Benton Flippen

From Music Maker Relief Foundation

The great Mt. Airy fiddler Benton Flippen died yesterday.  He was one of the last of the generation of musicians who influenced me and my friends, as we strove to learn old-time fiddling at the various fiddlers conventions and front porches we visited in the "upland South" of the late '60s and early '70s.  Benton replaced Fred Cockerham in the Smokey Valley Boys.  Some act that!  From the email today:

"In 1990, Flippen received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, an annual award that was presented by the NC Arts Council to recognize traditional NC artists. He was an innovator of a distinctive style of old-time string music, utilizing double-stops (playing two notes at once), slides and a strong rhythmic bowing technique. Some of the best old-time string bands have adopted several of his tunes. Flippen is also renowned for his original compositions which include "Benton's Dream," "Fiddler's Reel," "Sally in the Turnip Patch," and "Smokey Valley Breakdown."

"Flippen was raised on a farm in Surry County, North Carolina, where he first played the banjo during his childhood. His father was an accomplished old time banjo picker, as were his uncles and brothers. As a youth, he visited his fiddling uncle John Flippen and quickly turned to playing the fiddle. Soon after, he started playing with the area's noted bands and musicians, among them the Green Valley Boys led by Glenn McPeak, and Esker Hutchins and Leak Caudill. Hutchins became an important influence on Flippen's fiddling style, which includes a heavy bow shuffle and bluesy notation.

"In the late 1960s, Flippen was invited to fiddle in the Camp Creek Boys after Fred Cockerham's departure. From the 1970s on, Flippen belonged to the Smokey Valley Boys, an outfit that has preserved Flippen's unique musical abilities on recordings. The band also earned awards at numerous fiddling competitions before disbanding in 1985. In the late 1990s Flippen reorganized his Smokey Valley Boys with new and previous members. The current lineup of his band often includes Frank Bode singing and playing guitar, William Flippen (Benton's grandson) on guitar, Kevin Fore playing banjo, Verlin Clifton on mandolin, and Andy Edmonds playing banjo and guitar.

"Flippen was a celebrated fiddler in his own right, earning first place in numerous fiddle and band contests, including the Old Fiddlers' Convention in Galax, Virginia; Union Grove/Fiddler's Grove, where he won Fiddler of the Festival three times; the Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention, and many others. He also played at the Newport Folk Festival; the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee; the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes; the Smithsonian Institution; the Library of Congress; the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, Fayette County, West Virginia; and many other highly esteemed venues. He headlined the  Berkeley Old Time Music Convention in California just three years ago at the age of 88!

"His CD Fiddlers' Dream is available on CD Baby; he had six CDs to his credit, starting with 1972's The Smokey Valley Boys on the Heritage label. He also had Benton Flippen: Old Time, New Times with Rounder Records. Fiddler's Dream, his last studio album, was produced by Music Maker. He and the Smokey Mountain Boys gathered at the historic mountain music radio station WPAQ in Mount Airy, NC to do some recording, a night captured on the CD Benton Flippen & the Smokey Mountain Boys: An Evening at WPAQ, 1984."

David Holt interviews Benton Flippen, & Flippen plays "Cripple Creek" on the banjo

Benton Flippen plays "Benton's Dream"

Read more about Flippen from the Winter 2008/2009 Fiddler's Magazine

Music Maker Announcement of Flippen's death

I wrote the liner notes to one of Benton's albums back in the '70s.  He had a tremendously economical bowing style considering he was playing very rhythmic, Round Peak music.  He owned the Galax Fiddlers Convention for decades it seemed like. And why the hell not--he replaced Fred Cockerham fer gawd's sake!   Certainly a great tree has fallen.  

Hannity--A Pointless Exercise

Ok, it was totally my responsibility to turn on the damn car radio on the way home and then not change the channel when Hannity's show arrived from the aether.  They were talking about the excellent decision in New York last week--"they" being some guy from the so-called "family research council," a group that would be fine with gassing teh gay one and all on grounds of "improving the race," Mr. Hannity as "moderator", meaning a person who jumps in and mangles the affirmative side's sensible rejoinders, and then the other side herself, a very articulate woman named Sally, a lawyer no less, and a member of a same-sex relationship with children.  I went to Hannity's websites this morning to try to find her name, as Sally did a bang up job under the circumstances--no luck.  Mr. Hannity's website is just as fucked up as his phony talk show--that is, what Mr. Hannity produces daily is the illusion of conversation masking pure right-wing masturbation, period, end of story. 

In this particular instance Mr. Hannity had nothing to stand on at all--as the whole anti-same-sex marriage thing has never had anything going for it other than to stimulate lizard-brain hate for homosexuals.  Since a very big state has now ratified the obvious--that the right to marry should be applied equally--Hannity and the so-called Christian representative were changing tacks--yesterday the question was, is this really all right for "the children."  When Sally objected that she had children, she was chided: "let's not personalize this."  Yeah.

The thing is, people who still live in a sane, human universe should just stop going on Mr. Hannity's phony conversations.  Sally should have said "fuck you" and walked off the show, after Hannity had patronized her the first time.  Instead, like a person who makes every effort to engage with the "other side" in the hopes of finding common ground, she ignored, again and again, Hannity's no-holds-barred diminution of her personally and kept soldiering on, focused on the alleged subject of the show. 

All this did, in the end, was allow Hannity to produce yet another faux conversation, as "fair and balanced" as a 2-ton anchor around your ankle.  It is simply not worth the breath.  Right wing radio is all propaganda, 24-7.  As highly trained salespersons, they are, one and all, capable of demolishing most people of good will--because they have no good will at all.  And that's the Mussolini rejoinder. 

