Tuesday, January 21, 2025

In Memoriam: Dickey Betts

 


If you are here reading this, you know that a few of us SMM alumni agreed to continue the moribund blog with what has now become an annual ritual: The In Memoriam posts that end the past or start the new year. We all have unbreakable ties to our beloved SMM, and who knows? The phoenix may yet rise from the proverbial ashes.

My choice right off the bat for In Memoriam was Dickey Betts.

I'm of the age that grew up listening to Filmore East and Eat a Peach. Incidentally, I was (un)lucky to enroll at Guilford College, Greensboro, about a year after the Allman Brothers played in the Dana Auditorium as a little-known local/Southern band. I was up in Philly at that time and fully aware of their amazing music, but not in a position to go and see. Would that my timing had been different!



Dickey Betts is often noted as second "fiddle" to Duane Allman. Perhaps rightly so. Certainly, the band's unique (for that time) double lead guitars in counterpoint harmony set them aside. For comparison, look to other top-rated bands of the day. That said, there is a remark made by Joe Dan Petty to Duane Allman, who had just finished working with Eric Clapton, to the effect that Dickey Betts would "wear out Clapton in five minutes."

This past week I ran across a NYT article which mentioned that Betts would have been a member of the band the year that Jimmy Carter ran for president. Chuck Leavell reminisced that Carter visited the band in the studio, rode a minor wave on his association with them, and even in later years stuck by their sides. That, despite the obvious differences in their life-styles.

Off and on following the "main" Allman Brothers line-up, Betts returned to the band until finally being dismissed in the early 21st century. In the 90s, he deserves credit for bringing Warren Haynes into the band (Warren certainly gives him that credit.).

The best verbal picture I have been able to get of Dickey Betts the man is an article in Guitar World written by Andy Aledort, who played guitar in the Betts band Great Southern for close to ten years. I highly recommend it, here.

And here the two of them are in an extended video



Thursday, January 16, 2025

In Memoriam: Bernice Johnson Reagon

 

[purchase Breaths, a compilation of two Sweet Honey in the Rock Albums]

The first In Memoriam post that I wrote here (in 2011) was my second post ever, before I was even an “official” member of the SMM team.  It was about singer and civil rights activist Matt Jones who was, at one point, a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers.  Jones wasn’t one of the founding members, but the subject of this piece, Bernice Johnson Reagon was.  And she was much more.

Born in 1943 in southwest Georgia, she was the daughter of a Baptist minister and showed both academic and musical talent at an early age.  In 1959, she enrolled in Albany State College to study music, but the imperative of the civil rights movement led her to be active in the NAACP and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).  Bernice became involved in the “Albany Movement,” which aimed to desegregate Albany and ensure voting rights for Black residents.  As part of the Movement, protestors, including Reagon, sang at rallies as a sign of unity.  Reagon was jailed in 1961 for participating in the protests (as was Martin Luther King, Jr.)  Not only did the Albany Movement fail in its initial goals, Reagon was expelled from college as a result of her imprisonment.  She briefly attended Spelman College but dropped out to focus on civil rights work.

Along with Rutha Harris, Charles Neblett and her future husband Cordell Reagon, she founded the SNCC Freedom Singers, which began touring in December 1962 to raise money for SNCC.  In 1963, Bernice married Cordell, and in 1964, she left the SNCC Freedom Singers to give birth to her daughter Toshi, who became a powerful performer in her own right.  Son Kwan Tauna (who is a chef) was born in 1965, and the couple split in 1967.  Reagon returned to Spelman and graduated in 1971.  At Spelman, she formed the Harambee Singers, an all-female group which focused on opposition to South African apartheid.

After graduating, she received a Ford Foundation Fellowship, allowing her to obtain her Ph.D in History from Howard University in 1975.  While in grad school, Reagon was the Vocal Director of the Black Repertory Theater in D.C. and in 1973, she created an all-female and all-Black a capella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  She was the director of Sweet Honey in the Rock until 2003, and the group became world-renowned, recording albums that spanned genres, touring globally and earning three Grammy nominations, while continuing their focus on social justice and equality.

