Blue Collar Lit.: "...a big black vote would make the difference"

MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT- THE BEST OF
(FULL ALBUM)
On You Tube, uploaded by Jim Blues Rock Channel:

The last song on this collection is "Since I've Laid My Burden Down."

It can be listened to there, on the album/video, or as a single, on You Tube.

Its melody is the same as "Will the Circle be Unbroken."

Glory, glory -- hallelujah -- since I've laid my burden down
Glory, glory -- hallelujah -- since I've laid my burden down

No more sickness, no more sorrow,
Since I've laid my -- burden down
No more sickness, no more sorrow,
Since I've laid my -- burden down

I'm going home...

______________________________
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Frank Rizzo, Mayor of Philadelphia, 1972 - 1980

Richard J. Daley, Mayor of Chicago, 1955 - 1976

George Meany, President of the AFL-CIO, 1955 - 1979

--------------------- [excerpt, Thompson-Loathing '72] ------------------------------ One of Muskie's Senate aides had told me, as we waited on a downtown streetcorner for the candidate's motorcade to catch up with the press bus, that "nobody has done one of these whistlestop tours since Harry Truman in 1948."

Was he kidding? I looked to be sure, but his face was dead serious. "Well. . ." I said. "Funny you'd say that . . . because I just heard some people on the bus talking about Bobby Kennedy's campaign trains in Indiana and California in 1968." I smiled pleasantly. "They even wrote a song about it: Don't tell me you never heard 'The Ruthless Cannonball'?"

John Lindsay, Mayor of New York City, 1966 - 1973

Ed Muskie, U.S. Senator from Maine, 1959 - 1980

George McGovern, U.S. Senator from South Dakota, 1963 - 1981

The Muskie man shook his head, not looking at me -- staring intently down the street as if he'd suddenly picked up the first distant vibrations from Big Ed's black Cadillac bearing down on us. I looked, but the only vehicle in sight was a rusty pickup truck from "Larry's Plumbing & Welding."

It was idling at the stoplight: The driver was wearing a yellow plastic hardhat and nipping at a can of Schlitz. He glanced curiously at the big red/white/blue draped Muskie bus, then roared past us when the light changed to green. On the rear window of the cab was a small American flag decal, and a strip on the rear bumper said "President Wallace."

Ed Muskie is a trifle sensitive about putting the Kennedy ghost to his own use, this year. He has ex-L.A. Rams tackle and onetime RFK bodyguard Roosevelt Grier singing songs for him, and one of his main strategists is a former RFK ally named John English . . . but Muskie is far more concerned with the ghost of Kennedy Present.

We were sitting in the lounge car on Muskie's train, rolling through the jackpines of north Florida, when this question came up. I was talking to a dapper gent from Atlanta who was aboard the train as a special guest of Ed Muskie and who said that his PR firm would probably "handle Georgia" for the Democratic candidate, whoever it turned out to be.

"Who would you prefer?" I asked.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked. I could see the question made him nervous.

"Nothing personal," I explained. "But on a purely professional, objective basis, which one of the Democratic candidates would be the easiest to sell in Georgia?"

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "No question about it," he said. "Ted Kennedy."

Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy

Edward (Ted) Kennedy, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, 1962 - 2009

"But he's not a candidate," I said.

He smiled. "I know that. All I did was answer your hypothetical question."

"I understand perfectly," I said. "But why Teddy? Isn't the stuff he's been saying recently a bit heavy for the folks in Georgia?"

"Not for Atlanta," he replied. "Teddy could probably carry The City. Of course he'd lose the rest of the state, but it would be close enough so that a big black vote could make the difference." He sipped his scotch and bent around on the seat to adjust for a new westward lean in the pitch and roll of the train. "That's the key," he said. "Only with a Kennedy can you get a monolithic black turnout."

"What about Lindsay?" I asked.

"Not yet," he said. "But he's just getting started. If he starts building the same kind of power base that Bobby had in '68 -- that's when you'll see Teddy in the race."

This kind of talk is not uncommon in living rooms around Washington where the candidates, their managers, and various ranking journalists are wont to gather for the purpose of "talking serious politics"--as opposed to the careful gibberish they distill for the public prints.

The New Kennedy Scenario is beginning to bubble up to the surface. John Lindsay has even said it for the record: Several weeks ago he agreed with a reporter who suggested--at one of those half-serious, after-hours campaign trail drinking sessions--that "the Lindsay campaign might just be successful enough to get Ted Kennedy elected."

This is not the kind of humor that a longshot presidential candidate likes to encourage in his camp when he's spending $10,000 a day on the Campaign Trail.

But Lindsay seems almost suicidally frank at times; he will spend two hours on a stage, dutifully haranguing a crowd about whatever topic his speechwriters have laid out for him that day . . . and thirty minutes later he will sit down with a beer and say something that no politician in his right mind would normally dare to say in the presence of journalists.