Dag Walker |

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down

February 7, 2021February 7, 2021 admin2Dag Walker, Music, Rosetta Tarpe0 comment

By Dag Walker The singing, guitar playing gold-toothed Gospel Ranger, Claude Ely, born in 1922, lay in be a’dying as a 12 year old, tuberculosis slowly dragging him to the grave in Puckett’s Creek, Va., in the Appalachian Mountains. He wasn’t having it. “Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.” An uncle gave the boy a guitar to consolation, with which he composed his best known song, one that became a Pentacostal favourite of the folks of the Appalachian Mountains and beyond. The boy recovered, and took up preaching…

Op-ed

A German Doctor in Liberia: Werner Junge, Ten Years in Liberia.

February 2, 2021 admin2Dag Walker, Liberia, Werner Junge0 comment

By Dag Walker Carl Heisenberg once responded to a hapless physicist offering a gift of mind, some grand theory about the nature of the universe, some gem of sparkling intelligence, with the line, “That is so stupid it isn’t even wrong.” An American opinionator on radio, Mark Levine, is noted as having exclaimed, “That idea is so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.” Throughout my long and storied life I have heard innumerable times people mumble as they shook their heads saying, “How can anyone that smart…

Ho Ho, dear reader, they are obviously in transit. Even the post office takes time these days to deliver on such promises. Trust me, they are really great-looking bird stamps. Birds, and lots of ‘em. Hey, look out the window: there’s a Liberian pterodactyl attacking that space monster in the park! WOW, did you see that? Incredible.

Tributes

Bird Land: The beautiful birds and stamps of Liberia

November 7, 2020 admin2Bird Stamps, Dag Walker, Liberia0 comment

By Dag W. Walker My mother was a status-conscious woman back in the old days when working class people had aspirations of climbing the social ladder into the dizzying heights of the middle class. My mother, realizing she would never be the high-achieving being she longed to be, determined that I would be her surrogate, that shining social success she failed to become. Success, mine and hers, depend on me to rise, according to my mother’s limited understanding of success, to the professional heights as a doctor…

I fondly recall beloved Miss Donner von Blitzen, my third grade school teacher. I’m not saying she was mean and ugly, but when she went down to the swamp all the toads croaked. Aside from that true fact, which I am not making it up, Miss Donner von Blitzen had a particular bad habit of beating us kids when we used the perfectly good English word “ain’t.” I have the scars to prove it. My feeling to this day? “Ain’t nobody’s business if I do.”

Music

Big, Bad Bessie Smith, A Great Blues Singer

October 4, 2020 admin2Bessie Smith, Blues, Dag Walker0 comment

By Dag Walker I fondly recall beloved Miss Donner von Blitzen, my third-grade school teacher. I’m not saying she was mean and ugly, but when she went down to the swamp all the toads croaked. Aside from that true fact, which I am not making it up, Miss Donner von Blitzen had a particularly bad habit of beating us kids when we used the perfectly good English word “ain’t.” I have the scars to prove it. My feeling to this day? “Ain’t nobody’s business if I do.”…

Hawkins was born in Oakland, California, in 1943. He too is now dead. In 1967, he and Betty Watson co-founded the Northern California State Youth Choir of the Church of God in Christ with 46 singers ages 17 to 25. In a time of eight-track recorders, they used a two track recorder in the church and eventually made 500 copies of their albumn, featuring Dorothy Combs Morrison as female lead. They recorded the album Let Us Go into the House of the Lord, 1968, at the Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley, California

Music

200 years later—in 1968, Edwin Hawkins and Oh Happy Day!

August 31, 2020 admin2Dag Walker, Edwin Hawkins, Music, Philip Dorridge0 comment

By Dag Walker Most afternoons back in my old hometown the old guys would sit in cane rocking chairs out front of Virgil’s barbershop down on Main Street, smoking old pipes, dozing off in the summer sun, straw hats covering their wrinkled, bald heads; and when their heads jerked up as they awakened briefly, they would talk slow and soft about the olden days of their youth. They were old, indeed, but none of them recalling the old days ever talked about the year 1755. They missed something…

Society Arts & Leisure

Travelogue: I’ve been on the road for almost 50 years now. I have a lot to learn yet.