The video above is Sweet Honey in the Rock’s, “Ella’s Song,” written by Reagon in honor of civil rights pioneer Ella Baker, originally released on their 1983 album We All…Everyone of Us,” and it’s a powerful song of courage and struggle.

Reagon has published a number of books, released several solo albums and contributed to award-winning documentaries.  For years, she worked with the Smithsonian and National Museum of American History and was a distinguished professor of history at American University.  Among other honors, Reagon was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, a Peabody Award (for “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions” a NPR series on Black church music), the Charles Frankel Prize and Presidential Medal (presented at the White House by President Clinton, and the Heinz Award.

Reagon died on July 16, 2024 at the age of 81, survived by her children, a granddaughter, her life partner, Adisa Douglas, and her siblings.

Monday, January 6, 2025

In Memoriam-Karl Wallinger


[purchase Best in Show, a World Party greatest hits compilation]

We’re back again for some In Memoriam posts, honoring some of those from the music world we lost in 2024.  How many posts?  We’ll see....

Back in 2014, in my early-ish days writing here, I wrote about the first CD that I ever bought, World Party’s debut, Ship of Fools, in 1987.  I didn’t even have a CD player at that time, but saw the disc at a used record store, and because I had already heard some of it on the radio, I bought it.  The CD player came shortly after that, and I’m still buying them (I’m an old guy, and like to own my music, and yes, I do download music, too.)  The video above is of the hit song from that album, “Ship of Fools.”

Karl Wallinger was born in Wales in 1957, exhibited his musical talent at an early age.  He was a Beatles fanatic, but not to the exclusion of other music, and ended up with a musical scholarship to Charterhouse (the alma mater of, essentially, the original lineup of Genesis and their first manager/producer Jonathan King, as well as Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant, and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and many other notable Brits, dating back to its founding in 1611)After deciding that the life of a classical musician was not for him, Wallinger moved into rock music, forming a band with two guys who went off to be in the Alarm, and doing studio work. 

Answering an ad for a guitarist for The Waterboys, Wallinger convinced Mike Scott that the band really needed a keyboard player, and he joined first as a sideman, before his skill on numerous instruments, and his production talents, led to his joining the band full time for This Is The Sea, and helping to shape “The Whole of the Moon,” probably the Waterboys’ best known song. 

The growing rivalry and infighting between Scott and Wallinger resulted in Wallinger leaving to work on his own material, eventually recording as World Party.  As he later said, World Party consisted of “me and whoever is playing with me at any given time.”  Most of his albums were recorded with Wallinger playing the bulk of the instruments and singing, with guests, including Sinead O’Connor, contributing as needed.

It is hard to listen to World Party without hearing the Beatles’ influences, but he was far from a one trick pony, and his music included other influences ranging from folk to funk and psychedelia, often with lyrics with environmental or anti-war messaging.  World Party’s first three studio albums were critical and commercial successes, with the second, Goodbye, Jumbo, considered by most to be their best work.  But the band’s next two albums were less popular.  During this period, Wallinger also worked with other musicians and on soundtracks.

In 2001, Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm, which affected his vision and prevented him from working for about five years.  During this inactivity, he was supported, in great part, by royalties from a popular cover of his song, “She’s The One,” by Robbie Williams.  Despite that, Wallinger was pissed off that he wasn’t informed about the cover, and that Williams often introduced the song as one of the best he’d ever written.  In fact, Williams has apparently only rarely publicly admitted that his version is a cover.

Wallinger was able to return to touring in 2006 but never released another studio album of new material.  In 2008, the album Big Blue Ball, a project that Wallinger worked on with fellow “Old Carthusian” (that’s what they are called), Peter Gabriel was released.  It was based on recording sessions from 1991, 1992 and 1995 and Gabriel recalled that working with Wallinger was “the most creative and fun week I have ever had in the studio.” In 2012, Wallinger released Arkeology, a five-CD compilation that included rarities and covers of Beatles songs. 

On March 10, 2024, Wallinger died of a stroke at his home in Hastings, at the age of 66, survived by his wife, sculptor Suzie Zamit, son Louis Wallinger and daughter Nancy Zamit, as well as two grandchildren.