Decoration Day Blues

First started getting into blues music in college.  One thing that aided this was that the college bookstore regularly had record and tape sales (compact discs weren't invented yet), boxes and bins full of records and tapes, mostly inexpensive.  Also mostly things produced and issued in other countries- The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc.  Blues was fairly common, perhaps because the original recordings were likely available cheap, as the artists usually got their payment the recording session, so only the owners of the masters got paid for record sales, and they probably licensed the stuff cheaply.  Possibly the racist associations with that form of music were less well known in other counties, so for them it was just good music.  I was a huge fan of the then recent film The Blues Brothers, which included a scene of a street band performance by John Lee Hooker, which made me realize I needed to hear more by this artist, so the first thing I bought at one of these sales (a few held every year) was a cassette of John Lee Hooker.  I liked it, got more recordings- more Hooker, Buddy Guy, and of course Howlin' Wolf.  One of those early Howlin' Wolf purchases was an LP that collected songs he recorded for Sam Phillips in Memphis, before he officially moved to Chess in Chicago.  One of my favorite songs from that record was one called Decoration Day Blues.  Kind of a mellow song (especially for the Wolf) about how a woman he loved died and at her request he honors her on every Decoration Day.

My love of that music eventually got me to do a blues radio show, a weekly thing at my colleges for the next 8 years.  Now I just listen in my Studio or at home.

Since then, the name of the holiday was officially changed to Memorial Day, but older people (and people like me who read things) are aware of what came before.  Plus I have a bit of a connection, formed well after I got the record.  I was never in the military or lost any family members to war, but in the 90's I lived in Carbondale, IL, part of Jackson County, and home to John A. Logan, former civil war general and later member of government. There's a junior college in the area there named for him.   One thing he was know for was being a big advocate for the creation of a Decoration Day national holiday, having witnessed such a thing in Carbondale.  The internet tells me that such traditions were quite common around that time, making the claims of the first such day to be quite contentious. The wikipedia entry includes so many claims that it doesn't even list Carbondale, but in the years I lived there they believed they invented it and should get the credit.  Anyway, it began as a custom of decorating the graves of veterans, thus the name Decoration Day, which I believe as officially changed to Memorial Day around the time I was born.

The decoration things still happens, and there are numerous groups who each year plant little American flags on the grave of tens of thousands of veterans on Memorial Day each year.   All well and good, but mostly it's used as an excuse for businesses to hold sales, or for people with jobs to not work them.  Coupled with a rare sunny weekend, our local towns were overwhelmed with stupid visitors, as anyone of normal intelligence knows that going to a beach town on a holiday weekend in summer is a very bad idea.  Roads are choked with traffic, bars and restaurants are over crowded, parking is often unavailable (parking lots at touristy areas often have 3 price signs- one for regular summer weekdays, one for summer weekends, and one for holiday weekends, the last one triple what is asked on weekdays.) So not much I could do today.  Probably no one working at my Studio building today, and alarms on for the holiday, and I don't feel like dealing with the police today.  One thing I did do was finish the latest version of the information for the art classes I have been asked to teach there this summer- week by week breakdown, materials, etc. If someone is there tomorrow,  I can get it to them.