Mixed Feelings & A Requiem
I grew up in North Carolina. As time passes I look back at my formative years as a kid in the 50s. My parents had life long careers working in the tobacco factories. Evangelical fundamentalist religion was the structuring element of our personal lives. In the pre civil rights days most of my friends were white. People of color did not mix with “us.” I was aware of impoverished neighborhoods. I thought erroneously that was just how “those people” wanted to live. Since then a lot has changed, thanks in large degree to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. In truth many deserve credit, paying with their reputations and in some cases with their blood for a more just society.
There is the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” To put it another way, “Old habits die hard.” In my great grandfathers day, the majority of North Carolina farmers, too poor to own a single slave, never the less fought and died to protect the slave holding rights of a minority of wealthy plantation owners. More soldiers fell at Gettysburg from North Carolina than from any other Southern state. Now the spirit of the old Confederacy rises from the tomb in the supporters of our recently elected president. A list of legal rationalizations are offered to justify the oppression of people of color. The mid 19th century slavers quoted scripture to justify their practice of wealth extraction from black people.
So I have mixed feelings about the place of my birth, and of the people that helped form my identity.
On Sunday the obituary written in memory of Gregg Allman awakened awareness of my Southern roots. The obit delighted me in it’s description of the alchemy of a life that produced beneficence, a humanizing effect upon others. I’ll excerpt some lines from the A/P obituary text.
MACON, Ga. — Southern rocker Gregg Allman was laid to rest Saturday near his older brother Duane in the same cemetery where they used to write songs among the tombstones, not far from US Highway 41.
Thousands of fans lined the streets of Macon to honor Allman, who was carried into Rose Hill Cemetery as a bagpiper played a somber tune. Family and friends, including musicians who played in The Allman Brothers Band over the years, gathered next to his grave and on a nearby hillside shaded by huge oak trees. Towards the end, a freight train rolled in and stopped alongside the cemetery, reminding some mourners of Allman’s lyrics to “Melissa.”
…….Allman, who blazed a trail for many Southern rock groups, died May 27 at the age of 69 at his home near Savannah, Georgia, said Michael Lehman, the rock star’s manager. He blamed liver cancer.
With Gregg at the organ and Duane playing guitar, the band began its rise to fame in the central Georgia city 90 miles south of Atlanta about five decades ago. They used to write songs while hanging out in the cemetery, Alan Paul wrote in “One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band.”
……Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Allman was raised in Florida by a single mother. Allman idolized his older brother, Duane, eventually joining a series of bands with him. Together they formed the heart of The Allman Brothers Band before Duane died in a motorcycle crash in 1971, just as they were reaching stardom.
In his 2012 memoir, “My Cross to Bear,” Allman said he finally felt “brand new” in the 1990s after years of overindulging in women, drugs and alcohol. But hepatitis C had ruined his liver, and after getting a transplant, it was music that helped him recover. Allman felt that being on the road playing music for his fans was “essential medicine for his soul,” according to a statement from the Big House, the Macon museum dedicated to the band.
….The night before he passed away, Allman was able to listen to some of the tracks being produced for his final record, “Southern Blood,” Lehman said. The album is scheduled to be released in the fall.
“He was looking forward to sharing it with the world and that dream is going to be realized,” Lehman said. “I told him that his legacy is going to be protected, and the gift that he gave to the music world will continue to live on forever.”
I do not expect that anyone will stop a freight train for my funeral.
