Dale Williams Barrigar

Visiting Bill Burroughs by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

(Ed. Note–actually, Co-Editor note. Both images provided by DWB as we enter day two of some of his fine past works. This originally appeared in Literally Stories UK. It is good to keep things alive in this hectic globe of online publishing, a world covered by multiple layers of ether. The only way that this format can develop a history is to quickly acknowledge and keep a light trained on its past. LA)

It was a time when creative writing programs in the midwestern United States still contained edgy idealists, at least some of them. I don’t know what the writing programs here are like now.

A good creative writing class is, of course, always a bit of a performance. This is true for both the teacher, and the students. Everyone plays their role on an alternating basis.

As a teacher, some time around 2010, I began to notice a shift in my audience.

In another never-ending department meeting, the “head” called the shift “corporate.”

She said it was destined to only get worse.

The shift involved incessant cell phone usage, but also something else that was wordless and indefinable. I didn’t last long in such a climate. Pretty soon they had my head on a platter.

But back in the ’90s, I’d been a student, not a teacher.

I left Chicago for graduate school in Kansas with my now-ex-wife not long after the suicide of Kurt Cobain. His death was announced while I was watching MTV, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and reading in the middle of the night. It meant more than a lot to me, because he was almost exactly my age and I was a huge fan. I’m an even bigger fan now, almost exactly thirty years later.

There were practical reasons for choosing Wichita, Kansas, as my destination. But another huge reason was the fact that William S. Burroughs also lived in Kansas, a couple of hours up the road, in Lawrence, an old abolitionist town and still an artistic and liberal enclave with a university. I believed Norman Mailer when he wrote that William S. Burroughs was, truly, a genius of the English language and the written word, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Jonathan Swift.

The writing program at Wichita State University involved taking half creative writing, and half literature classes. So I spent my time studying Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dr. Johnson and Boswell, as well as delivering pizzas to pay the bills and writing endless short stories, prose poems, and book reviews for the local paper that kept pouring out of me and were both inspiring (to myself) and completely in the realm of juvenilia.

But I felt myself getting better at writing every day. And I knew William S. Burroughs was just up the road, a literary giant, a continual, tantalizing presence and inspiration. My intention ever since moving to Kansas had been to visit him, even if only for a few minutes. But I always put it off and kept dreaming about it, aways planning to go and never taking off.

I’d already been on numerous literary pilgrimages throughout the United States. My focus had been on visiting the place and the spirit of the person, instead of the actual author, because most of them were dead. A list can be found at the end of this tale, for those interested in desert island lists. (I’ve been on even more literary pilgrimages since then, including Canada for Leonard Cohen and Mexico for Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

My three years as a graduate writing/literature student at Wichita State University were almost up. My writing had improved (even if it was still juvenilia), and I’d moved on from delivering pizzas to teaching classes in the department. But I still hadn’t visited William S. Burroughs up the highway a couple of hours in Lawrence. Then the moment came.

I was sitting in a favorite dive bar in a poor side of town on the other side of the tracks with two of my favorite folks in the world. Cocktails we regularly shared together in those days included cocaine, LSD, opioids (no needles), hash, plus two to four packs of Marlboros a day per person, all in the spirit of John Lennon, Rimbaud, Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, and Burroughs, but tonight we were only drinking: whiskey, beer, tequila (and tobacco smoking). All three of us were taking turns playing the audience at our bar table and “writing in air,” as James Agee called it.

One of my friends suddenly suggested that we get in his car right now and visit Old Bill. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin were playing on the juke box because we kept feeding the coins in for them. We talked about it for about ten minutes, then purchased supplies: pints of Jack Daniel’s and packs of cig’s for the road from the barman behind the bar. That kind of take-out was legal, and not even frowned upon, in the Kansas of those days.

The three of us were in my friend’s Mustang headed to Lawrence. These were two of the closest people to me in my life. One of them I was even closer to, because I was madly in love with her, as well as being a best friend. Our driver had done significant time in prison due to shooting a rival in the leg and other issues, years in the past. He was also a true genius of the underground, someone who could recite entire long passages from “On the Road,” “Howl,” “Song of Myself” and William Blake at will and from memory and would do so frequently in the bars of Wichita. If he wasn’t getting it right, he was making it up, which was even more impressive.

My favorite William S. Burroughs short story is “The Junky’s Christmas.” In this piece, Burroughs, the great sinner, is transformed into a kind of grizzled yet benevolent grandfatherly figure who narrates a tale about a down-and-out junkie who gives away his last shot to a lost soul on Christmas day before being astounded into heaven, as Melville wrote of stoics when they die at the end of his very, very long poem Clarel, a work that perhaps fifty people, or less, have ever read end to end. And that means fifty people ever in the history of humanity, not just who are alive now. If anyone is alive now who’s read this entire poem, I wish to hear from you.

We asked around in the college bars of Lawrence. They told us where Burroughs’ house was. We continued drinking in the bars into late, late in the night, celebrating Old Bill in his home town. We didn’t finally head out to Burroughs’ place until after the bars had closed down.

We found his house, but he wasn’t home, or was sleeping, or wouldn’t answer the door; and who could blame him; we knew he was elderly, so we didn’t try long, but we were on hallowed ground, if only for a few moments.

