‘Something I Said’ Archives
Deeper Blues
from the series Something I Said... Review by DWIGHT HOBBES Dwight Hobbes A longer version of this Deeper Blues review first appeared in the June issue of Blue Monday Monthly Entertainment Magazine. Andrea Swensson’s Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs and Salvation of Cornbread Harris (University of Minnesota Press) is a must-read. She brings acumen, insight and passion to bear on a beloved Twin Cities icon while Harris, crowding 100, is still around to enjoy it. Calling Cornbread Harris a living legend understates the case. At the dawn of Minnesota Rock & Roll, he co-wrote The Augie Garcia Quintet’s trash-talking hit “Hi Ho Silver”, a humorous take off on TV’s “The Lone Ranger”. And enjoys the distinction of that band upstaging Elvis Presley’s Twin Cities debut. Swensson documents, “Cornbread and Augie wore this incident like a badge of honor. Speaking to the Star Tribune in 1993, Augie recalled that ‘pulled me off stage by my jacket. There [...]
Juneteenth
from the series Something I Said By DWIGHT HOBBES Dwight Hobbes Rabble rouser cum activist Al Flowers will be on hand for a good, old-fashioned Juneteenth joint over north at Bethune/Phyllis Wheatley on the 15th. Bet money mainstream notables, stylin’ and profilin’ to see and be seen, will swing by for a foto-opp, maybe sign some autographs. Then, get back to living the boozhie life. Flowers, though, didn’t trade the Civil Rights Era clarion call, “We Shall Overcome” in for “I Have Overcome”. Still grounded in the grassroot, he’ll be there not for show but for grow – as in helping the community honor our past, while putting a foot down about the future.Juneteenth celebrates how Texas slaves, after being hoodwinked for two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, learned they were free and had a real good time! Albeit belatedly - baseball games, fishing, rodeos, street fairs and, of course, tradition that stands to this day. Cookouts.You’ll have the [...]
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They
from the series Something I Said... By DWIGHT HOBBES Dwight Hobbes Horace McCoy’s Depression Era classic, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Simon & Schuster), may inspire you to get up on a drizzling, overcast morning and go slit your throat. Simone de Beauvoir lauded it as “The first existentialist novel to have appeared in America” and, sure enough, it’s a grim portrayal of man’s desperate inhumanity to man. And woman. It is a deftly crafted indictment of life, itself. We witness two down-and-outers trying to get a leg up in their hard scrabbled lives. Robert, dreaming of directing film, rakes and scrapes by, hired now and then as an extra. He comes across Gloria, whose best acting prospects fled with her youth. She sees the rose through world colored glasses. They end up unlikely partners in a grueling dance marathon, taking a shot at the $1500 prize. That amount of money is still nothing to sneeze at. In those days, it was a fortune. Along with, for these [...]
