Friday Music: The Blind Boys of Alabama

The Blind Boys of Alabama are an old-school gospel group that's been singing and touring since 1939. Yeah, 1939. That's a lot of cultural and music business changes to weather over seven decades. Originally called the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, the five original singers (Jimmy Carter, the current lead singer, has been with the group since it began) met at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in Talladega.

Clarence Fountain, another founding member, recalls the early years while the singers were still attending the institute: "The school was not happy for us to go off campus, but we would sneak out," Fountain told Folk Roots interviewer Dave Peabody. "We would go out and make some money. There was a big soldier camp up there,had about ten or twelve thousand soldiers. We'd perform for that soldier camp and we'd do alright."

On the band's name change, Fountain says, "For a while we called ourselves the Happy Land Singers and we toured all around the country. Then a promoter put us on a show with another blind group, the Jackson Harmonies from Mississippi. He billed it as a contest between the blind boys of Alabama and the blind boys of Mississippi. The name worked good so we stuck with it."

Known for remaining contemporary and collaborating with many mainstream artists while keeping their traditional gospel sensibilities, the Blind Boys have won four Grammy Awards and their most recent album, Down in New Orleans was released earlier this year.

People not apt to listen to gospel music might know the Blind Boys from their cover of the Tom Waits' song "Down in the Hole" that was the theme song for HBO's drama The Wire. (The show has used a variety of covers of the tune, with the Blind Boys' version used in season one.)


YouTube has a wonderful selection of video performances:

"Something Got A Hold On Me" -- a 1960s live performance
"Too Close" -- the same early-to-mid 1960s performance venue
"Look Where He Brought Me From" -- a live performance in a church, I think, maybe in the 1970s
some old-fashioned musical testifying at an outdoor concert or tent revival
"Run On" -- live 2001 performance on the British tv show Later
"Amazing Grace" -- their live version sung to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun," and here's a studio version someone has set to images of Black American history
"Satisfied Mind" -- Ben Harper & Blind Boys of Alabama performing live (There Will Be A Light, Harper's album with the Boys came out in 2004)
"Shall Not Walk Alone" -- with Ben Harper, video is of a recording studio performance
"Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb" -- the video is some cute, quirky animation (2005 album Atom Bomb)

Source

Things that crack me up #37

This is a the latest of a series at my blog, usually consisting of an amusing visual image about disability. Visual descriptions are meant to both assist those who cannot view the image well, and encourage discussion when others see something different.


















Visual description: A one-pane comic, drawn very simply. A stick figure stands next to a sign posted on a wall that reads "Third Floor Office" with some Braille just below those words. At the top of the comic: "I learned to read Braille a while back, and I've noticed that the messages on signs don't always match the regular text." The stick figure touching the Braille signage has a thought balloon translating what she reads: "S-I-G-H-T-E-D P-E-O-P-L-E S-U-C-K ... Hey!"

Comic source

h/t to Andrea at Andrea's Buzzing About

Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog

Things that crack me up, #32

For Steve and Connie:

Visual description: It's a color photo evidently taken somewhere on graduation day as many of the people in the background are wearing gowns and academic regalia. A tarred walkway cuts over a grassy area. In the foreground a red sawhorse blocks the entire walkway for no obvious reason. These words are printed boldly in white on one of the red horizontal crossboards: "Providing a safer environment for the visually impaired."

Things that crack me up, #29

"This is a job for Blindness Girl!"

And, her resume explained by Steve Kuusisto at (where else?) Planet of the Blind.

Poetry Monday: Every Man's Burden

The Magic Wand
by Lynn Manning

Quick-change artist extraordinaire,
I whip out my folded cane
and change from black man to blind man
with a flick of my wrist.

It is a profound metamorphosis—
From God gifted wizard of roundball
dominating backboards across America,
To God-gifted idiot savant composer
pounding out chart-busters on a cockeyed whim;
From sociopathic gangbanger with death for eyes
to all-seeing soul with saintly spirit;
From rape deranged misogynist
to poor motherless child;
From welfare-rich pimp
to disability-rich gimp;
And from ‘white man’s burden’
to every man’s burden.

It is always a profound metamorphosis.
Whether from cursed by man to cursed by God;
or from scriptures condemned to God ordained,
My final form is never of my choosing;
I only wield the wand;
You are the magicians.

Poetry Monday: The Knife of Language

Helen Takes the Stage
by Kathi Wolfe

(Helen Keller starred in a vaudeville show The Bluebird of Happiness in 1924.)

