Ma Rainey (April 26, 1882 – Dec 22, 1939)

CHICAGO – CIRCA 1924: “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey and her band the Rabbit Foot Minstrels with Ed Pollock, Albert Wynn, Thomas A. Dorsey (on piano at right) Ma (Gertrude) Rainey, Dave Nelson and Gabriel Washington pose for a portrait circa 1924 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

White folks hear the blues come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.
Ma Rainey

Now I’m gon’ show you all my black bottom
They stay to see that dance
Wait until you see me do my big black bottom
It’ll put you in a trance.

“Rainey was outspoken on women’s issues and a role model for future women entertainers who took control of their own careers.

Also known, though less discussed, is the fact that she was bisexual. Rainey never shied away from her feelings in her music, as is apparent in the lyrics of ‘Prove It On Me'”:

Lyrics: Ma Rainey: Prove It On Me Blues”

Went out last night, had a great big fight

Everything seemed to go on wrong

I looked up, to my surprise

The gal I was with was gone.

Where she went, I don’t know

I mean to follow everywhere she goes;

Folks say I’m crooked.

I didn’t know where she took it

I want the whole world to know.

They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me

Sure got to prove it on me;

Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,

They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.

It’s true I wear a collar and a tie,

Makes the wind blow all the while

Don’t you say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me

You sure got to prove it on me.

Say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me

Sure got to prove it on me.

I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,

It must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.

Wear my clothes just like a fan

Talk to the gals just like any old man

Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me

Sure got to prove it on me.

http://www.outhistory.org/wiki/Ma_Rainey%27s_%22Prove_It_On_Me_Blues,%22_1928

The 1982 August Wilson play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was based on her career and took its title from her song of the same name recorded before 1928 which ostensibly refers to the Black Bottom dance of the time, while making the obvious allusions to seeing her big black bottom.*

* compiled from internet sources

 

 

Thanks to Jean-pierre Moronval on Facebook for posting this poster

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – Feb 22, 2021)

 

 “We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wild Dreams of a New Beginning

“Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together. It should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song.”

“When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951, I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats.”

“You’re supposed to get more conservative the older you get. I seem to be getting just the opposite.”

 “I am waiting for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe for anarchy”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

 I wish to descend in the social scale.
High society is low society.
I am a social climber
climbing downward
And the descent is difficult.
(Junkman’s Obbligato)
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of City Lights Books during the time of controversial obscenity trial regarding Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl”, which City Lights published.  Circa 1957.

‎

“freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness” *excerpted from A Coney Island of the Mind

“The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality” *excerpted from A Coney Island of the Mind

 

Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,” and was tried on obscenity charges.  He was declared innocent, a landmark victory for free speech.

“Ferlinghetti was one of the more politically-minded of the Beats, and has been continually active on behalf of liberal causes. He attributes his pacifist consciousness partly to his wartime experiences: he had been sent to Nagasaki, Japan six weeks after the city was destroyed by the world’s second atomic bomb.”
* excerpted from “Lawrence Ferlinghetti” by Levi Asher

 

The world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t mind happiness

not always being

so very much fun

if you don’t mind a touch of hell

now and then

just when everything is fine

because even in heaven

they don’t sing

all the time

The world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t mind some people dying

all the time

or maybe only starving

some of the time

which isn’t half bad

if it isn’t you

Oh the world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t much mind

a few dead minds

in the higher places

or a bomb or two

now and then

in your upturned faces

or such other improprieties

as our Name Brand society

is prey to

with its men of distinction

and its men of extinction

and its priests

and other patrolmen

and its various segregations

and congressional investigations

and other constipations

that our fool flesh

is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all

for a lot of such things as

making the fun scene

and making the love scene

and making the sad scene

and singing low songs and having inspirations

and walking around

looking at everything

and smelling flowers

and goosing statues

and even thinking

and kissing people and

making babies and wearing pants

and waving hats and

dancing

and going swimming in rivers

on picnics

in the middle of the summer

and just generally

‘living it up’

Yes

but then right in the middle of it

comes the smiling mortician.

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(thanks Steve Grosskopt)

William S. Burroughs (Feb 5, 1914 – Aug 2, 1997)

“Knowing you might not make it… in that knowledge courage is born.”
William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.”
William S. Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957

 “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE”
(This is credited in “Last Words” as his final journal entry)

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.”

“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”

“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Boulder, Colorado, circa 1974, the year Naropa Institute was founded.
copyright Rachel Homer

“There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.”

Burroughs and Bowie
copyright Daily Telegraph

“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.”

William Burroughs, NYC 1953
“Burroughs at what looks like the 8th Avenue & 14th Street Subway station, New York City”  October 1953
Author Allen Ginsberg

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”

 

with Joe Strummer

“You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.”
William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

with Tom Waits

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”

 

with Madonna

“As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”
William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

 

with Jimmy Page

“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”

 

 with Patti Smith

“If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”

 

Kurt Cobain visits the Burroughs home in Lawrence, KS, 1993

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.”

 

William Burroughs sits on a bench in his backyard
(either waiting for the answer or the manager)
Photo source: the Estate of William S. Burroughs

“So cheat your landlord if you must, but do not try to short-change the muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality.”

“I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.”

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”

“In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”

“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.”

“When you stop growing you start dying.”
William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”

“Language is a virus from outer space.”

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”

“I’m running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.”

“When you’re sick [due to drug withdrawal], music is a great help. Once in Texas, I kicked a [heroin] habit on weed, a pint of paregoric, and a few Louis Armstrong records.”
William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), Chapter 12