On the way back to Wichita, the car ran out of gas on a stretch of the Flint Hills Highway that didn’t have any towns, exits, or gas stations on it for a length of seventy miles. A state trooper drove my friend thirty miles down the road and back again to pick up gas while my other friend and I waited in the car and watched the sun come up over the great, tall-grass prairie hills. The state trooper never mentioned the drinking. There were still antelope on the hills in those days and may they remain there forever. We watched a herd of them running by and beyond us into the distance. This sight was true beauty, as only wild animals in the middle of nowhere can be.

William S. Burroughs died on the day I finished graduate school in Kansas. The next day, I moved back to Chicago to enter the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago, which had been co-founded by Paul Carroll, one of the editor/writers who first published Burroughs and was almost prosecuted by the U.S. government for doing so. Allen Ginsberg had passed on four months before. This synchronicity meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to anyone on this planet except me. And I think it was better that way because it wasn’t something I could’ve shared at the time in the right way, even though I tried.

Old Bill had told and written many stories in his life, in many different forms, and his life itself was a great American story, not without tragedy, of course. Burroughs, who could be more than a tad prickly, always insisted that the purpose of his famous cut-up technique was not artistic, but spiritual, mystical, and magical. The cut-ups brought him messages he needed to know about life, not facts but mysteries.

He didn’t believe in what we call “death,” or “accidents,” especially after the death of his wife, Joan, who had also been his best friend, probably even more than she was his wife.

Robert Browning said, speaking of the afterlife, “Never say of me that I am dead.” I never met William Burroughs in person, but that was never the point.

Postscript.

Alabama: Barry Hannah; Alaska: Jack London; California: John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Gary Snyder; Colorado: Hunter S. Thompson; Florida: Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway; Georgia: Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Carson McCullers; Idaho: Ernest Hemingway; Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Saul Bellow, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who I met in Chicago and who I plan to write about soon; Iowa: Flannery O’Connor and Denis Johnson; Louisiana: William Faulkner (New Orleans); Massachusetts: Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville; Michigan: Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and Robert Hayden.

Minnesota: Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Louise Erdrich; Mississippi: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Larry Brown, and Eudora Welty; Missouri: Mark Twain; Montana: James Welch and Thomas McGuane; Nebraska: Willa Cather and Malcom X; New Hampshire: Robert Frost; New Jersey: William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman; New Mexico: D.H. Lawrence; New York: Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer; North Carolina: Thomas Wolfe; Ohio: Sherwood Anderson; Oklahoma: Ralph Ellison and Woody Guthrie; Oregon: Ken Kesey; South Dakota: Black Elk; Tennessee: James Agee, Cormac McCarthy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Virginia: Thomas Jefferson; Washington: Raymond Carver; Wisconsin: Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Lorine Niedecker.

The Old Guitarist by Dale Williams Barrigar

(This was previously published by Literally Stories UK; both images were provided by the author. ‘Tis our pleasure this week to revisit works by our esteemed Co-Editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar)

I saw a little man riding a child’s bicycle in Berwyn, Illinois, outside Chicago, on the sidewalk, along Roosevelt Road.

He was carrying a guitar; this was the first thing that caught my attention.

The guitar was strapped over his back. But it was also slung down partly across the side of his body so he could cuddle it with one arm while he steered the bike with the other and pedaled the small pedals with his small legs.

This was a busy neighborhood, but anyone paying attention would surely notice that there was something special between this little old man and his guitar. He held it like it was an animal or a person. He held it delicately while he rode his bike down the sidewalk; he kept it close to him; and he held it with love.

It looked like a small classical guitar covered in road miles. The body of the guitar was red around the edges fading into orange with flower patterns on the pickguard. The strap that held it to his body was an old red one.

The neighborhood was busy, with cars steadily moving in both directions along Roosevelt Road. The famous music venue, Fitzgerald’s, was across the street and both sides of the road were lined with old brick apartment buildings and new corner smoke shops; tattoo parlors; bars; Italian ice and Italian beef restaurants; a bank; a gas station; and Euclid Square Park in the distance.

But the little old man with his guitar was riding the opposite way. Soon on Roosevelt Road, he’d be pedaling into urban devastation, a city’s almost-peopleless wasteland, unless he turned around.

He was small and he was old.

And it occurred to me that he looked much older than he probably was while also seeming much younger in the way he moved, an uncanny doubling.

His long, gray-brown, wiry hair fell all over his shoulders and half way down his back. His small bearded face was wise, wizened, and lean, with deeply sunken cheeks. He was small and old and covered in road miles like the bike and his guitar.

This little, homeless-looking man was not someone you would mess with because of his overwhelming presence no one was noticing.

And he held his guitar like a knight holds his lance; like a warrior carries his club; like a conductor wielding his baton; like a dog walker his leash; like a priest and his chalice.

He had a shocking presence as he steadily pedaled with his guitar down the sidewalk: if you were paying attention. He looked like he was going somewhere, or maybe just anywhere. He wore an old blue button-down shirt over an old white T shirt and he had blue shorts on that went past his knees.

His foot gear had once been white tennis shoes and he had rope bracelets covering both wrists. His skin was dark brown and wrinkled, permanently tanned by sun, wind and sky.

