(…cont.)
Badger was a friend of Richard Farina who had been a revolutionist in Cuban. He was a folksinger who played the dulcimer and his wife, Mimi-Joan Baez’s sister sang and accompanied him on the guitar. He wrote a popular novel at the time called Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up To Me. Badger was with Dick on the day of his motorcycle accident.
“I was almost a disciple of Farina, but I did not know him well enough to say that. We drank champagne together just a few hours before he died. I remember him getting on the bike and I told him that I wouldn’t get on that thing without a helmet. Then later that day I heard Farina had been killed. I sang at a benefit the next day, the last time I sang in public, except to about 5000 people once on a special occasion, a few years later. I went out the Carmel Valley Road, looking for signs of the accident to see if I could account in some way for Dick’s death. Some people will say that such things be forgotten, but Hemingway once said that the way a person dies is part of his life and that part of their life should be written about too. Farina came to me after he died and told he was all right, because I was crying and I could not understand why he should have to die in the prime of his life.”
Ernest Hemingway
Here is one stanza and the chorus from Badger’s signature song for America during the Peace Movement against the Viet Nam War. It was written in Carmen Valley in 1966.
Now there’s no room
But for joy
If you’re overflowin’
With Sorrow;
So take the fire
Of your soul
And all the fire
You can borrow,
And if it comes to a fight
Use the force of your love,
Use the power of your hand
With the strength
Of a dove…
Now is the time
To end all your sorrow;
If you let it slip by
There will be no tomorrow.
Oh, what really matters
Don’t you understand,
Is not the destruction
But the union of man…
The union of man
In every single land
With no hunger
And no empty hand.
“Peace Brother”
When Badger lived those twenty years in San Francisco he was friends with all kinds of artists, poets and writers, musicians and singers like Mark Spoelstra who he met while singing outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal at Fresno; and others like Jerry Garcia, the folksinger Marvina Reynolds, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and Jesse Fuller. J.C. Burris(blues-harp man)bunked with Badger and his first wife Stephanie for a while and he’s the nephew of the famous blues harmonica player Sonny Terry. When Badger was in the Haight-Ashbury District he lived in the same apartment building with Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company before she became famous. He attended their jam sessions in the basement there on 1090 Page Street.
Badger’s Companheiro Musical
The two major songwriter influences and heroes of Badger’s in his youth were Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie came from Okemah, Oklahoma. He had a sign on his guitar that said “This machine kills fascists.” My brother’s link with Woody came from being born in Fresno County where the Dustbowl Okies immigrated to from Oklahoma; this migration put them in the lap of my Mom’s generation. In other words, my mother’s brothers and sisters married people(as our generation did)from Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas. This combination resulted in the term Portagee-Okie. There were some full-blooded Azoreans that were called Portagee Joe just because they talked in the same lingo twang of the Okies; and acted like them too in their gestures and mannerisms.
Woody Guthrie
Badger was attracted to Guthrie’s topical songs against the cruelty shown towards Migrant Refugees during the Great Dustbowl. Woody’s Deportees was a theme about Okies being turned back at the Port of Entry into California as undesirables. And even after Badger’s own protests songs came to an end, it was still Guthrie’s influence that caused him to go in another direction. Woody’s song This Land Is Your Land(some Americans feel this should be our National Anthem)had a much more lasting inspiration because it’s theme was more universal as a mighty hymn to the common man, and to the grace of an individualist’s soul power we Americans have as our birthright. It was at this transition time in Badger’s life that he started singing positive songs of celebration like A Prayer for the Common People’s Fame, rather than protesting political and social injustices. Having said this, Badger still tried to help oppressed people during his entire lifetime.
(cont…)