'Big Mama Thornton: I Can't Be Anyone Else But Me' - A Short Review

   I went to see the Irish premier of this 2025 documentary last month knowing the bare minimum about Big Mama Thornton. Knowing little beyond that she had a strong role in the birth of Rock and Roll. I did not even know what her role with that birth was. 

  But the documentary soon informed me of the outline of the role in the music she gave birth to. Big Mama Thornton was originally called Willy Mae Thornton and was born in 1926 to lead the hard life those who were black and poor did, early on. She was physically strong, she had to be to survive the harsh life that she, and millions of others, were raised to live out, enduring a poverty they did not ask for amidst the great depression and other financial pressures. As a young adult she was 6 foot 1 inches tall and weighted up to 270 lbs, sometimes less than that. Her first public introduction to music was in the Baptist Church in her native Montogmery, Alabama. There her father was a minister and her mother sang from the front of the stage. Willy Mae went to church and sometimes sang, mostly she attended but did not sing. When Willy Mae was 13 her mother contracted tuberculosis and had to be nursed in the Montgomery Tuberculosis Sanitorium by Willy Mae until her death soon after. Willy Mae missed that much school for nursing her mother that she could not return to her education. She took her first job as a washer up in one of the roughter local taverns.

  Many owners of record labels and managers of musical acts were innately untrustworthy characters who when anyone trusted them, then they did so either for them not knowing who they were trusting, having nobody else to trust, or desperation. Willy Mae Thornton's first break as a singer came when she was 14, from the older sister of the then recently died Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. To see the footage of Bessie Smith, what litttle of it there is and even as it is unrepresentative of Smith as how she deserved to be seen, was one of the early treats in the documentary. Ma Rainey also died soon after, in 1939. With her strong vocal style Thornton became an early natural heir to those women who stamped their characters onto the blues, and onto 'race records' as they were known. Thornton would tour but not record for the next 11 years, the first 8 of them as a comedienne, singer, and dancer in a revue style show before she left the show. She felt sure she was being underpaid and cheated out of money she was owed. She had to wait until she was 25 before she cut her first sides 78 rpm sides as part of a version of the troupe she had left earlier. The sides were cut for E&W records of Houston. There she got her first song writing credits. Through a series of coincidences she was signed as part of her troupe to Peacock records in 1952. There, as a solo artist, she met the young Lieber and Stoller who wrote the song 'Hound Dog' around discussion they had with her. It was the first song they had written. She was awkward as she was coached into giving them the vocal performance they wanted as producers, but they got what they wanted when she could feel like she owned it as a self taught musician. She provided the backing band, and one of the stand out performances on the record is the drums which were played by her drummer Johnny Otis, The record sold locally and then sold across America, and gave her a name that in years to come  would make her a headline act in gigs acrfoss America, and in Europe, Whilst her record label at the time denied her the co-credit for the song and denied her the earnings she should have got for co-writing and co-arranging the song.

  From then on, in spite of her lack of secure grounding with a very male record industry, an uneasy relationship with being managed, a certain defensiveness about how to play and record a song, and never quite being on the top side of her economic situation as she should be (a standard complaint with blues artists), she was on her way.

  For the next three decades she was touring, recording and sometimes resting to write more songs including 'Ball and Chain' as recorded to spectacular effect Janis Joplin who asked Big Mama Thornton if she may. The film fills lots of the holes in her story where there is no footage, or reports of events in her life, with shots of car lights on the road representing her life. The car headlights footage is intersperced with the recollections of those who knew her and have documented her life, some of them documenting it long after she died. 

  The film ends with footage filmed recorded by British television a Channel 4, who filmed her live on her last concerts where she is in full comand of the stage, both as a blues singer and as a fine example of a drag king. A woman who dresses stylishly in male clothing. Not that her sexuality was ever the couse of comment, she seemed to be above any such comment. I just thought her dress sense was just fabulous.  

Take The Weight Out Of life

I would rather be a human being
than a human doing, 
I like how being allows me a lightness
lighter than doing, and being done to or for.

This being both lifts me up,
and lifts those around me.... 

In The Serial Catastrophe Government

 I understand how Trump and the Tech Bros
work: 'run fast and break things' is their motto.

What I don't understand, because it is so hard to ask
about how they run so fast and break so many things
is which is the cause? Which is the symptom?
Because where the cause leads, the symptom follows...

From the distance I am from the USA
it would be easiest for me to believe
that both are symptoms of another cause:
being incapable of long term fore-thought
before acting as ministers grab at
the nearest solution that presents itself.

Recorded 100 years Ago Today - 'Young Woman Blues' - Bessie Smith

 

Young Woman’s Blues (Bessie Smith) - recorded by Bessie Smith's and her Blues Boys. Bessie Smith (vocals), Joe Smith (cornet), Buster Bailey (Clarinet), and Fletcher Henderson (piano).

October Moon - The Hunter's Moon

...looks like every other moon, after all the moon remains the same
and lends itself to many different foreground images, for contrast.
What changes is the activities linked to the moon that month.
Hunters in the wild like good light, just as their quarry
like the shadows to hide in.

So as the nights get longer and the light of the sun is reflected
more brightly by the moon, so the moon becomes
the hunter's helper, where only the hunter knows.
what their role is in the hostilities between hunter and hunted. 
 

 

Tempted By The Lure Of Employment

I have never read 'The Screwtape Letters'
by C.S. Lweis, but I recently heard a speaker
list the ways in the book, in which Screwtape
seeks to educate his nephew Wormwood,
in the trade that they both practiced, tempters.

I read the list and it reminded me of what I met
from employers, when I called myself a jobseeker.

In job applications I filled in, and the few interviews
I was granted, employers used exactly the same tactics
on me that Screwtape sought to teach Wormwood
to set up the rules neither of them wanted to live by,
but which they wanted everyone else to follow.

isolation
seperation
distraction
seduction
illusory temporary comfort
wearing seekers out,

The height of the illusion was raised in the phrase
'The devil always finds work for idle hands',
as used by knowing, property owning, adults
which they applied most readily to the youths
who landed on government traning schemes,
for them not having any other employment.

There every youth was presented with the idea
that the path to employment could be found
by them doing what their trainers told them to do,
and never asking questions. When the true aim
of the scheme was to create long term work
for the trainers, and the management above them. 

I remember acutely the seduction,
the illusory temporary comfort, that wore seekers out
where as a job seeker I was easily distracted
I never found the path that led to paid employment:
where ever I applied, the path started somewhere else.

So thank you for C.S. Lewis for the guide
to Human Reources and Modern Management.  

The Badness In My Method

Ensured that I was rarely seen
to be on the right side of history,
whatever the narrative presented to me.

But I grew up with that adversity towards reason.
My mentors were the adults who put themselves
the other side of the many well reasoned arguments
that they were presented with, which they would say
others should accept, whilst setting themselves apart from.
Whilst denying that their principles looked nearer
'do as I say not as I do' than they could demonstrate.

As far as I could tell the people who most respectfully
disagreed with each other were the allotment holders,
who gave each other autonomy because the plants
they grew set and won the arguments there -
as long as the plants were alive they remained silent.

For several years I have not cut my grass,
I have left my garden untidy. Now the ecology
quietly agrees with me over how long the grass 
grows between the trees and bushes should be.
In the heat the temperature is notably lower
 - by two or three degrees every summer.

Thus proving there is method in my badness.