Of Blood and the Boogie

Destination Freedom. Destination Freedom. Dramatization of the great democratic traditions of the Negro people is brought to you by Station WMAQ as part of the pageant of history and of America's own destination freedom. Out of the human turmoil and hectic life in USA in the late unlimited decades following the First World War, out of fantastic financial boom and prohibition and gang wars and fake

came new songs in music. And though those decades are now bones in the body of history, some of its music made by unknown musicians out of the heart of the environment around them forecasts even more restless, surging, driving times to come, such as the saga of one form of folk music which swept the popular music field,

and whose anatomy we dissect in today's chapter of Blood and the Boogie through the eyes of noted folk artist Albert Ammon. It took me a long time to locate the beep. It took a long time even though I knew it was in the air and everywhere around me.

It was in the tight tenement woods to set aside for millhands, porters, steel workers, and pile drivers, dishwashers and waiters, and sandhoards, maids and ditch-diggers, prisoners of poverty. It was in their fight, laugh and claim, work and love, driving and dreaming.

Lusty, troublesome, rolling always onward, always searching, sometimes finding but always moving, never stopping. All this I know now, but it took me a long time to find a beat. I lay stretched on my beard, excited in all my teenage tinseness, waiting for my mother and father to sleep so I could slip away and walk along

the alcohol avenues, sing along with the itinerants passing outside my winter and sing in as though they sang to the beat of my heart. I wanted to soothe the awful excitement that upped my heartbeat whenever I heard the blues, whenever I waited for my folks to sleep so I I could slip away.