Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain't Never Been Told: A Narrative Account with Entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof

Chapter 1. Treats of the Parallel Rise of the Industrial Revolution, the Blues, Radical Abolitionism & Mechanical & Martial Time

3 Chapter 1 Treats of the Parallel Rise of the Industrial Revolution, the Blues, Radical Abolitionism & Mechanical & Martial Time { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } Now on with the show; let the pome begin: See, Gentle Reader, the Light slowly dawn on the 1890s. See how now AMERICA is in the infancy of its Industrialization . Hear the up beat down { Bill Harris } 4 beat, the heartening signature sound, the cultural keystone, the standard of entertainment (since the 1830s), in every village & hamlet, every borough, burg & town worth its Stars and Stripes, the music most popular, the hardy pace-setting, infectious, militaristic, patriotic, morale-lifting, processional sound. See the citizenry, parading like Hamelin’s enchanted heirs, in the snares of its brass band mania, marching in the communal quickstep, ONE, 2, THREE, 4, DAAA da dada da dada da umpp! umpp! dada da dada da dada daaa da umpp! umpp! umpp! umpp! of a Sousa march, ONE, 2 THREE, 4: All AMERICAN John Philip: 1854–1932 of (Note the irony . . .) Portuguese & German parents. See the North. See the mechanizing cities on the hill. See the smoking furnaces of gritty, glowing factories fueling by the recent war’s demands. Fired by coal. For now, just look away, look away, look away to Dixie’s lands. { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 5 Hear, from as far back as the 1600s (when o’er in Merry Ole, Black Masques & Othello were vogue-pop) & the (little noted, much misread) field hollers, & protest & work & play & social & sacred songs were congealing into the primal ooze of the blues. The blues. “A feeling.” For the blues was without form, & negroid; & deep was the darkness upon its face, & heavy the weight upon its soul. But its Spirit was a harkening back & a hankering forth, & it was intimate; & it was individually universal & insistent as heartbeats, or the Mississippi’s course & surge, Two, 3, Four. Why? the question is, was it? What workings, what source? what urgency, paucity, dearth, privation, what unfulfilled need sires this dark art? & then there’s the question of the timing simultaneity. Is’t serendipity? Perchance happenstance? Happenstance perchance? This phenomenal, seemingly synchronous geneses of the blues & Industrialization. The blues. “The music,” scholar W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) says, { Bill Harris } 6 “of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” The blues. “Not music,” Southern sages assert, “so much as indescribably uncultivated offbeat , nigger-lazy slurrings; downbeat & crude groaning-moaning calls to console a No-body cares ’bout de troubles I’se seed soul.” See the South (once again) turn a deaf ear & blind eye to a future force, as it had some 6 decades before, while still A-MERICA’s Cradle of Power, beholding, then with arrogant apathy, the dawn of Industrialization: the time in A-MERICA of change that changes A-MERICA & Time, Tick Tock. Machine for man, Tick Tock Tick Tock. Factory for cottage, Tick Tock Tick Tock. Urban for rural, Tick Tock Tick Tock. Capitalist for landowner, Tick Tock. Massed goods-makers make the move to the new Movement, & their retooled worker-consumers March to the tune TOOT! TOOT! & Ding Dong & Tick Tock of factory whistles, mill’s bells & clocks. { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 7 Clocks (mechanical gear for measuring or denoting time, whose operation depends on a constant mechanical oscillator by means of which the energy stored advances an indicator at a controlled rate. Tick Tock Tick Tock). Clocks. Manufactured-in-the-North clocks, one of A-MERICA’s first mass-produced goods. See the pendulum swing Tick Tock. From nature’s natural to Industry’s dictums, &, as if its time isn’t running out, see the South, soothed by the sounds of the same old oscillating groan, grunt & sigh of an economy based on unrecompensed bondage. See the South disregard, though much malign, the hiss, whir, chug & grind of the North’s mechanization. See the South try to hold back the hands of time, Tick Tock Tick Tock . . . & the North try to assuage the hourly wage. On time, social philosopher, political theorist, German, Karl Marx (1818– { Bill Harris } 8 1883) will, in 1847 say, “We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man...