His nose was large and his hands were long, and his eyes were fiery, dark, black-circled, peering intensely and intently from under calm, or calmly troubled, brows. The backpack on his back spilled over from its pockets with plastic water bottles, handkerchiefs, bits of clothing, paper, pens, and other things.

And the little man disappeared into one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, pedaling on his child’s bicycle: carrying his guitar like a lifeline.

A few weeks later that summer, I saw him again. I was taking a stroll around Euclid Square Park with my Siberian Husky, Boo. Euclid Square is a large grassy green space surrounded by houses and trees and Roosevelt Road along one side behind another row of trees. He was sitting directly in the middle of the large, grassy field that was the center of the park. His bike lay in the grass not far away.

And he was sitting cross-legged in the grass in the middle of the park, playing his guitar.

I was too far away to hear well in the wind, but it was fascinating to watch this virtuoso working over his guitar from the corners of your eyes.

He played fast, he played slow, he rocked back and forth, and then he rolled, he rolled half forward as his hands kept flying all over the guitar.

I couldn’t hear it much, but he looked beautiful playing, like a wild man, like a magician: like an escape artist.

Soon I noticed that a friendly-looking old lady had become fascinated with his playing too. The smiling old woman was approaching him on foot across the grass. I saw her reach him, and I saw her bend down, and try to hand him some money, at least a few dollars because she had more than one bill in both of her hands.

But by now he had stopped playing. He had rolled into a little ball over his guitar which he was holding upside down. The man wouldn’t play any more, and he kept his head down, but he reached up and took the money from the old woman. She smiled and was happy and turned away to rejoin her party on the other side of the park.

As she walked away, I looked at the old guitarist.

He flung the money away from him, out across the grass. Both he and I watched the wind blow the bills away across the grass.

Then he looked around to make sure no one could hear him.

And he started playing again.

Notation: Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” is in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Photography of Dale Barrigar Williams (aka, The Drifter) Vol. One

(The header image is a group shot of the Canine stars of this production: Colonel, Bandit and Boo)

Today and tomorrow pictures will be supplying their well known ability to say a thousand words, and then some. These are courtesy of The Drifter today and Christopher J. Ananias tomorrow.

If you are not shy, send us five images and we will be happy to give you a photo shoot day of your own. Standards of legality and good taste apply for those very few among you who need to be told such things–Leila

(Tressa, The Dog Whisperer)

(The Ongoing Legend of Boo and his high end reading materials)

(Sweet Miss Bandit)

(Gallant Colonel)

Dale and family love Dogs, and it shows that the feeling is mutual!

Happy September From Saragun Springs

(Image is of PDQ Peety, preparing for the fall the same way he meets every season–blasted)

Happy Labor Day to the USA (my first since retirement)

As always we in the Springs aim to fill every day of the month with poetry, stories, art and the weekly Sunday column by our beloved co-Editor The Drifter (and the odd imitations of such contributed by The Saragun Gazette). This week is full, but we have plenty of room to share things written by others who have contributed previously or who are new.

At first it was a week offered, but we can also do single days as well. And as autumn draws nearer with its omnipresent scent of pumpkin spice, as Christmas creeps into retail establishments the same way gold is edging maple leaves (but greeted by different degrees of patience and pleasure), the Springs is planning to become just as inescapable as death. So with that cheery thought in mind, welcome to September, one and all.

Leila

The Hands of the Poet by the Drifter

“Galileo looked into the night / and learned the truth was an old lie /

And he sighed, knowing his fate: / If I write that again Someone will

tell the Vatican” – Irene Leila Allison

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is

the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein

(Wonderful images provided by The Drifter)

INTRO NOTE, or Here We Go Again:

From The Drifter: The idea for this essay came as a flash of inspiration like a lightbulb going on in a tired brain, while driving around (drifting) on the West Side of Chicago during a dreary, weary day after reading Leila Allison’s enlivening poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope,” available on Saragun Springs; first date of publication Tuesday, August 26, 2025.

I.e. it was a weary, dreary day until reading the poem then being inspired by the poem to write this essay about it.

The Drifter suddenly pulled over near a vacant lot on the West Side, nodded to the old fellows smoking their bud around a trash can watering hole under a tree, then committed most of this essay to paper via a short-hand note-taking method in a language invented by none other than himself, readable by only himself, with colored pens on repurposed paper like old bills and advertising circulars.

It was like Leonardo da Vinci furiously working at his desks (he had more than one) in the middle of the night, long hair crazy-wild and fingernails long, dirty, and broken like Bob Dylan’s from digging up corpses for dissection and anatomical drawings the night before.

All that remained to do was draw it all together and translate it, somehow, into fairly readable standard English prose.

The results can be perused below; now or later or much later.

One of the first questions to ask when reading a poem (or anything) is, “What did the writer need to know in order to write this?”

Harold Bloom said that the main purpose for reading fine (and great, which is a cut above fine) imaginative literature was and is in order to augment one’s own consciousness.

Another word for “consciousness” here is PERSONALITY.

Another word/s for “augment” here is make it better.

And the answer to the question, “What did the writer need to know in order to write this?” these days is, all too often, “Nothing;” or, “Not much.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” and whom Bloom called the Mind of America because of Waldo’s influence, both positive and negative, on all other subsequent American thinkers, whether they know it or not, said that a poem was “a meter-making argument.”