Here I am,
playing,
like a well-trained
seal, for you,
between the clowns
and singing dogs.
Your surprise
at seeing me in the flesh
in a room smelling like cigars,
makes my skin prickle with heat
more than the stage lights.
Did you know
that Mark Twain taught
me to play pool and spit tobacco?
Annie, my teacher, hates
my being here.
"It's so undignified
to tell jokes to drunks
and traveling salesmen," she says.
I crave applause
more than scotch, cigarettes
or hot dogs swimming in mustard.
With the knife of language,
I've carved out the best life
an icon can.
But, being a saint
is as difficult
as getting a drink during Prohibition.
Yet, until the curtain falls,
I am tethered, like you,
to the laughing
muck and mire of the earth.


And from The Washington Post in July of 2001, an article by the above poet on heroes and inspiration: "He's Your Inspiration, Not Mine":

Don't get me wrong -- I like to readnews reports on disabled people, at least when they're about issues -- health insurance, discrimination, education -- that concern me and my peers.

Just keep us in some kind of real context. Occasionally, show us not as main characters but as background characters -- like a story about a Metro delay or the Smithsonian Folklife Festival that includes, but doesn't necessarily feature, the folks with white canes and wheelchairs stuck on the subway or sitting in the audience. And on TV and in movies, give us some roles as regular characters -- like Marlee Matlin's deaf political consultant on "The West Wing." There's been progress on this front in the last few years; I'd like to see more.

And I'd like to see stories about some of the peoplewho really are heroes to those of us with disabilities. Like those who found a sudden demand for their previously unwanted services during World War II, and rose to the challenge. While able-bodied men were away fighting, disabled people worked in factories and offices and served as volunteers. Reporting for a 1995 article, I talked to Norma Krajczar of Morehead City, N.C. As a visually impaired teenager in Massachusetts, Norma was a volunteer aircraft warden; the thought was that her sensitive hearing would give her an advantage over sighted wardens in listening for enemy planes. And I learned that Akron, Ohio, became known as the "crossroads of the deaf" because of all the deaf people who came to work in tire factories converted to defense plants -- making more money than they had ever been able to before. Yet, even with all the reporting that's been done recently about the Greatest Generation, you don't hear much about those folks.

The Sparrow

I've been reading The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. It's a captivating novel about a Jesuit-funded mission to contact newly-discovered aliens on a planet in the Alpha Centauri region of space. It's set just twelve years into the future -- 2019 -- and, well, the story doesn't seem to be any more about disability issues than the average novel, which is to say that there is always a little something about impairments and the human condition in most fiction. Though the mysterious happenings in the far reaches of space do involve horrific damage to one of the main character's hands, I haven't read far enough yet to see what that's all about.

But, interestingly, there's this, about the priesthood and celibacy:

It would not have surprised Emilio Sandoz to learn that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends. The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.

One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It's not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself. It's got to be something like that for you guys."

And Emilio realized that Sam was right. When wearing clericals, he did feel as though he had a sign over his head flashing NO LEGITIMATE SEX LIFE. Lay people assumed they knew something fundamental about him. They had opinions about his life. Without any understanding of what celibacy was about, they found his choice laughable, or sick.

The single craziest thing about being blind, using a wheelchair, having an artificial limb ....

When I was new to being visibly disabled, a teenager, I thought of this mixture of the inability to blend and being made to symbolize something outside my own true experience as a kind of odd celebrity. People stare wherever you go. You use back entrances, meet with managers (and busboys) to get into venues through long back hallways before arriving at your reserved seats, have special policies that apply just to you. I could be tardy to my high school classes because it was assumed the elevator made me late. (Of course, it was often the elevator.)

There was a special White House tour for crips when I visited DC with my family years ago. I was spotted and we were literally pulled out of the very long ticket line and told to just approach a particular gate at a certain time without need for passes. As instructed, we jumped the line at the Washington Memorial too. But I have no sense of whether our special gub'mint tour included extras or deprived wheelchair-using folks of something special I'd have liked to see. As far as I know, I didn't have the option of declining these services -- it was the "accessible" gimp tour or nothing.

Some of this has been alleviated by ADA compliance over the years. I don't know about the DC sites -- the last time I visited just as the ADA was passed and much had yet to change.

But the single craziest thing about my life with severe physical impairments has always been this bizarre social exchange about what would otherwise be a private aspect of my body and my life. Not just the architectural barriers that must be negotiated, but the prayers, the judgments and the self-conscious comments of others designed to satisfy curiosity or put themselves more at ease.

