The Bigger Picture

New Depression

by Bob Moses

For the past few months, nearly every news story led with an alarming comparison to 1929. This bank collapse, that government rescue, the intoned mantra of presidential debates: “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” Not to add to the gloom, but recall that 1929 saw extreme volatility and financial-sector ruin, but the truly bitter years of unemployment and migration didn’t come knocking for a few years (“Happy Days Are Here Again” didn’t accompany the FDR inaugural until 1932).

In times of economic anxiety, we seek comfort in the authentic — dinner with friends instead of a night out, back-to-the-land movements, Jimmy Carter. And heritage music. As Nathan Salsburg points out in Sing Murder, the Dust Bowl families in the first Depression carried their love of the “old songs” with them. Perhaps we can credit (blame?) the severe recession of 1973-74 for Lynyrd Skynrd and the high-water mark of Southern boogie rock, the warm, backward-looking safety of blue skies, front porches and long-haired girls in floor-length denim.

"Suite for Hobo and Brass"

Around the time of the crash of ’87, I was trying to work out some connection between Bach, counterpoint and the blues, or more specifically, how would Bach sound if played by a New Orleans second-line brass band. While the result was predictably uneven, I was more successful in my choice of text: Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing: And Other Writings. In its short declarative sentences, its accumulated detail, its blank-faced air of resignation, Waiting For Nothing is to my mind one of the most affecting Depression narratives — including The Grapes of Wrath. It was certainly more controversial than Steinbeck’s classic; the British publisher excised an entire chapter that described the main character resorting to homosexual prostitution. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1935, Waiting For Nothing (dedicated to “Jolene, who turned off the gas”) piles affront on desperation on grim determination to display the heartsickness of a stiff’s existence. Tom Kromer was a son of the West Virginia coalfields and glass plants. He managed to cobble together enough education and inspiration to spark a desire to write and report what he saw of real life.
Waiting For Nothing
Kromer’s five years on the bum (he wrote most of the manuscript in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp) make up the spine of the book’s story; in the British edition’s autobiographical statement he claims, “After a while I stopped asking for work. I started out again and have been on the road almost constantly since then, except for 15 months I spent in a CCC camp. This last time has been four years. Sometimes I would stay in a town for four or five months doing odd jobs for a room and something to eat. Most of the time I slept and ate in missions, dinged the streets and houses, and used every other racket known to stiffs to get by.” Kromer became something of a protégé of Lincoln Steffens and the socialist West Coast Writer’s Project, publishing two stories in Steffens’s Pacific Weekly. But Waiting For Nothing is his monument.
Performing Suite for Hobo and Brass
Kromer’s text and my musings on our New Orleans musical heritage resulted in Suite for Hobo and Brass. It was recorded by Sean Slade at Fort Apache South, and features Ken Field (Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Revolutionary Snake Ensemble) on alto sax, Henley Douglas (Heavy Metal Horns, Boston Horns) on tenor sax, Tim Sprague (Children of Paradise) on trumpet, and Jon Ferry (Bim Skala Bim) on trombone. I chose a section of the book’s first chapter, mostly for the rhythm of the language that leads to a decisive moment, and the concluding declaration that the narrator is starving. It was performed live once in Boston for one of Jerry Beck’s Revolving Museum events. We were positioned, appropriately, in front of a giant book that housed an art exhibit in a vacant lot. Christian Marclay was performing in the next block. The 80s were great, market crash notwithstanding. Wish you were there.

Each Depression writes its own narrative. We’re in the first chapter of this one.