What Emerson meant by this (or one thing anyway) is that the “argument,” or reason-for-being, of a poem is what elevates its language, what calls for the poem to be written as a poem instead of in prose.

The “argument” here is NOT polemical, political, a run-of-the-mill opinion, or a straight-up “idea” like how to conquer the moon or invent a better way of doing something practical.

Poetry’s impracticability is another one of its essential features. If it was only about doing things it wouldn’t be poetry, or not poetry (which is thinking) at its highest levels.

Philip Larkin called the modern short poem, which is the most common form of poem now, “a single emotional spear-point.”

An emotional spear-point has to have a deep reason for being, or it can’t be itself.

PART TWO

Here are just a few of the things Irene Leila Allison needed to know in order to write her poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope,” according to this writer (The Drifter, aka Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD).

One: What it was like to be none other than Galileo.

Two: What the power dynamics were like in society during Galileo’s time. (He was born the same year as Shakespeare and lived 26 years longer than The Bard, to the age of 77, which would be more akin to 97 today.)

Three: What it is like to challenge authority with the pen (or the keyboard) in any age. (For this to happen, you need to challenge it with your mind and your life first.)

Four: What the power dynamics are like in society in any age.

Five: The subversive nature of true creativity (or creativity at its deepest levels) in any age, including Galileo’s, and our own.

Six: The price to be paid for being subversive in any age, whether it be in writing or in any mode, like any form of resistance, which is available and morally required (in different forms, depending on the person) of everybody. (Jesus himself was nothing if not a rebellious spirit, at least when it came to the goings-on in this earthly realm.)

This list could go on but the Drifter will stop with a round half dozen in order to give the reader time to think about this.

…

…

The seventh thing (7 = heaven) Leila Allison needed to know in order to write this poem was how to fit all of the above into the space of just over one hundred words.

Return to the half dozen items listed above, and then ponder knowing all that, and then ponder the magic of powerfully, clearly, and beautifully expressing all of the above in a third of the words Lincoln used for his Gettysburg Address.

Not a single syllable is wasted in Ms. Allison’s poem, much less a single word.

Words are reinvented in this poem, used so they can be understood by the reader but also torn out of their “normal” context and made new again.

Here is just one example.

Describing Galileo making his amazing discoveries that changed the entire human world while under house arrest, Ms. Allison says, “the spheres (and spears) remained.”

In five words, she’s boiled down one of the most profound humans and human projects of all time into a space that is tiny in terms of its actual size, and as gigantic as the entire universe itself in terms of its implications.

This is what true poetry is, saying so much in five words or less that entire pages, or even books, of prose could be written upon it and still not capture its essence.

And doing it all while being beautiful.

At this point, I urge any and all readers of this to seek out Ms. Allison’s poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope.”

The title sounds like it could have been come up with by James Thurber, Lewis Carroll, or Dr. Seuss (he was one of the most important American poets of all time, which is neither a joke nor an exaggeration), a sign of the light hands of the poet.

Because children, too, should be told about people like Galileo; and the intelligent child in all of us is what keeps us alive.

And after truly studying, and absorbing, this poem, you will know more about Galileo, the world, and the universe than, literally, entire book-length works about him or his times can tell you.

FIND THE POEM, AND WORK TO LET IT FIND YOU.

From the West Side of Chicago:

Signed, The Drifter…

Drifter Self Portraits

(Images provided by the Drifter–Boo and Vincent)

I only show myself when the holy spirit of creation is upon me.

Or in its aftermath.

Or in the lead-up to it.

Or in some other form of extremity that embodies some sort of emotion that can be used for good in this world, if one looks hard enough, one way or another.

I have pictures of myself where I look one hundred and ten years old.

And not a healthy one hundred and ten, like Moses was when he died.

They say he was as strong and mentally acute at that age as he had been at forty. And that his sight and hearing were as strong as they’d ever been, too. But it didn’t stop him from dying.

Yes, I have pictures where I look bad old.

Beaten and broken, weary and bloated, or shriveled, wasted and worn, worn out.

I only keep these pictures for myself (for now), in the same way that Hamlet held up poor Yorick’s skull to his own (for now) living face and spoke to it.

A memory of the future, which is the definition of memento mori.

I started experimenting with drawn and photographic self-portraits in the 1980s, when I was in my teens.

I was partially glad when the Selfie came around, because it partially justified me, at least in the legend of my own mind.

Before that, even people who were otherwise on my side would sometimes make fun of me for taking “selfies” – before “selfie” was even a term, or a word.

But ever since there were cameras, there have been poets who have done this.

Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin, and Robert Johnson are only three examples.

I was raised in the Lutheran Church in Michigan; their religious art influenced me in enduring and subconscious ways that I can’t even diagnose in myself because they go so deep.

Other influences on my self-portraits include classic album covers, certain movie posters, author photos, and of course the classic self-portraits by the great classical artists.

I had a stroke at the age of 57 in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

After that point I started making self-portraits just to prove to myself that I was still alive – as alive as ever, or even more so.

I had one grandmother who remained youthful up until the very end, at 88. I had another grand who remained youthful until the age of 92 (and then her slow decline until “the end” at the age of 94).