August 30, 2020 admin2Dag Walker, travelogue0 comment

By Dag Walker It’s easy to rush around the world looking at important sites only later to find one has missed the life of locals who make the world human. I travel so I can experience the greatness of places, to see architectural wonders, historic events, artefacts unique and brilliant. Sometimes, though, I just cross the street to talk to locals about their neighborhood. Nothing much comes from casual conversations on the street most of the time; but sometimes– not today but sometimes– I am enlightened in a…

Diana Ross and the Supremes, “Where did our love go?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Ta5TlCBR8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Gordy https://www.britannica.com/biography/Berry-Gordy-Jr https://www.biography.com/musician/berry-gordy-jr https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-motown-story-how-berry-gordy-jr-created-the-legendary-label-178066/

Music

When Berry Gordy made Motown Our Town

August 3, 2020 admin2Berry Gordy, Dag Walker, motown0 comment

By: Dag Walker Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s in the remotest parts of the Rocky Mountains in the United States of America we had our musical traditions, old guys like Elmo from down the road who played fiddle at the weekend barn dance, Zeke on spoons and a tin bucket, Bobby Joe on washboard, and Betty Lou singing up a Country Western storm of heart-break and horses on the lone prairie. Yes, there was fancy music, stuff we never actually heard in those cold, high mountains…

In Los Angeles, Herb Reed, a recently discharged Army veteran recruited Cornell Gunther, Joe Jefferson, and Alex Hodge to form a vocal quartet he would eventually name The Platters. The group’s name came from the metal disks, or “platters,” that rotate vinyl records on the turntable of a phonograph. These four men were the “original” Platters in 1953.

Music

The Platters: music was grande in the 1950s

July 28, 2020July 28, 2020 admin2Dag Walker, Music, The Platters0 comment

By Dag W. Walker Music history was grand in 1953. It was the year the American group The Platters was formed in Los Angeles, California. In LIberia that year, Solomon Carter Fuller, born in Monrovia, a pioneering physician, psychiatrist, pathologist, and professor died] on January 16, 1953. William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman was the 19th president of Liberia, with William Tolbert as Vice President. In Los Angeles, Herb Reed, a recently discharged Army veteran recruited Cornell Gunther, Joe Jefferson, and Alex Hodge to form a vocal quartet he would eventually name…

Op-ed

I might have been better on a hilltop in Nepal

July 2, 2020July 3, 2020 admin2Dag Walker, Ecuador, Writer0 comment

Introduction: Dag Walker is an amazing writer traveling the world, who currently finds himself in Quito, Ecuador, where he enjoys the beautiful weather far from his own home– in North America. In the mountains and hills of his current residence, he finds time, and solace to contemplate writing and structuring his thoughts as he pound ideas we need in a world that seeks to self destruct, writing that he is “hopeful”! Walker wrote this short essay as— a reflection of what writers go through before they get published, but also…

Society Arts & Leisure

Jockk Brand vs. the Man at the Top of the Stairs: excerpts from a Novel

February 17, 2020February 17, 2020 admin2Dag Walker, Jockk Brand, Writer0 comment

Jockk Brand vs. the Man at the Top of the Stairs and Other Men Hiding in the Shadows in the Garden Evening. Icy Cafe, Street of the Monkeys, Phom Phen. By Dag Walker By 9:00 p.m the temperature had dropped to the low 100s in the city. Seated on a quiet back street outside of Icy Cafe, a small group of young backpackers and a few older ex-pats sat sipping beer and rum and smoking endless cigarettes, sweating heavily under the dim pig-tail light bulb above the low doorway of…