”Some Of These Days” for Jimbo Mathus Roebuck Staples of the Staples Singers grew up in the Delta playing the guitar. He says: ”I was raised on the Will Dockery place from the time I was 8 till I got to be 20 years old. Charley Patton stayed on what we called the lower Dockery place, & we stayed on the upper Dockery. He was one of my great persons that inspired me to try to play guitar. He was really a great man. At first, I was too small to go hear him on Saturday night, but on Saturday afternoons everybody would go into town & those fellows like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson & Howlin' Wolf would be playin’ on the streets, standin’ by the railroad tracks, people pitchin’ ’em nickels & dimes, white & black people both. The train came through town maybe once that afternoo n, & when it was time, everybody would gather around just to see that train pull up. They’d play around there, before & after the train came, & announce where they’d be that night. And that’s where the crowd would go. They’d have a plank nailed across the door to the kitchen & be sellin’ fish & chitlin’s, with dancin’ in the front room, gamblin’ in the side room, & maybe two or three gas or coal-oil lamps on the mantlepiece in front of the mirror— powerful light. It was different people’s houses, no clubs or nothin’. And I finally grew up to play.” —Detroit March 22, 1982/ New Orleans May 27, 1997

#51 “friday the 13th” for mike liebler any day can be the lucky one, or the one with your number written all over it, 123507 in the poet’s case, walking out the front door of the penitentiary, 8:30 p.m. 14 years ago today, two times 7 years the cycle of struggle, to make it through in one piece, on the yard or in these streets, “anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death,” burroughs said, & sometime in new york city coming home from the recording studio walking up to his front door, john lennon with a gun stuck in his face, oh, oh, sweet giant of song, with heart of huge dimension & eyes deep in the sky, there has to be a day when each of us must pass beyond this tedious sphere, to enter some wondrous place of which we do not know whether we're ready or not, some other place or space out of time where no punk with a weapon will ever press you again or blow off your face out of the depths of his madness, no one will hold us against our will in a cell with bars in front & back, 6 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet high, no one will take us out of our natural lives & send us away from here by means of some murderous fantasy in which we are denied everything we have lived forﾑ oh please let us die at the end of our own time & not before, free in our world of strife, let us have life as long as we can & please, let there be men like monk & john lennon to share of their hearts & light up our ways as long as we may live —detroit friday, december 13 > december 30, 1985

“spiritual” for linda jones what is jazz, but spirituals played thru saxophones & trombones, spirit voices thru metal tubings & the terrible repetition of the formal premise, viz. trance-like at its best, or boring when the spirit doth not move, oh what is blues but spirituals with a line removed, that is structurally, & in content just a prayer to the gods of daily life, to ask the blessing that the body of another may lay warm in the bed beside you at night, & the rent be paid, & a meal on the table, with the sheriff far away from the scene of the crime, oh what is jazz but the registration of the human personality in relation to the spiritual, stripped of literal meaning but full of sound & portent, direct as the voice of the gods —detroit september 15, 1985