folo

[Read more →]

. . . I’ve got a YouTube for ya.

[Read more →]

Attention, fellow Siegelman-case watchers. Scott Horton today provides this heads-up:

60 Minutes has been busy at work on the second installment of its series on Siegelman, which is likely to air this Sunday. It will be interesting to see if there is a recurrence of "technical problems " [at Huntsville station WHNT]

[Read more →]

Oh man, check out the 1:00 PM session here (sorry, you’ll have to rotate it one turn). And just think how much fun the escapees from that 4:15 PM session will have over cocktails too!

[Read more →]

Hat-tips to the three readers who nearly simultaneously sent us Dickie’s motion to dismiss the Bar complaint that NMC wrote about on Saturday.

Enjoy . . .

UPDATE: AND, lest there be any remaining confusion, we have also the March 14, 2008, “minute entry” (from PACER) indicating “Plea Accepted.”

Perhaps this episode could also be known as “How. To. Cheese. Off. A. Federal. Judge. (Some. More.)”

[Read more →]

Sharp-eyed Sailor spots Jerry Mitchell’s fresh report that retired Court of Appeals judge Billy Bridges is taking over for the suspended Bobby DeLaughter in Wilson v. Scruggs. (Though you have to guess the case involved, since Mitchell doesn’t name it.)

Beyond yet another instance of a childish name clinging to its owner well past the usual sell-by date, what impresses me about this story is how much of it might have been written by DeLaughter’s defense attorney.

Well, what do we know of this Judge Bridges, folo? How do you like this news?

[Read more →]

In 1939 the folklorist John Lomax and his wife Ruby visited Parchman Penitentiary (which is within the circle I mentioned yesterday that has been the subject of the last few music posts). Lomax was convinced that in prisons he could find earlier music forms, he thought uncorrupted by commercial recording. Although he was mistaken, he and later his son Alan Lomax made wonderful records in their recording visits to prisons. Most famously, in an earlier trip south in Louisiana they met, recorded, and obtained the release of the singer Leadbelly. In a late 40s trip to Parchman, Alan Lomax recorded the work song that became the opening sequence of Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

I’ve written about the 1939 John and Ruby Lomax trip when I was the coauthor of a chapter of a book about blues lyrics, Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From. With the English writer Chris Smith, we wrote an account of the facts of a ballad about the murder of a federal marshal near Booneville, Mississippi, in the early 30s. John and Ruby Lomax recorded the ballad in the 1939 trip.

They also encountered and recorded in the same camp at Parchman a singer who had already recorded commercially, Booker Washington White, later known through his Okeh records as Bukka White. White was from Aberdeen, had recorded as Washington White in Memphis in 1930, and then was sent to Parchman. After White was released, he went to Chicago to record for Okeh songs that included one about Parchman, “When Will I Change My Clothes.”

Later White moved to Memphis, where he continued to play music while holding down other jobs. He gave a guitar to his first cousin, Riley King, and was a prototype of a professional musician for his young cousin. I think I recall that King lived with White when he first came to Memphis. He definitely played with him during his early years in Memphis. Riley King is of course B.B. King.

The field notes for John and Ruby Lomax’s visit to Parchman are here, They describe their visit to the camp where White lived:

Singers were not plentiful or enthusiastic, but we recorded a few tunes before the rain subsided enough for the boys to chop wood and do other light jobs around the barracks. In the evening we tried again with fair results. We discovered that one barrier was the idea that we were there to make money out of the boys without “divvying-up”. This they were told by one of the boys who had made some commercial records. After Mr. Lomax made it clear to them the purpose of the recording and the use to-which their songs would serve, they were more generous, and helpful.

The one who had made commercial recordings was White, who thought they should be paid for making records.

Here’s one of the two songs White recorded in Parchman, “

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

.”

The Library of Congress has a series of web pages that include all the field notes and recordings from that trip in part of its wonderful American Memory web pages. You can follow John and Ruby Lomax through the 1939 trip, and listen and read about the recordings they made in Parchman from their original notes.

Here’s White on film during the blues revival era of the sixties, doing his song about his hometown, Aberdeen Mississippi Blues:

[Read more →]

I can’t make this link directly, but on the front page of the New York Times, please check out “The Last Word: Dith Pran.” It’s a video interview and profile of the photographer who died yesterday after not only naming but surviving “The Killing Fields” of Cambodia, then dedicating his life to telling the story.

May his spirit indeed be happy.

[Read more →]

Alphonso Jackson, the knucklehead HUD secretary who said publicly that he revoked a contract because the applicant, in thanking him, let slip that he didn’t like President Bush, is finally resigning this morning, according to AP.

It’s only taken two years to get him to this point, which suggests that he’s a faster learner than most of BushCo.

[Read more →]

Okay, if you agree with my granddaddy that cornbread-and-buttermilk is a good thing, maybe you can fall in line with Jim Hood’s brother Tom, executive director of the Mississippi Ethics Commission. He wows to the DJournal that the ethics-reform package that MS House and Senate leaders could begin negotiating in conference “probably this week” is “the best thing since cornbread and buttermilk.”

The legislation would require public officials to provide more details about their assets and sources of income and place greater penalties on them for violating state ethics laws. …

Among the issues is how a public official can establish a blind trust. It came to the forefront last year during the gubernatorial campaign when the state Ethics Commission allowed Gov. Haley Barbour to set up a blind trust, even though no state law governs the creation and maintenance of a such an arrangement.

Rep. Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, said if the ethics legislation passes, there will be guidelines for setting up blind trusts. Brown said that’s important, not just because of Barbour’s situation, but because of the possibility other public officials would create blind trusts.

The chambers so far agree that their conference bill should:

- Establish qualifications for the person overseeing the blind trust for the public official.

- Require initial disclosure of the items that would be placed in the blind trust.

- Prohibit the overseer of the trust from disclosing additional holdings obtained after the trust was developed.

(I assume that last provision means “disclosing to the owner” what additional holdings have gone into the blind trust, but since this is Mississippi, I may be wrong about that.) Anyhow, according to reporter Bobby Harrison, the big difference between the two versions is that the House’s requires the overseer of a public official’s blind trust to inform the owner when initial holdings in the trust are sold. (Under federal rules, owners of blind trusts remain liable for doing business with companies in their trusts until the overseer officially notifies them that said holdings are out of the trust.)

His mention of “greater penalties” is nice to see, but since he offers few details — and, last I heard, that laughable $100 fine for conducting public business in secret was still intact in the House’s proposed bill — my enthusiasm here falls short of c’bread-&-b’milk level (i.e., it’s “low”). All he explains is that the bill

gives the Ethics Commission, whose members are appointed by the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the House and chief justice of the Supreme Court, authority to enforce the state’s open meetings laws.

This provision is designed to let the public file open meetings complaints without going through a costly court procedure, although it would not forbid pursuing the issue in court. In the negotiations process, there also will be an effort to give the Ethics Commission the authority to enforce the state’s public records laws for the same reasons.

“There also will be an effort”? Jeez, Bobby, that’s as clear as . . . you-know-what.

[Read more →]