Goodbye Pork Pie Hat<\/strong><\/h1>\nby Joni Mitchell\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen Charlie speaks of Lester<\/strong>
\n You know someone great has gone<\/strong>
\n The sweetest swinging music man<\/strong>
\n Had a Porkie Pig hat on<\/strong>
\n A bright star<\/strong>
\n In a dark age<\/strong>
\n When the bandstands had a thousand ways<\/strong>
\n Of refusing a black man admission<\/strong>
\n Black musician<\/strong>
\n In those days they put him in an<\/strong>
\n Underdog position<\/strong>
\n Cellars and chitlins’<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen Lester took him a wife<\/strong>
\n Arm and arm went black and white<\/strong>
\n And some saw red<\/strong>
\n And drove them from their hotel bed<\/strong>
\n Love is never easy<\/strong>
\n It’s short of the hope we have for happiness<\/strong>
\n Bright and sweet<\/strong>
\n Love is never easy street!<\/strong>
\n Now we are black and white<\/strong>
\n Embracing out in the lunatic New York night<\/strong>
\n It’s very unlikely we’ll be driven out of town<\/strong>
\n Or be hung in a tree<\/strong>
\n That’s unlikely!<\/strong><\/p>\nTonight these crowds<\/strong>
\n Are happy and loud<\/strong>
\n Children are up dancing in the streets<\/strong>
\n In the sticky middle of the night<\/strong>
\n Summer serenade<\/strong>
\n Of taxi horns and fun arcades<\/strong>
\n Where right or wrong<\/strong>
\n Under neon<\/strong>
\n Every feeling goes on!<\/strong>
\n For you and me<\/strong>
\n The sidewalk is a history book<\/strong>
\n And a circus<\/strong>
\n Dangerous clowns<\/strong>
\n Balancing dreadful and wonderful perceptions<\/strong>
\n They have been handed<\/strong>
\n Day by day<\/strong>
\n Generations on down<\/strong><\/p>\nWe came up from the subway<\/strong>
\n On the music midnight makes<\/strong>
\n To Charlie’s bass and Lester’s saxophone<\/strong>
\n In taxi horns and brakes<\/strong>
\n Now Charlie’s down in Mexico<\/strong>
\n With the healers<\/strong>
\n So the sidewalk leads us with music<\/strong>
\n To two little dancers<\/strong>
\n Dancing outside a black bar<\/strong>
\n There’s a sign up on the awning<\/strong>
\n It says “Pork Pie Hat Bar”<\/strong>
\n And there’s black babies dancing<\/strong>
\n Tonight<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joni Mitchell’s process when she wrote the album Mingus was to hang with Charles Mingus and meditate about it afterward then write. Or at least that’s how I remember her […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[119,405,17],"tags":[420],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-2544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-politics","category-rabble-ca","category-writing","tag-joni-mitchell-and-bob-wiseman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}