Steve Kuusisto has blogged a bit about this recently:

They've spotted the guide dog. They see you are by yourself. They are good hearted people. They want to talk about dogs or the fact that they have a blind uncle, or auntie, or they have a blind neighbor, or maybe their postman is blind and for some unknown reason he's still delivering the mail by touch and isn't this a miracle?

Isn't it curious that the celibacy of priesthood, interracial adoption, being blind, and sitting on wheels all provoke remarkably similar public experiences? If you trust the fictional truth in the book I'm reading, that is. And I do. I do.

Blind Rage and the legacy of Helen Keller

It wasn't until I began reading Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Heller that I realized my own ambivalence to the deaf-blind female icon of disability. Written as a series of letters interrogating Helen Keller and the written record she left behind of her life, Kleege explores what has been left unsaid, altered for public consumption, and molded to fit the appropriate image of what a woman without hearing and sight was expected to be in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

A blind woman herself, Kleege fuels what could be called either creative nonfiction or a feminist critique of Helen Keller's life and autobiographic writings with the frustration and anger of a lifetime of comparisons to Keller -- the saintly example of a proper, over-achieving disabled girl famous all over the world. I learned last year that critiques of famous public figures with disabilities from a feminist/disability rights perspective are just about impossible to find, so this book is especially welcome and needed as a contribution to both feminist history and disability studies.

Kleege's approach in questioning Keller's life is a distinctly feminist one. An awareness of "the gaze" exists throughout the book, and though it is primarily a nondisabled gaze upon the body and actions of a blind-deaf woman, as a disabled woman myself I find this inextricably intertwined with the familiar male gaze of feminist theory and critique. (And Michel Foucault's medical gaze, as well.) After all, the nondisabled gaze upon Keller would have been quite different were she a deaf-blind boy and man instead of a girl and woman. Ability and gender are inseparable in the complex personal interactions of disabled women within a society that privileges both male and able-bodiedness.

The book is divided into four sections: Consciousness on Trial, Full Body Contact, Working the Pump, and The Hand's Memory. Roughly, these cover Helen's childhood attainment of language, adult relationships, making a living through her famous story, and old age.

I'd read part of Consciousness on Trial a couple years ago as part of the anthology Points of Contact: Disability, Art and Culture which had at least one other essay that examined the power of the sighted gaze upon blind folks and intrigued me as a sort of colonization of disabled bodies. That colonization leads to assumptions about the minds of disabled people and what they are and are not capable of as the Other -- we've seen this public process recently in the case of Ashley X.

At age eleven, Keller wrote a story for the man who headed the Perkins School for the Blind, and he proudly published it as an example of the excellence of the school and his young deaf-blind prodigy. But the story turned out to be strikingly similar to a story Keller had no doubt been read at age eight, during the summer shortly after she began to understand the handsigning teacher Annie Sullivan used to communicate with her. She was learning new words, language, at an astonishing rate. Communicating exhuberantly. Absorbing new ideas like a sponge.

The school put Helen on trial for plagiarism, attempting to discern if Sullivan was honestly relaying the true achievements of her famous student or exaggerating her capabilities. Without "Teacher" at her side, young Helen faced a panel of unidentified men and women she could neither see nor hear who interrogated her about the complex concepts of knowledge and memory. Kleege imagines the details of the scene and the aftereffects it had on Keller's confidence.

Kleege also unflinchingly explores Keller's life through these nondisabled preconceptions and doubts of what a deaf-blind woman can be:

So here it is. Here's what I've come to ask. Were you a hoax, Helen? A fake? There, I've typed the words. Forgive me, Helen. It's a betrayal, I know. My stomach feels tight and slimy. My flesh is pulling back from my skin. But I really need to know. Because as I'm sure you've thought from time to time, maybe every hour of every day, it's what they think. Them -- the ablebodied, the hearing and seeing majority, the Normals, as some of us call them today. They may play lip service to your achievements, may laud all you accomplished, hold you up as an example to children: "Why can't you be more like Helen Keller?" But behind all those words there's a doubt. Maybe you were a hoax, a fake, a fraud. Yes, Teacher tamed you. She cleaned you up and made you docile. She taught you how to shake hands and smile for cameras. She taught you to make your little hand gestures, and to mumble on cue. But who's to say you were really saying what she said you were? (p.31)

What it would mean to be a "hoax" in this context is tenuously dependent on what the nondisabled public believes is the distance between their able-bodied expectations of who Helen was and all that she and Teacher offered about who she was. As Kleege makes clear, what they offered the public had a great deal to do with what the public was ready or willing to accept. Still, as interest in her as a Vaudeville "act" proves, Helen's very livelihood was dependent on the public's awe and borderline disbelief of everything she was. A charismatic storyteller, Helen (mostly with Sullivan) toured Vaudeville stages for years as a means of financial support. The novelty of her being considered a being of intelligence and consciousness is what made her a ticket-selling act. Or, more pessimistically stated, the continuing doubt of her consciousness and humanity are what drew the crowds.

