Dungeon Family Reunion
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CD INCLUDED DUNGEON FAMILY REUNION the antebellum spirituals and shouts, the deep lot of folks in the grave today on account of has a population just north of 3,000, is also home African roots of which had remained largely A someone called them “nigger.” ’Cause they to the region’s largest private employer, the Ir- untouched due to the relative isolation of the got mad about it. Didn’t understand. I remem- win County Detention Center, where hundreds sea island. Thus the addition of Bessie to their ber a white lady, my white lady told me, says, of undocumented immigrants are indefinitely ranks was remarkable. She contributed material “People get mad about that, Bessie, but they ought detained in what the Georgia A.C.L.U. has de- inherited from her step-grandfather, Jet Samp- to be glad that they are one.” I still is as mad at You Don’t Know scribed as “substandard conditions.” son, a prolific singer and multi-instrumentalist her right then, and I said, “Now, what are you What You Mean In February, fifty-some-odd members of the born into slavery; ring plays picked up as a girl talking about?” I would go on to read it and I extended Prater family traveled to Ocilla from in South Georgia, around Dawson; work songs find it on there, where the Lord said that would To Me all over the country to attend Dave Prater Day. learned from convict road gangs, Bahamian fish- be: that slang name on earth for what we’re the On a Friday afternoon, several hundred people ermen, and Gulf Coast roustabouts; and hymns Ethiopians. And we’re one of the greatest people BY gathered downtown. It was chilly, even for and songs for worship gathered from a good on the face of the earth. If you would just under- JONATHAN BERNSTEIN February, and food trucks sold hot cocoa and half-dozen black churches. stand it, see. And we’s a nation. And everything. coffee for a dollar. The celebration began with By the time folklorist Alan Lomax visited But I just didn’t know it. And I was talking to a talent show, where a few locals sang George St. Simons with a stereo tape-machine in 1959, my daughter-in-law about it, and she’s pricked Strait and Hootie & the Blowfish. Prater’s grand- Bessie Jones and many of her songs had become against it, you know, and I kept on talking and daughter Shalonda won the competition with fundamental to the ensemble (soon to be re- after she got saved, and go further ’way with the her rendition of “When Something Is Wrong christened, by Bessie, the Georgia Sea Island Bible, and began to read, and I ease up on and eriously?” said the teenage girl work- with My Baby.” Singers). Lomax was entranced. He invited her ease up on—you got to ease up on, you know; you ing behind the desk at the office of the Throughout the day, Sam & Dave played to New York City for the recording of her “oral can’t feed a baby off of bones, you know; you got “S Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Totowa, over the PA, but something was missing. Dave’s biography,” which, when it was completed, to give him milk, you know—and so I just ease New Jersey. “You’re like the fourth person in son Chris had remixed songs like “Hold on, covered some thirty hours of tape, including up on, ease up on till I got her to see it. Now she’s the last couple days to ask about him.” It was a I’m Comin’,” editing out Sam Moore’s high- reminiscences, ghost stories, tall tales, jokes, as happy with it as she can be. She understand it. humid Thursday afternoon in early July, and I tenor parts and turning the duo’s greatest hits religious testimony, herbal remedies, and many, It’s just a slang word, Jesus said, that earthy name was looking for Dave Prater’s grave. A middle- into triumphant Prater solo records. Later on, many songs. Over the course of these sessions, they call you. And then it goes on that way, over aged woman working nearby chimed in: “Who traffic stopped during a moment of silence, the principals discovered that they were compil- there. It’s in Acts—Apostles, I think it’s around was he, anyway?” and a congressman from the Georgia House of ing the raw material for a large-scale pedagogical the fifth chapter, but anyway, you see straight-out As one half of Sam & Dave, Prater’s voice Representatives read a resolution officially rec- project to which, over the next twenty years, nigger, the first nigger convert. That’s Enoch. And can be heard on some of the most enduring ognizing Prater as a “distinguished Georgian.” Bessie Jones would devote herself with reli- Queen of Sheba was so black, it’s pitiful. She’s as r&b recordings of the last half-century. In the At one point, four rectangular green signs were gious fervor, teaching the old-time songs, plays, black as my son. Real dark. Like pretty smooth mid-sixties, Prater and his partner, Sam Moore, unveiled that would adorn each of the major and lore to children and adults alike, across the black skin, had long black hair—that’s Queen crafted a live act so unparalleled in its sweaty roadways into town. They read: country, in kindergarten classrooms and folk of Sheba. The greatest queen. And the prettiest tent-revival ecstasy that Otis Redding, sick of festivals, nightclubs, the Poor People’s March on woman of the time. And Jesse was a black man, being upstaged by his opener, once claimed: Home of Washington, Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. Her you see. That was Mary’s father. And Mary is “I never want to have to follow those mother- “Dave Prater” Bessie, who from early girlhood was acutely at- vision was one of radical egalitarianism, inspired Jesus’s mother. Where he say that I am of the fuckers again.” Yet since his death in 1988, the Sam & Dave – “Soul Man” tuned to portents, signs, and superstitions, culti- by the enduring collective, expressive folk tradi- Ethiopian tribe. Root and offspring of David. man who was best known to the world simply 1997 Georgia Music vating an abiding sense of the spiritually sublime tions—occupational, recreational, spiritual—of You know David black. as Dave has receded from the popular history Hall of Fame Inductee in her work, her relationships, and, especially, the black rural South and her ardent faith in a of sixties r&b, erased from our pantheon of Got to her music. She nurtured a prodigious repertoire kind of ecstatic liberation theology, which found he colored peoples and the nationality of soul legends. Ocilla’s Chamber of Commerce had decided of songs—hundreds of them, for work, play, activist application in the civil rights movement. T peoples—I’m talking about the nation of After I told the women that Dave had been to honor Prater as part of its celebration of Black Ease Up On worship, instruction—as both a rite and as a voca- It was the right time for Bessie to do her work. people—all over the country, to my eye and a famous musician, they remained perplexed as History Month. It was the first time the town tion. For Bessie, music was a means of honoring The entirety of Bessie Jones’s oral biography my belief, everywhere in the world, I believe to the recent surge of interest in his grave. “Was had ever recognized its most famous native. BY her enslaved ancestors, as she called them, and is available in free streaming audio through we should realize that peoples are just people. it a recent anniversary, or anything like that?” “It should have happened a long time ago,” NATHAN SALSBURG uplifting her hard-driven contemporaries. “Those the online archive of Lomax’s Association for And you’re human and you got to die. We all Not as far as I could tell. said Mayor Horace Hudgins. Hudgins moved to folks were going through some hardships,” she Cultural Equity. What follows is one small ex- realize and know that God don’t think no more “Can you think of any reason why everyone Ocilla from nearby Homerville in 1987, a year told the scholar John Stewart in 1978, “and all cerpt, particularly illustrative of Bessie’s mys- of you than he do of me. That’s what we oughta would be visiting now?” before Dave Prater lost control of his Chevy those good songs, and the meanings of those tical worldview and the often-visionary oral see. If God loved you—I was talking to a white I could not. and crashed into a tree on Interstate 75, just songs, the Lord gave it to them. It was handed poetry in which she expressed it. lady then—if He loved you more than He did twenty-five miles west of his hometown. Prater down to them without any schooling. And that’s me, He wouldn’t let you have to even birth a ive months earlier, a small town in south- had been driving home, as he did at the end of essie Jones got the Holy Ghost in the vicini- why I’ve been so delighted to keep it going the baby: He’d let your childrens come on up to you F central Georgia was hosting its own Dave every tour, to visit his mom.