I was out on my walk with my dog today, this time with my MP3 player wailing away on shuffle. Along the way, the song "Wooden Ships" from the very first Crosby, Stills, and Nash album came up. I had not heard it for a while, but as I always do when I hear it, I thought of my of my long gone friend, Ralph Dickey. I knew him for a brief year or so when I was going to law school in Berkeley, some time around 1968 and 1969. Ralph was a beautiful soul who was a super musician -- piano was his axe and he played classical or jazz with equal beauty and aplomb. Anyway, when CS&N released their first album, it was Ralph who turned us all on to it. He had gotten an early copy and was simply enamored of it, bubbling with such genuine praise that we all went out and bought it immediately. You have to remember that at that time NOTHING like it had ever been done before. It was truly a unique album, with every song on it being like a new lover. Ralph always touted "Wooden Ships" as the best of the best.
So today, as I listened I thought of Ralph who, for reasons I still don't understand, took his life at a very young age. In his honor, take a listen, and pretend that you are back in 1969, hearing it for the very first time.
3 comments:
Part of the reason Ralph took his life was because he kept falling in love with "white" women who didn't want to challenge their families and marry him or even stay with him forever, and since he was raised by his white mother (not really ever knowing his black father) for the first seven years of his life and then when she married a white man who didn't want a mixed race kid, he was dropped off in the "ghetto"—as he always told it—with a sister of his father's and faced with being too white and too suburban and sensitive he retreated into himself and then when the whole "black power" thing happened it confused him eve more as some of his "black brothers" thought he behaved and appeared too "white" and his "white" girlfriends thought he was too "black" to bring home to daddy, etc. and then on top of it he went to that "primal scream" therapy inventor who seemed to make it all worse. I cried like a baby when Ralph passed. I loved that guy and his gentle sweet nature, and his beautiful musicianship (and his music recommendations, like the time he turned me on to the John Mayall lp with that fiddle player whose name escapes me tonight, but I bet you remember. Lal
Yes Lal, you're right, I remember: Don "Sugarcane" Harris.
And thanks for the explanation about Ralph. I guess I never got the whole story.
Don "Sugarcane" Harris, absolutely. I knew you'd remember. I ended up hanging at John Mayall's house in L.A. when I lived out there. Really nice guy. I only wish Ralph had lived long enough to see all that heavy racial legacy lightened a bit by more advanced understanding and acceptance. He was such a talented guy, musician and poet as well as much more. Thanks for the tribute to his taste and foresight.
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