Up on Cripple Creek

If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire war before her eighteenth birthday, you can get out of bed.
~ E. Jean Carroll

I got out of bed yesterday morning and went to the gym. Simply EVERYONE was there. Seriously, the joint was more jammed than a hospital emergency room on a Saturday night during peak COVID months. Of course, I was the only one at the Y masked up.

Doesn’t anyone grocery shop on Saturday mornings anymore? When do these folks pick up their dry cleaning, take Fido for a nice hike, hit the pharmacy, visit Granny in the insane asylum or some such?

Ya know, I don’t care. What I know is that I won’t repeat that crowded nonsense today. Nope, I’m headed to the mall for oldster mall walking.

One nice thing about the mobbed Y, I wasn’t the only crip on the track. There was an elderly gent using a walker and a young guy (with a spotter…like me!) in a wheelchair.

By the by, the term cripple’s origins are in Old English—crypel, “one who creeps, halts, or limps, one partly or wholly deprived of the use of one or more limbs.”

Compare Dutch kreupelen, German krüppeln (both first attested in 16th cent. (source)

Origins of the name of the L.A. gang, The Crips?

...the name supposedly originally was cribs, partly a reference to the youth of most of the original members, and when they began carrying “pimp canes” it was altered to Crip, which has been attested in U.S. slang as a shortening of cripple (n.) since 1918. (source)

Now I have this song in my head:

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me
If I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

Another song, by The Band—The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down—has always torn me in two. I love the music BUT it’s glorifying the South’s war to enslave Blacks, isn’t it?

Ta-Nehisi Coates called it "Another story about the blues of Pharaoh.” Yup but is there anything more to it?

A byproduct of the lyrics’ belabored historical frame is that it obscures the song’s origin, in a time the United States was mired in another war. I hear “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as an anti-war song first and foremost, and one that is definitively rooted in the Vietnam era. By 1969, the war in Vietnam was deeply unpopular and an obvious disaster of U.S. foreign policy. The Tet Offensive of the previous year had made it abundantly clear that the United States was losing the war, and less than two months after its release, the details of the My Lai Massacre would be made public by journalist Seymour Hersh.

So why write an anti-war song in the middle of the Vietnam War told from the perspective of a Tennessean in 1865? Only Robbie Robertson can say for sure, and these days he’s mostly evasive on the subject. (source)

He’s also evasive on the subject because he’s dead. Robertson was half First Nations (Cayuga and Mohawk) and went on to write and record with The Red Road Ensemble. Why would this man memorialize the side that treated Black and Brown people as no more than animals and farm tools?

 I’d like to see The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down as a purely allegorical anti-war song. Sadly, I don’t think that’s how it’s viewed south of the Mason/Dixon line. *CRINGE*