I only make the self-portraits on my regular phone. No tricks. I’m no technologist. As in all art, spontaneity and selectivity are the keys. These, and dogged determination.

I got this phone three years ago. I’m 58 now. So I call all of these self-photos the 55 and Up Series. Almost everything else disappeared with the other phone.

I also make the pictures to taunt all my enemies, and all the people who left me in the dust when I didn’t want them to.

There were others who left me in the dust and I was okay with it: or even goaded them into doing so.

Signing off for now until next Sunday: “The Drifter.”

I Was Ten When Elvis Died By Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

They called him fat and they called him a fool, but when he stepped behind the piano he was neither fat nor foolish.

He was Elvis, in South Dakota, in a small theater, about to sing another song, just a few weeks before he would fall to the floor in his bathroom back at Graceland and leave us for good – so suddenly.

And thereby catapult himself into the earthly realms where no one dies. Because now he’s the quintessential American, globally more famous than Abraham Lincoln, or maybe equally so.

(We say nothing of current people who may be more “famous” than either of them at the moment, because this kind of fame is only for the moment and will fade. In the annals of humanity, the good ones last longer than the bad except for the exceptions, like Hitler; and you really have to be bad to be as horribly bad as him.)

Before he sat down at the piano it was almost as if he was fat and a fool. He looked quite overweight although still more handsome than the most handsome movie star ever (because he was never really a movie star), and he was obviously high as hell on something, or rather not one something, but many somethings.

He was so high that he couldn’t talk right, not at all. He mumbled and muttered, he lost his train of thought, he shook his head to try and get it back, he laughed at himself up there on stage. He was high and jonesing for more at the same time, he was wired and wasted, he was surrounded by gigantic cups of ice and Coca Cola that he drank nonstop and to wash the pills down with (dozens or even hundreds of pills per day) (and he was fatter from the beverages than the sandwiches because eating interfered with the endless buzz of being him); he was high in the way that someone gets high who sees it almost as a duty and an obligation, certainly not a pastime or a hobby: he was so high that he was high as only ELVIS could be high: admirably high, utterly high, completely wasted, totally wired, and yet still walking around, telling the jokes, laughing at all. And about to sing another song.

And when he opened his mouth, the world suddenly knew (or only the parts of the world that live in South Dakota – for now) that Elvis was no longer a pop musician; he had left that behind him long ago. (“Don’t look back,” said Bob Dylan.)

Because now he was a CLASSICAL MUSICIAN. Now he was on the level of an opera singer, better than Pavarotti. Now he was someone who Beethoven and Mozart would hang out with. Now he had elevated his art into the highest levels of art that art can achieve, and his version of “Unchained Melody” was so good it made you want to compare it to (and I want to compare it to) the Mona Lisa or the Statue of David.

Elvis was fat and sometimes acting foolish; he was high as high gets when you can still walk around, and he couldn’t even talk right. But when he opened his mouth and began singing this one song, he truly belonged, and truly does belong, with the best of the best and the greatest of the greatest, not just in America, now, but in the world, anywhere, any time.

And then the song was over. And no one even applauded at first (before it exploded). But even the ordinary folk of the great state of South Dakota knew what had just happened.

Elvis had outdone himself. He had elevated himself, had increased his own greatness, had increased the greatness of art and the human race in the few minutes of one song.

His voice had been so powerful, so subtle, so nuanced, so loud, so ringing like a bell, so true, so lasting, so effecting, so mountainous and river-like, so sad, so tragic, so affirming, so massively grand, utterly great, and endlessly hopeful and emotionally pure and poetic that no one else who ever lived could sing that good, at least not what he did in that one song one time in South Dakota three weeks before he died.

Now they laugh at him as the fat fool a lot more than they celebrate him as the grand and great singer, the one true voice, the best of the best in the purity of American song. And that says a lot more about us than it does about him.

The rubes and the dupes and the snake oil sales folks all know who he is; but not one of them really knows who he is.

Only Elvis could have become ELVIS that way. Just as only you can become YOU in the way you need to.

Instead of laughing at him we should listen.

END NOTE: He was reading A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus by Frank Adams when he died; the book was found not far from his body.

John Lee Hooker’s House Rent Boogie by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“A man alone ain’t got no chance.” – Hemingway

Like all great story-telling, John Lee Hooker’s “House Rent Boogie” can make you feel much better about yourself, if you’re willing to meet Hooker half way.

In a nation filled, more and more, with what Noam Chomsky calls the “precariat,” or economically disadvantaged folks who live paycheck to paycheck, dwelling to dwelling, meal to meal, buzz to buzz, never knowing, as Henry Miller put it, when the chair will be yanked out from under their rear ends, and they will be tossed out into the street again, Hooker’s “House Rent Boogie,” also known as “House Rent Blues,” can offer solace and encouragement to many of us.

This kind of story-telling shows what story-telling is really for, which is helping the human species to make its way in this world while we struggle to survive our allotment of days here on the rapidly warming earth.

“House Rent Boogie” comes in different versions. Bob Dylan is famously, and rightly, known for reinventing his and other people’s songs as he travels the world like a modern-day Homer, the great Greek poet, but the great blues players and singers were doing this very same thing quite a while before Dylan came along, as he readily acknowledges. An original version of this story-song appeared some time in the early 1950s.

