Good Music; Good Book

Whether or not this feeling I have right now will last, it is currently strong enough that I have to write something about it.

Den put a CD by Odetta on the stereo to test one of his tubes, or speakers, or something else I don't understand, but it is simply a wonderful CD, brought to our attention by a good friend, Laurie, who knows the kind of music I like. The title is One Grain of Sand, and was first recorded in1963.

Maybe it is because I am reading a book about race relations in the South in the late '60s and early '70s that  this music seems so powerful right now, or maybe not. The book is Blood Done Signed My Name, by Timothy Tyson, and is really good—reads like a novel, but is a true story written by the son of a white Methodist minister who served a white congregation in North Carolina. I am half-way through the book; it is a very powerful story about the murder of a young black man in Oxford, N.C., how race relations were changing, and how the changes came about. Having grown up in the North, I had no idea how oppressed African Americans had become, and still were, in the 20th century. It seems there was more equality right after the Civil War than there was when the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 were passed.

Reading this book, and listening to this CD at this particular point in the reading (just past half-way), has made me wonder where I was when all this going on. Why wasn't I more aware? Why didn't I do something? Of course, I knew about the marches, the assassinations, the bombings; but they did not seem as real to me then as this story does now. I'm not sure anything will be changed by discovering something I didn't know 45 or 50 years ago, but maybe there is some value in hindsight.