Meanwhile--more cudos to New York State.  What the right says about same-sex marriage may become moot. 

Remarkable

http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2009/11/winter-apples.html

According to a detailed report at FireDogLake, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser physically assaulted a fellow justice (and a woman at that) prior to his upholding the "budget" law designed this past spring by Governor Walker and passed under dubiously legal circumstances by the Wisconsin Legislature.  Here's a link to the story at firedog:

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/06/25/wisconsin-supreme-court-justice-prosser-choked-colleague-before-anti-union-decision/

As you can read in the piece, much has yet to be fact-checked.  On the other hand, no clear denials are forthcoming from Justice Prosser, and one has to wonder if one is simply a reasonable person.  And once again, I have to note that this sort of exchange is basically a hallmark of authoritarianism--fascism if you will.  We're seeing a lot of this these days, in a lot of contexts.  Too many seem to think that if things aren't going their way, it's time to choke, punch, and even shoot.  As Mussolini said to the reporter when asked what his first act would be upon becoming the Supreme Leader of Italy--"Why, to kill you."  I've quoted that before.  I just think it's a striking illustration of the moment when dialog becomes something else--something not about ideas any more.

I hope someone somewhere is working on a book about how all these right-wing governors and legislatures cooked up this state-by-state mini-revolution that's now underway.  I find it very hard to imagine that it was just "in the air," although perhaps the ground-swell of Tea Party activism which preceded last fall's elections really lifted all these people to at least temporary power.  Certainly plenty of people at the Tea Party rallies were capable of living in immediate inconsistency: there was more than one quote along the lines of "get government out of health care, but hands off my Medicare."  Humans are more than capable of living in profound inconsistency.

Indeed, just yesterday I was reading a shocking article in the New Yorker* concerning a woman who refused ever to admit she was mentally ill and who eventually was discharged from an institution in New Hampshire and subsequently starved to death living in an empty house, enthralled and distracted by her fantasies.  She wrote a journal describing her life to the bitter end, and survived for months only on apples until they finally ran out.  This true story reflects a general trend in the ongoing "contest," if you like, between a law of absolutes and a psychiatry which deals with what we actually find here in the world--complexity and shadows.  The woman's sister is suing the hospital for discharging her without any word to anyone in her family.  The hospital, grounded in many legal decisions handed down since the '70s, believed they were simply following the woman's wishes and decisions: the woman, "Linda," refused all treatment, asserted that she had no mental illness, believed her sister was controlling, stood firmly on her right to "liberty" as she walked out the door with pocket change and no plan of survival.  The question--perhaps forever an open one--is where "decisions" can be judged by others to be so misguided as to be overruled--even at peril to some absolute "freedom" that we also all support here in the USofA.  It's a conundrum, that's for sure, and it exists not only at the personal level, but at the level of the body politic.  Let us not forget:  Hitler was elected.  Thus, in a real sense the rubble that was Germany in the fall of 1945 was a result of the will of the people of Germany.

I mentioned the fine conversation with Billy Wilder I happened to watch the other day on Turner Classics.  Mr. Wilder had escaped Germany in 1933.  He made a movie about the concentration camps in 1945.  Germans walked out of it--until he tied their food ration card access to sitting through the film.  His hope was that they would see--admit to themselves in other words--what had "really" happened.  This was not an easy task.  People would much rather deny painful truths.  And frequently people actually succeed in denying--until some harsher reality simply asserts itself in its complete undeniability.  The apples ran out and Linda starved to death.  And right now, Congress withholds funding the EPA.  Just sayin'. 

*God Knows Where I Am, Annals of Mental Health, Rachel Aviv, New Yorker, May 30, 2011.  [I've been told in conversations down at the Texaco that any reference to the New Yorker is suspect, because the New Yorker is a "liberal" source not to be trusted.  I offer this footnotal anecdote as an example of the methodology of denial, living and breathing--indeed puffing on a cigaret--even here in Chatham County.]

Update: Ann Althouse has obliquely confirmed the news that Justice Prosser assaulted Justice Bradley last weekend.   Here's the link:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/06/28/legal-scholar/
I take quibbling about who's "bigger" implies that the event is a fact and not some leftist smear.  

Milestones

Maryland Match Company

Libby woke me up in the night to tell me about New York's vote to make it legal for two people to marry.  Here's Tbogg's take on this very significant moment:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/06/24/our-hearts-were-young-and-gay/

There's a general principle hidden in there too, in a week in which the "other side," meaning those folks Tbogg mentions in his piece, have basically outlawed all abortion clinics in Kansas by virtue of the mischievous application of building codes.  Odd that the very people who seem to relish this utter fantasy of Sharia Law being imposed on the US are themselves actually bringing Sharia Law to various of our states.

And at the national level, Mr. Cantor walks out on negotiations concerning the debt limit.  I think Digby's probably exactly right on this--it's a kabuki dance, period.  That's sad.  It means Mr. Obama is thoroughly entangled, when he should be standing up for America and explaining clearly, every day, that the Republicans are bent on destroying the entire fabric of social programs which have been put in place since the '30s.  At the very least, this really ought to be said:  if the Debt Limit is not raised, it is Republicans who are blowing up a fragile economy, and their smarmy, misleading ads about Obama's record don't change that fact a bit.  The rightwingers like to complain about Mr. Obama "apologizing" to world leaders (something he didn't do, by the way).  But it's the rightwing that he's reticent about standing up to at the moment.  Are they going to say, sometime towards next November, that it's Obama's fault because he didn't stop them from playing with matches?  Answer: of course they will, and you heard it here first.