But the most entertaining, complete, and enduring version of the song, absolutely, one hundred percent, is the one that lasts for six minutes and twenty-four seconds, recorded in 1970, when Hooker was in his 50s. (He was born in 1912 or 1917 and lived until 2001.) This is, truly, one of the greatest blues performances of all time that we have a recording of. J.L.H. is the peer of the best of the best, from Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, and B.B. King.

(Buddy once followed my wife-at-the-time into the Ladies’ Room at a show in central Kansas in the 1990s while continuing to play his electric guitar the entire time, giving her his big smile in there before modestly retreating. I saw B.B. front row in central Illinois in the 1980s, and was blown away not just by his playing and voice, but by his PRESENCE. For some reason, I kept being reminded of Eisenhower pushing forward the Civil Rights Movement after Louis Armstrong called him a coward, which speaks very well of both men.)

“Precariat” is a combination of the words “precarious” and “proletariat.” “Boogie” means many things, including a fast, strong style of piano blues, a dancing to such music, a dancing to other music, and a way of escaping, literally or figuratively. Hooker’s complex story-telling uses the term in all of the above senses, as he explores and explodes what it’s like to be a part of the precariat in America or any other land, but especially in America, Land of the Almighty Dollar and Home of the Greedy.

The first line of the song is “I’m gonna tell you a story.” This is the talking blues, backed by electric guitar, harmonica, piano, bass, and drums. Hooker’s deep, mellow, profound, strong, confident, masterful, laughing, lamenting voice tells the tale of a man who’s lost his job. While he was employed and had a full wallet, the world was his friend and so were all the people in it. Now that he’s become down-and-out and busted, everyone has suddenly turned dismissive, sarcastic or apologetic as they resolutely turn away. It’s a tale that illustrates Scottish thinker Adam Smith’s “vile maxim,” which was that you shall care for, and worry about, no one but yourself.

Smith is one of the most misunderstood philosophers in the Western world, and he was virulently against adopting this maxim, but he saw how outrageously prevalent it was, especially in commercial and mercantile countries like Great Britain and America. In the Land of the Scam and the Home of the Selfish. John Lee Hooker, no less a philosopher, one who boils down his sense and experience of the world into a personal, satiric, universal narrative, gives the heartless human sphere the solid drubbing it deserves in this eternal song. As a black man in America who was in his 40s before the Civil Rights Movement came along, and who once worked as a factory janitor in Detroit, Michigan, among other such jobs, Hooker knows deeply about what he speaks and sings of.

Charles Mingus called his experimental autobiography, which he spent twenty years on and off writing, “Beneath the Underdog.” This phrase gives a taste of Hooker’s point of view in “House Rent Boogie.” Once your wallet goes in good old America, and you’re thrown back on nothing else but yourself and your wits, things can go bad very quickly, in the land where “the masters of man,” as Adam Smith called them, are perhaps more ruthless than in any other land before or since, or at least just as ruthless.

In 350 or so Hemingwayesque words, including realistic dialogue which Hooker acts out with his voice and punctuates, undercuts, and dramatizes with his electric guitar, his piano player, and his other musicians, who’s chiming, banging, bumping, and ringing away along with him is like the supporting characters in a Shakespeare play, this parable about being down-and-out says so much about the way we live now that it could have been created yesterday, instead of fifty-four years ago.

A recent story on the radio described the United States as a place where it’s “expensive to live and hard to get a job.” And the majority of jobs that are available are so crushingly boring and meaningless for many of us that it’s damn near deadly; or just plain deadly. In America, vast Tower of Babel, where language itself, humanity’s greatest invention, has been stolen and perverted by the politicians, preachers, mass media, ad people, and snake oil sales folks on tv and everywhere.

In the Land of the Avaricious and the Home of the Homeless, where real art and artists, and real thinking and thinkers, are not just rejected, ignored, mocked, and spat upon, they are sometimes even downright crucified, and certainly laughed right out of town. Henry Miller called his own version of this story “The Rosy Crucifixion.” Charles Bukowski wrote about it in almost every line he ever typed. Hooker too is rosy about his busted story, when he switches point of view and comments on himself, the main character, “He rocked on.” He rocked on, and kept going somehow, no matter what. Because this, thank God, is another strong strain in the American character. Perhaps the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s showed this strain as well as, or better than, anything else in our history.

In 1980, Hooker appeared in the Blues Brothers movie alongside the white black brothers, Belushi and Akroyd. He was in the Chicago street with his band in front of the Soul Food Café playing “Boom Boom Boom,” and his appearance lends the film the aura of an American reality that’s still ringing true like a bell forty-four years later, maybe more than ever now. And I seem to remember Hooker in the ‘80s and/or early ‘90s in music videos on MTV, wearing his shades with Pete Townshend and being the epitome of cool as much as Miles Davis himself ever was.