With a lifetime of confounding expectations of the nondisabled public, fielding questions implicit and explicit about capability, Kleege understands how the pressure effects Keller:

It's the doubt, Helen. You know about the doubt. It's that nagging unease at the back of your mind whenever anything good happens. You're in school and you wonder, "Is the A on this paper a gift? Would a Normal student get an A for this?" You get a job, but you wonder, "Do they really think I'm qualified or is this just some sort of affirmative action quota?"

....Of course you know about the doubt. The plagiarism case seems to have been the precise moment in your life when the doubt first took hold. Because you must have understood that they would never have done it to a Normal child. If you'd been a Normal child, they would have said, "So someone read you the story, and you remember the story but don't remember the person reading it to you. OK. I can see how that could happen. Sounds reasonable to me." But because it was you, and because seeing and hearing had nothing to do with your experience of the world, they couldn't let it go at that. (pp. 33-4)

As a specific interrogation of the icon Helen Keller, Blind Rage is deeply compelling. Kleege speculates about Helen's adult relationships and possible romantic connections. She explores the complex power struggles undoubtedly present in her lifelong association with Sullivan, who was a recovered blind person deeply aware of the threatening abysses of poverty and dejection awaiting helpless disabled women. She questions to what degree the medium of Sullivan for so much of Helen's communication, and the enterprise of being such a famous person, affected who Helen was and who she appeared to be.

On a broader level, Kleege's book works as a discussion of how history remembers those who can't always speak for themselves, those living under the shadow of monolithic stereotypes of what they can be, and those whose consciousness and humanity are relentlessly doubted.

_____________________________________________

Visual description of photos: The three photos above came from a simple Google search for images of Helen Keller.The first is her in profile as a child, the second is of her as an adult with Annie Sullivan next to her signing into her hand. The last is a portrait of Keller as an elderly woman, looking directly into the camera. It seems by far the most honest and unstaged and, to me, interesting of the three.

Mini-Slumgullion

An all non-Ashley version:

Connie at Planet of the Blind writes about trading up to get her husband Steve.

Amy Tenderich at Diabetes Mine writes on bravery and chicken-shittedness.

Go wish Bint Alshama at My Private Casbah a belated Happy 30th Birthday! She's also outlived her initial cancer diagnosis four years now and so there's two reasons to celebrate.

Because sometimes I miss him: Cutter John and The Starship Enterpoop.

Books for the new year

Happy New Year everyone!

Like every book lover I know, I've got a towering (and growing) pile of books waiting to be read. I thought I'd share a brief list of some books from that pile that I plan to read in 2007. All of these are disability-related and currently wedged between my full bookshelf and dresser. If you've already read them, are interested in discussing them, or happen to be the author, this is your heads-up to what I hope will be interesting future discussions here on wherever these books take us.

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon -- Moon won the Nebula Award in 2003 for this novel told from the perspective of a young autistic man. Normally a writer of military sci-fi, this story apparently differs from the author's usual genre and was prompted because she has a child with autism.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn -- This will be a reread for me, but I haven't been back to it since I first found it at the fabulous feminist bookstore Women and Children First in Chicago when it was originally published in 1983. An amazing novel about carnival freaks and disability told in first-person by Olympia Binewski, a bald, humpbacked albino dwarf.

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer -- From the Amazon description: "McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible."

Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto -- Fellow disability blogger Stephen's first memoir.

My Body Politic by Simi Linton -- Author of the excellent Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity tells her personal story.

Blackbird Fly Away by Hugh Gallagher -- A personal memoir.

By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich by Hugh Gallagher -- A definitive book detailing the eugenics movement against disabled people in Nazi Germany. Gallagher also wrote FDR's Splendid Deception.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire -- I read this while in the hospital and unable to blog about it. An alternative telling of The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch Elphaba's point-of-view. Disability and physical difference everywhere.

