Genealogy Storytelling

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Charlie Wilson Telling His Story

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My brothers and I wrote all of the songs, we didn’t receive any of the writers’ money…any of the publishing money. One year I remember doing 99 shows back to back, making probably more than $100K per night, but when we would get home we’d have to stand in line for $150.

Watch the video clips to see what else he said about how that severely affected his life.

I had a brick for my pillow, a piece of cardboard for my bed, and 3 carts wrapped in cellophane. Time stood still for me, couldn’t go no farther from that point on, drugs played a huge part…from that day on for two years just nothing but drugs every single day.

See full story on iloveoldschoolmusic.com

A TV Documentary on Leah Chase

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I look forward to seeing this tv documentary on Leah Chase from my home city of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase is truly a living legend and great ambassador for city.

 

The remarkable life of the Queen of Creole Cuisine, Leah Chase, is featured in this colorful behind the scenes documentary film.

In New Orleans Leah Chase is as well known as any jazz musician or long time politician. It is true, too, that once you leave the watery city and go in any direction youre bound to find someone who is an enthusiast of Creole food, New Orleans and a big fan of Leah Chase. She has overseen the evolution of her famous dining spot from a sandwich shop that prospered during segregation to a fine dining restaurant filled with her impressive African American art collection.

During the Civil Rights movement the leadership found great friends and supporters in Leah & Dooky Chase. Strategies were devised in the upstairs dining room she devoted to their planning sessions. When describing her memories of those pivotal times she says, I like to think we changed the world through a bowl of gumbo.

See full story on kickstarter.com

Lincoln’s Back to Africa

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How different history would be today…

Lincoln Back to Africa
“Emancipation of the slaves, proclamed [sic],” J. Waeschle, 1862. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Today marks the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s “shot heard ’round the world.” I’m referring, of course, to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation he fired off from the White House on Sept. 22, 1862, five days after the real bullets had been fired 70 miles outside of Washington, D.C., at the Battle of Antietam (then and now the bloodiest day in American history, with close to 23,000 casualties).

What little Union victory there was in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s withdrawal from Maryland gave Lincoln the opening he needed to issue the Confederacy his ultimatum: If it remained in a state of rebellion come Jan. 1, 1863, he would sign an executive order rendering “all” of its “slaves … then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

For any student of American history, this is well-trod ground. But here’s what you may not know about those crowded days of late summer 1862. While weighing emancipation, Lincoln also had a very different kind of ultimatum on his mind—for African Americans. For much of his first years in office, Lincoln was obsessed with solving America’s seemingly intractable race problem by persuading free blacks to lead the way for an exodus that would wash the United States of the original sin of slavery—without having to live alongside those it had enslaved.

See full story on theroot.com

Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

40 Acres and a Mule

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The story behind 40 acres and a mule. 

On a rainy night in early 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton arrived in Savannah, Ga. which the Union had captured weeks earlier with a question: What should become of newly free black people? It was a question that many in power had been asking for some time. What was different this time was to whom the question was posed: the newly free black people themselves.

It was a visit born of a massacre about a month before, and it launched a debate that continues to this day.

The issue of where these people should go had dogged Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, too, as he marched through Georgia in the fall of 1864. Sherman had expected to pick up able-bodied black men to assist his troops (but not to join them; Sherman would not allow that). An unintended consequence of his scorched-earth policy was that all manner of freed slaves including women, children and the elderly abandoned the plantations and fell in behind him.

Click here to the Washington Post for the full article