Some people in America know what cool is, and some don’t, as Norman Mailer pointed out in his essay “The White Negro” from 1957, originally published in “Dissent” magazine. Mailer’s essay was and is intensely controversial and provocative, probably wildly mistaken in many of its points, but also profound and utterly ground-breaking, praised by the likes of Eldridge Cleaver, and intensely engaged with by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The average Soccer/football Mom, Soccer/football Dad, or Corporate Mom, Corporate Dad are a few who do not know what cool is, according to Mailer. Anyone who’s ever been on the street and all real artists are some of the ones who do know. Mailer’s hipster from the essay is an absolute precursor of hip-hop to the level of being prophetic, except for the crucial point that Mailer’s hipster wants NOTHING at all to do with the so-called American Dream, which Hunter S. Thompson rightly claimed was dead anyway no later than the mid-1970s, ushered out by none other than Tricky Dick himself, the sly old alcoholic precursor of all current want-to-be American dictators and authoritarians.

If Hooker, with his wide range, deep knowledge, and tales of American experience in over 100 albums recorded, is a kind of fragmentary or experimental novelist, as the great Chicago radio host and writer Studs Terkel told me the one and only time I ever met him for ten minutes in the early 2000s, then “House Rent Boogie” is one of his best chapters. Play it loud, and over and over and over. Play it loud, and don’t just listen. Study it.

Scottish farmer-poet, song master, and exciseman Robert Burns, up there right after Shakespeare as one of the most quoted and known writers in the world, is a precursor for all of the American blues poets, story-tellers and singers. Burns’ social justice sympathy extended even unto a mouse whose house, or nest, was wrecked by the plow. His heart and mind went out to the under-mouse as well as the underdog. In similar fashion, John Lee Hooker’s “House Rent Boogie” extends a hand to everyone who’s ever lost a job, lost a friend, lost a romantic partner, or been on the outside in any way. His song title “Teachin’ the Blues” tells us much about his intentions. He was a professor of life, like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

Hooker also has an album called “The Healer.”

Hooker was the Mississippi son of a popular sharecropping minister who thought the blues was the devil’s music. As such, he wouldn’t let his son play his guitar in the house. But Jesus of Nazareth himself was thought to be a devilish demon-conjurer by most of the leaders in his own society. A bunch of townspeople tried to throw him off a cliff one time long before he was finally crucified by the Romans. JC is the first and most profound precursor of the blues. Not only did he have sympathy for the underdog, he knew very much what it was like to be one. Just like John Lee Hooker.

Howlin’ Wolf: Moanin’ at Midnight by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“You create yourself.”

– Ralph Ellison

If you want to get an idea of what it might have felt like to be near the Southern cottonfields of the United States prior to the Civil War, turn to your favorite music source, and play the song “Moanin’ at Midnight,” by Howlin’ Wolf, so often that it seeps into your bones and steeps your very soul.

Sam Phillips called “Moanin’ at Midnight” “the most different record I ever heard.”

Released as Wolf’s first single for Chess Records in Chicago in 1951, the B-side became much more popular for many years. It shows the way great art so often goes under the radar for months, years, decades, or centuries after its creation, and also how it so uncannily returns.

Chester Arthur Burnett of West Memphis became Howlin’ Wolf and moved to Chicago in 1953, which can thereby be named the first year of rock and roll.

In France, “Waiting for Godot” was premiering in a small theater to boos and gasps, reflecting the modern feeling of absurdity/ambivalent hope. “The Crucible” was opening in New York, reflecting the hysteria of the McCarthy hearings. Hank Williams, the cowboy Shakespeare, had just died in the back seat of his automobile on the way to yet another show. Charles Bukowski, Post Office employee and classical music expert, was 33. “Wise Blood,” by silent, brooding Flannery O’Connor, was one year old.

In “Moanin’ at Midnight,” in less than three minutes, with less than sixty words, and with one drum, one harmonica, one electric guitar, and one massive, utterly unique voice that could probably only come from a man who was six feet three inches tall and weighed 275 pounds, Wolf creates an artistic masterpiece that is also a human and historical document as valuable, in its own way, as the Mona Lisa.

The song is also a tale of terror that could only have been created by a black person in America before the Civil Rights Movement; and a story so universal it can rightly be said to belong beside one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or one of Robert Burns’ haunting Scottish border ballads about the continuance of love after death.

The ringing telephone in the song’s lyrics reminds the reader/listener that paranoia, anxiety, and deathly fear cross all boundaries in time and space. The knocking on the door in the song, like the knocking at the gate in “Macbeth,” reminds the hearer that IT is coming for all of us one of these days, no matter your race, creed, color, gender, opinions, or bank account.

Howlin’ Wolf’s moaning, humming, singing, talking voice in this song is so absolutely, finally, terrifyingly, consolingly uncanny, that it cannot be accurately described in words. It only invites failure to attempt to do so. Henry Miller called music as an art form, “absolutely sufficient unto itself” because it “tends toward silence.” If you’re alive, Wolf’s voice will give you the chills, and thrills, give you goosebumps, and increase your heart rate all at the same time, conjuring up some feeling from childhood you’ve never been able to name or live down. Play it loud. Play it very loud. Over and over again.

At the age of 43, after time in jail and the army, Wolf drove to Chicago for the first time in his own Cadillac, having made money on the radio in the Memphis area. Like Muddy Waters, he eventually moved to the Chicago suburbs, where he lies buried. He ran with fast women. He intimidated dangerous men. He lived with pit bulls. He wasn’t a man to cross the color line, he was a man to explode it or pretend it didn’t exist, depending on his mood, or who he was staring down at the moment.

