New View of General Lee

OKAY, get ready for a deluge of coverage of the Civil War, whose 150th anniversary begins in the new year. One of the first shots fired will be a new documentary on Gen. Robert E. Lee, who emerges as a complex, brilliant, at times tormented, and deeply human character. The doc, which goes up Monday on PBS, avoids the hero-worship of neo-Confederates and a debunking approach that might have been tempting.

HERE is my article on the film, which involves an interview with filmmaker Mark Zwonitzer (who has also written an acclaimed book on country music's Carter Family) and two eminent historians, Joan Waugh of UCLA and Joseph Glatthaar of UNC Chapel Hill.

We often hear that Americans are cut off from or uninterested in their own history. It's often true, but especially since the Ken Burns documentary in the early '90s, the Civil War has been a growth industry, and an obsession with the war has never gone away in the American South. And many historians see the war and its immediate aftermath as the period in which contemporary American culture was forged.

The film is quite explicit, by the way, about the cause of the war: For all the talk about "state's rights," it was quite solidly about slavery. Just look at the secession documents for each state: They were pretty unambiguous about what mattered to them.

And let me urge anyone interested in the Civil War to read historian C. Vann Woodward and his "Irony of Southern History."

Otis Redding Live on the Sunset Strip

Perhaps the most exciting development in West Coast culture this week is the release of one of the greatest R&B records I have ever heard – Otis Redding Live on the Sunset Strip. It should be equally appealing even to people who know classics like Redding’s Live in Europe and other, shorter recordings of these April 1966 dates at the Whisky a Go Go.

Peter Guralnick, in his masterly Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, sketches an indelible portrait of Redding’s emergence from Macon, Georgia, “just another graceful southern city gone to seed,” through early hits like “These Arms of Mine,” and the growth of what he calls “an aching vulnerability seemingly at odds with the self-confidence he exuded to friends and associates.” Redding died in a plane crash near the end of 1967, at his peak, right before his transcendent “Dock of the Bay” – a song showing a new direction -- was released.

The set is made up of three full sets, including the songs “Security,” “Respect,” Chained and Bound,” “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” and his covers of songs like “Satisfaction” and even “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

As much as we love James Brown, Solomon Burke, Sam Cooke and others, Otis is our favorite soul singer here at The Misread City. We spoke to Ashley Kahn, author of books about Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme, who penned the liner notes for this new 2-CD set.

Q: Some of this material exists in previous sets. What’s new here?

This includes stuff that wasn’t available previously. Most important, it doesn’t try to fix ‘problems’ – it’s warts and all. It’s the performance experienced by the people who were actually there, with his hand-picked road band, which he called his ‘orchestra.’ It also includes Sunday night’s last set: In the jazz world, the last set is where people take chances, pull out tunes you don’t expect them to, sometimes hitting, sometimes not. Normally record companies say, ‘We’re gonna bury that -- put it in the archives.’

You can also hear how the energy build in a live show. And the time allotted to these recordings gives you the pauses and banter between the songs: It gives you the feel of the down-home welcome of an Otis Redding show.

Q: Otis’s Live in Europe is an acknowledge masterpiece – how is the spirit of this date different?

A: That, and there’s also the concert recorded with Booker T and the MG’s at the Monterey Pop festival. By the time of those concerts, he had crossed over from being this R&B guy to someone making pop hits, radio hits. Pop radio was changing, genres were opening up. This is earlier: It’s the working-man’s Otis that you get here.

Q: The live recording has a special place in '60s soul, even beyond its role in rock, jazz, and other genres.

A: Live was when soul musicians were most themselves – its when they’re working an audience and working off its energy. It’s hard to recreate that in the studio. At a live show, musicians are very motivated – it’s hit it or quit it. You gotta make it happen – and that’s Otis at his best.

Q: Even with the great voices of '60s soul, there was something deep and yearning about Otis Redding that nobody could match.

A: There’s a grittiness he never lost. As he said in the great tune, ‘Tramp,’ he did with Carla Thomas, ‘I’m straight from the backwoods,’ with no apologies. It’s there in his voice, his in banter with the audience. Otis had a balance between the down-home and sophisticated mid-‘60s soul.

Q: Otis died when he was only 26. What might he have gone on to do?

A: There were so many changes taking place during his career and after. But Otis was always in the process of shifting. If you think of the territory he covered from just the early ‘60s to the mid ‘60s, when he was listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles. And he put together, with 'Dock of the Bay,' a gentle folk song on acoustic guitar.

Would he have gone in the direction of Al Green, with a preacherly quality, but elegant and intimate?  Or Barry White and Isaac Hayes, that between-the-sheets soul?

Who knows. He was certainly heading in a more introspective direction.

He was definitely following his own path. 

Remembering the Civil Rights Years

LIKE a lot of people, I knew the reputation of Eyes on the Prize, the famous documentary about the civil rights movement in the Deep South in the '50s and '60s. But watching all six hours of it was simultaneously spirit-rousing and soul-crushing as I watched the movement beaten back time and time again.

The documentary, which originally broadcast in 1987, has been out of circulation for decades, but is back on PBS and now available on DVD for the first time.

HERE is my LA Times piece on the program, which included interviews with some of the show's creators as well as a UCLA professor to put it in perspective.

I must say, as a white person, even one raised by anti-racist parents far enough after the events in the program, I found some of the "resistance" by segregationists almost painful to watch. I've never understood the impetus for black militancy so clearly as I do after seeing what well-armed white folk -- both police and "volunteer" racists -- did to non-violent marchers, many of them women and children.


Amazing to be reminded that Emmett Till's killers were never brought to justice despite admitting to having killed a 14-year-old boy and dumping his body in the river. Some of the politicians are incredible, when you compare the interviews they give years later to the footage of the '50s and '60s.

Sometimes the old and new footage comments on each other, as when Selma, Alabama mayor Joseph Smitherman, mocks the protesters as media-savvy phonies in a contemporary interview before a flashback to 1965 footage in which he refers to “Martin Luther Coon,” before apologizing.


My piece closes by wondering about the connection between the movement and the election of Barack Obama. New Yorker editor David Remnick has made that link quite explicit, apparently, in his new book, The Bridge.


The Southern resistance to "government meddling" and crowing about "state's rights" sure takes on a new context after you've reflected on the events of this period. 


Photos show Emmett Till and Rosa Parks with Martin Luther King.