As the brief, but intense “woke” mania recedes in American history (though not quite yet in Europe), the historical examination of what it was should commence.
Periodically in American history, the nation falls into social hysterias. American culture, for whatever reason, seems particularly hard wired towards such movements. Likely, the Puritan influence accounts for this. These periodic hysterias are frequently called “witch hunts” because the first of them happened in Salem, Massachusetts and the authorities did indeed, on the word of (likely) mentally ill teenaged girls, hunt down mistresses of the dark arts for identification and purification.
Of course most of these “witches” were socially unfriendly and unconventionally behaving older women who lived apart from the community. They also often applied knowledge of using natural substances to produce real or imagined effects on others.
Some historians have seen this as a possible collective trauma aftereffect from King Phillip’s War two decades prior. In that war, an American Indian chief, called King Phillip by the British, launched a war of genocide against European settlers and Indians who converted to Christianity to live in peace among the Puritan New Englanders.
Regional and national hysterias have come and gone. During World War I, the hysteria focused on German influences in US culture. Hamburgers became Salisbury Steaks, frankfurters became hot dogs, and some Germans even changed their family names. Few examined the difference between Germans newly arrived and those who emigrated before the United States earned independence.
But here, as in the Red Scares later, the fear started with truth. Germans had infiltrated the United States and committed acts of sabotage. Communists did infiltrate the highest levels of the United States and British governments in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Truth led to fear, which led to exaggerations and opportunists, which led to years of sustained panic that, in the end, did more to camouflage than expose the actual Communist threat..
The 21st century saw its own social hysterias centered around the transgender issue, Donald Trump, and everything “woke.”
“Woke” brought out the absolute worst in those caught up in its ideology. Legions of college students drank deep of the contaminated spring of racial grievance. Almost as if they had marching orders, they fanned out to identify and condemn even the slightest offense.
And one of their dumbest ideas was “cultural appropriation” or what they considered “theft” of cultural attributes of other cultures by what they called “white” culture.
In this context, usually what they call “white” is synonymous with “mainstream.”
They saw culture as something one could and should put into protective silos for only people of that culture to enjoy. Historians will look back with head shaking wonder at earnest university students protesting “Taco Tuesday” as a crime against culture.
Conversely, cultures they deemed “bad,” such as the heritage of the South and the Confederacy, were to be condemned, if referred to at all
These kids should have taken lessons not from their professors, but from Sammy Davis Jr. and Richie Havens.
In 1965 Jerry Jeff Walker, a folk singer from New York, found himself in a New Orleans jail for either public intoxication or vagrancy. Inside he met some colorful characters, including one old-timer who referred to himself as Mr. Bojangles. Prior to the advent of computerized data sharing across the nation, sometimes petty criminals in the South would give the name “Bojangles” instead of their own to hide their identity.
This Bojangles told of his life as an itinerant entertainer and of his profound sadness after the death of his dog. Walker related the man’s story through song.
Sammy Davis Jr, who joked on stage that his combined Puerto Rican and black ancestry, along with his Jewish faith, would offend everyone, heard the song and found his heart touched. Davis took the simple country-folk melody and gave it length and elegance as only a jazz style can. In every recorded version still around, the way Davis sings the first words “I knew a man, Bojangles and, he’d dance for you . . .” brings a powerful humanity through soft melancholy.
He performed Mr. Bojangles, a story originally told by a white convict, in every show for the remainder of his life.
Even more profound, the black folk singer Richie Havens injected his own humanity into a song-story that younger people in 21st century America would likely not comprehend. A Canadian act called The Band, who for years backed up Bob Dylan, crafted a story about a man and his family crushed by the Civil War.
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” recounts the privation, fear, and hopelessness that many Southerners felt in 1865 “Stoneman’s cavalry came and they tore up the tracks again,” “you take what you need and you leave the rest, but they should never have taken the very best,” or “he was just 18, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave” show the power of songwriting at its best, wringing pathos from any listener.
Havens started off like Walker, ironically, singing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and made his name performing “Freedom” at Woodstock. He recorded a performance at the iconic DC music venue “The Cellar Door,” an album that included his cover of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
Like Davis in “Mr Bojangles,” Havens opens with an even more melancholy tone than others who recorded the song. “Virgil Cain is my name and I served on the Danville train,” the song opens. Havens adds a note of dejection and hopelessness that goes just a bit beyond The Band and Joan Baez, who also covered the song.
Havens did not sing the song to glorify the Confederacy and the suffering and sacrifices its soldiers made on its behalf. He and Baez looked at the song more in the context of what combat and war does to the men who fight it and their families back home. Though the 1969 song emerged in the context of both the antiwar and civil rights movements, those who sang it saw the messaging, both antiwar and pro soldier simultaneously, as the real meaning.
Davis and Havens, black men who knew well the cudgel of racial discrimination wielded in those times, sang the stories of white men who suffered, yet endured. They chose to emphasize the impact of human suffering and how it helps different people to relate to each other rather than dwell on racial or historical differences.
They told the story of others to expand their listeners’ compassion and humanity, two attributes much less common in these “enlightened” times.