I also hope to read Jen Burke's A Life Less Convenient and Stephen's newest book, Eavesdropping, but I haven't bought them yet.

Book meme

I've been tagged by IrrationalPoint for this book meme, which will offer a little taste of the book review I'm currently working on.

Here's the meme:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
   
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
   
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
   
4. Name of the book and the author
   
5. Tag three people

She pats your arm and tells you, "That's all he wants, Helen. Just the face. You touch the cage. You make the face. It'll be fine."

That's page 123 from Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage: Letter to Helen Keller, and the excerpt is Helen in Hollywood acting in a little known film about her own life.

Passing on the meme plague, I tag Bint of My Private Casbah, Thistle of Thistle in Vermont, and Grace at What if no one's watching?

Saturday Slumgullion #21 -- Currency Edition

The original news from AP via CBS News: In late November, a federal judge ruled that United States paper currency discriminates against blind people because different denominations of bills are impossible to tell apart without vision or some other assistance.

"It's just frankly unfair that blind people should have to rely on the good faith of people they have never met in knowing whether they've been given the correct change." --Jeffrey A. Lovitky, attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit

This week, the Bush administration filed an appeal, stating (among other things) that blind folks can use credit cards if they want better control of their money.

Our Money Too, an organization supporting the change of paper currency debunks some myths about the process and its effects. Here's one I hadn't thought of myself:

Myth No. 5: The issue of tactilely discernable currency is a "distraction" from important issues impacting blind people.

• Tactilely discernable paper currency will increase employment opportunities for blind and visually impaired people by affording them greater access to jobs where the handling of cash is an "essential function" of the job.

• Younger blind and visually impaired Americans will have an easier time finding work in the retail sector-an industry where many young people get their first work-related experience.

• Improving blind and visually impaired people's access to a wider variety of jobs is especially important considering the fact that between 55% and 60% of visually impaired people of working age and 70% of working-age people who are legally blind remain unemployed, according to the most recent statistics from the American Foundation for the Blind.

Joseph Shapiro's NPR report on some blind people who don't feel money redesign is necessary. It's audio, but there are also images of various foreign currency that does accommodate blind people's needs at the link.

An article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Surprisingly, the ruling was not universally embraced by the more than 10 million blind and visually impaired people in America. While few deny that having differentiated bills would make life easier, some say the lawsuit sends a message that the blind are helpless. Opponents also say it detracts from other problems blind people face, such as unemployment and lack of Internet access.

A statement against currency redesign from the National Federation of the Blind:

The National Federation of the Blind believes that with training and opportunity, blind people can compete in the world with only minor modifications. The American Council of the Blind, which brought the lawsuit against the United States Treasury, promotes the view that the blind are unable to compete unless the world is modified dramatically and specifically for blind people, and that the blind must be made objects of care and pity rather than equal participants in society.

An article from the Press-Enterprise:

"I had a friend who took out a $100 bill thinking it was a $10, and paid for a cab. And the driver kept it," said Shannon Burke, a mostly blind La Quinta resident who teaches along with Davies at the Braille Institute in Rancho Mirage. "If we had some sort of way to differentiate, that wouldn't happen."

At the Howard County Maryland Blog -- "Blind Money and Wasted Resources" questions the Bush administration's assertions in its appeal of the judge's ruling.

At Majikthise, Lindsey Beyerstein writes about vending machines and the government's moral imperative.

Kathy Podgers at From the Port comments on the position of the National Federation of the Blind.

The ruling debated at Overlawyered.

At Speak Up, an unlikely but creative solution: smell-o-cash.

David Gates at Growing Up with a Disability asks "Why can't we get it?"

At Blind Chance, David Faucheux on changing currency as an "accommodation."

At The Blind Bookworm Blog, Kestrell comments on the currency ruling and on comments to her opinions.

And, at The Volokh Conspiracy, an examination of the ruling and what "meaningful access" means when talking about currency. Comments are interesting -- if infuriating -- too.

Because conservatives are using Judge Robertson's record as a reason this ruling is faulty, here's the Wiki on him.

For the curious: this is an electronic money reader. Notice it's not currently available until March of 2007, and that it costs $270.

Visit the Disability Carnival #4

The newest installment of the Disability Carnival is up over at Diary of a Goldfish. Great reading for the long holiday weekend there, so check it out.

And get ready for carnival #5 at Stephen & Connie Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind on Thursday, December 14. The deadline, I expect, is the Monday before -- December 11. The theme is "Traveling with a disability: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." See you there!