“Moanin’ at Midnight” is a song that is almost part of nature. He was channeling a world as much as he was conjuring up THE world and creating it all in a picture whose psychology is so deep and profound it’s downright Jungian. He didn’t know how to read, they say. But he knew everything there is to know about the human soul. He was as much Jesus-like teacher from the Book of Mark as devilish blues musician from the Deep South. He was a professor of the blues and of life itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wolf played more shows on college campuses than anywhere else. His teaching was deep and profound, filled with consolations, challenges, provocations, and indelible gifts.

Frederick Douglass, a writer and American visionary who makes a fourth with Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, wrote of the slave songs, “Those songs still follow me.” It was long after he had bested the slave-master in a physical fight and escaped to the north, where he would eventually meet in person, and influence, none other than Abraham Lincoln.

Douglass also wrote, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” In many ways a far too under-sung, and even unknown, American master, and hero, Howlin’ Wolf gets the last laugh as his voice, spirit, and genius live on.

The Rolling Stones: Memory Motel by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”

The Stones’ song, “Memory Motel,” from their 1976 album, “Black and Blue,” is an overlooked and underappreciated masterpiece. This story-song is well worth looking at and listening to again. And again and again. One of their very best works, it’s a shining, enduring example of the Anglo/English ballad tradition which was incorporated into the black American blues idiom and then re-worked again by white singers and groups like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and later on to the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, and Eric Clapton, leading to crucially important artists of today like Nick Cave; Lana Del Rey; Taylor Swift (“All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version)”); Snoop Dog; Eminem; Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Conor Oberst (of Nebraska); and Wilco.

These cross-cultural exchanges, sometimes violently resisted by mainstream society, were moral acts which led to more than just rock and roll, bending the arc of the human universe toward greater justice by vastly increasing integration and racial equity throughout the world. Real music isn’t just music, from Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to now.

“Memory Motel” is a song which connects everyone by exploring the gnawing ache in the bones of lost love and the passing of time which all humans experience, no matter their race, creed, income levels or gender. In seven minutes and seven seconds, in a song recorded in Germany, the Stones tell the tale of a heartbreaking, breathtaking love affair starring a beautiful, hazel-eyed, long-haired, wild-haired woman who grabs the guitar from the hands of her man; drives a green and blue, broken-down pick-up truck; and sings genius songs in a bar in Boston. The narrator is an equally brilliant rock singer on the road. The setting a haunted motel on a remote seashore.

Shakespeare’s Juliet, Robert Burns’ Highland Mary, William Wordsworth’s Lucy, Keats’ Fanny Brawne, Mary Shelley, and Byron’s half-sister Augusta Leigh are all somehow drawn together in this intense mini-drama told in the idiom of the English blues.

Long-haired, unshaven, shirtless, piratical Richards, holding a Jack Daniel’s bottle and a cigarette, absconds on the guitar and only sings for most of this piece, which means he’s bringing everything he can to his vocals; while long-haired, unshaven, checkered sport coat-wearing, show-biz Jagger pounds the piano keys as if they were a typewriter and he were trying to write an entire Emily Bronte romance novel within one song (bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to his ankle and his red socks on).

Richards enters the song half way through as a third character in a shadowy performance worthy of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival, establishing an emotional threesome in the song’s situational dynamics that lends a profound layer to this public closet drama. His voice continually praises the intellectual and emotional uniqueness of this special woman, never expressing jealousy or anger, but sometimes grief at her loss. The mainstream cliches about Keith are completely undercut by his progressive feminist perspective and his depth of emotional expression in this autobiographical story performance, which is heart-breaking, realistic and long-enduring in human terms.

(Keith only sings co- or lead vocals on a double handful of Stones tunes. Almost every one of them is one of their best works.)

Richards co-wrote a fascinating, Hemingwayesque autobiography called “Life.” He was an obsessive reader of Byron at one point. The Byron who went around the higher levels of English society with gigantic dogs, a laudanum bottle, and sometimes a monkey (or a trained bear at college). Byron’s girlfriends and friends were collaborators, competitors, and rivals. One of his beautiful, regal, and intellectually intimidating ladies labeled him, the great lord, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“Memory Motel” implies this kind of tragic history, as surely as Mick Jagger read aloud portions of Shelley’s elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” in honor of Brian Jones. (Jones is a member of the eternal 27 Club. Keats was 25 upon dying. Percy Shelley was 29. Wordsworth was 80. At this writing, Jagger and Richards are 81 and 80, recently on tour here in Chicago, home of Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and where the Stones recorded their second album sixty years ago in 1964.)

“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”

As I grow older, every time I go back to my own Memory Motel, I hear more.

I had become a failed literature professor at the age of 52, because they took my job away. Also, another relationship had ended. I couldn’t bear to keep the photos of her and us, nor place them in the dumpster either. So I took one of the small, black-and-white, photo-booth photos of beautiful, genius, red-haired her from when we were on our trip to Nashville seeing a retrospective of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash at the Country Music Hall of Fame. And I placed the photo deep in the middle of a library book which I put in the middle of a bunch of other library books I returned.

A librarian named Veronica called the next day and returned the photo to me.