of his work and turned their stories into songs of gentle ironic humor, pathos and poetry. His most famous songs of the hobo lifestyle are "Hobo Bill's Last Ride," "Hobo's Meditation," and "Waitin' For a Train." "Hobo Bill's Last Ride" is an especially sentimental but nonetheless affecting piece about a hobo who is dying, alone, on a boxcar, on a rainy winter's night. It concludes with a chilly comment on society's dismissive attitude toward these men who rode the rails:

There was no mother's longing to soothe his weary soul
He was just a railroad bum who died out in the cold.

That one has been covered by several singers, but none of them quite match up to the original; Hank Snow probably came closest.

I have already mentioned the Parton-Harris-Ronstadt cover of "Hobo's Meditation," with lead vocals by Linda Ronstadt; it's quirky and the harmonies are flawless. As for "Waitin' For a Train" my favorite cover was by Jim Reeves. Put off the train in Texas--"a state I dearly love"--by a brakeman, the hobo ends his song

My pocketbook is empty, my heart is full of pain
I'm a thousand miles away from home, waitin' for a train.

Hank Williams Sr. did a series of recitations in the course of his short career under a name that would be appropriate for a hobo--Luke the Drifter--and a few of his songs make reference to the hobo life, most particularly "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow." However, since the nameless protagonist of that song ends up in prison for life, it is usually classified as a prison song.

Next up is the immortal cheeky 1965 Roger Miller classic, "King of the Road." It is sui generis; there is no other hobo song quite like it, and though George Jones among others tried valiantly to cover it, nobody ever sang it with Roger Miller's joyful insouciance. This is one that nothing will do but the original, if you want to check it out.

May I also mention the great Boxcar Willie (1931-1999), who performed parttime as a singer in the hobo style (complete with the layered clothing and scruffy unshaven look) throughout a twenty-seven year career in the Air Force, only becoming a full-time entertainer when he left the service in 1985. Born Lecil Travis Martin, he met hoboes in train stations in the 1940s and wrote a number of his own songs, in addition to performing Jimmie Rodgers with an elan that would please the Singing Brakeman himself. I used to listen to the Grand Ol' Opry a lot; Box was a member beginning in 1981, and one of my fondest memories of him was a night he did an entire set of Hank Williams songs. He alone of all those who have made the kamikaze flight of singing Hank Williams did not embarass himself. My favorite of all his recorded performances, though, is a duet from Hank Williams Jr.'s 1981 album THE PRESSURE IS ON. Called "Ramblin' in My Shoes" it's an exuberant celebration of trains, hoboing and great music.

No doubt I've missed a whole lot of great performers and performances; Woody Guthrie, for example, was a hobo for awhile, and his experiences turn up in his music. Bob Dylan was never a hobo, but he sang about them. Hopefully, though, I've hit the high points.

Thanks for holding your yawns, and till next time, fair thee well.



PS It's official. Miss A DOES NOT have mono. One less worry.