Charley Pride Sings "Roll On Mississippi"

Charley Pride, 1981
Wikipedia

Like most 'white' folks who grew up in America's backwoods regions of the Sixties and Seventies, I loved Charley Pride's voice on country music radio long before I realized he was African-American! Finding out was a surprise, though it only whetted my interest.

But I lost contact with country music for a while, so I missed his 1981 hit, "Roll On Mississippi" -- written by Rhonda Kye Fleming and Dennis W. Morgan -- until 1986, when I heard it on the radio while I was staying in Fribourg, Switzerland. Here are the lyrics (or listen here as you follow along):

Walking along, whistling a song,
bare foot and fancy free
A big riverboat, passing us by, she's headed for New Orleans
There she goes, disappearing around a bend
Roll on Mississippi, you make me feel like a child again

Cool river breeze, like peppermint leaves, the taste of it takes me back
Chewing on a straw, torn overalls,
Cane pole and old straw hat,
Muddy river, just like a long lost friend
Roll on Mississippi, you make me feel like a child again

Roll on Mississippi, big river roll
You're the childhood dream, I grew up on
Roll on Mississippi, carry me home
Now I can see I've been away too long
Roll on, Mississippi, roll on

When the world's spinning round, too fast for me,
I need a place to dream
So I come to your banks, I sit in your shade,
And relive the memories
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Roll on Mississippi, you make me feel like a child again

Roll on Mississippi, big river roll
You're the childhood dream that I grew up on
Roll on Mississippi, carry me home
Now I can see I've been away too long
Roll on, Mississippi,

Roll on, Mississippi, roll on
Roll on, Mississippi, roll on
Roll on, Mississippi, roll on

Ah, nostalgia, that magic of country music. I didn't grow up along the Mississippi, but that great river defined the eastern border of Arkansas, and I always identified with the hillbilly Huck Finn and his Big River adventures.

And my family crossed that river last night on their way to the Ozarks . . .

Reading Obama...

Barack Obama

"We are such stuff as dreams are made of,

and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

(Image from Wikipedia)

One doesn't read many memoirs by credible presidential candidates that include material like this:

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, ... by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, ... wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self -- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass -- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger. (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, page 85)

One can safely remark that this stuff ain't whitewashed. Part of the story's interest lies in keeping the reader wondering how the hell Obama got from that maddening, seemingly inexorable logic to where he stands today.

Reading Obama, one wants the story to be an everyman's story, but it isn't, of course. It's Obama's story, and like that line in a Charley Pride song, it says "all I have to offer you is me."

Well, that and a few position papers...