{"id":595,"date":"2014-01-20T06:00:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T06:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dailykemp.com\/?p=595"},"modified":"2023-01-16T16:38:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T16:38:29","slug":"dreams-deferred-hearing-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailykemp.com\/2014\/01\/20\/dreams-deferred-hearing-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: ‘Dreams’ Deferred"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I first wrote the following commentary in January 2011 for the now-defunct Option-Magazine.com<\/a>. At the time, America had a Black president. We were cautiously optimistic. Each year thereafter, until 2014, I re-posted slightly updated versions of the piece at Creative Loafing<\/a> in Charlotte, North Carolina. Since then, I’ve continued posting it here at DailyKemp.com \u2014 updating numbers, adding new names, and including new instances of threats. I plan to keep updating this piece and linking it on social media until Dr. King’s dreams (plural, because he didn’t just have one) become reality. At this point, I suspect I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Went up on the mountain<\/i><\/span>
To see what I could see . . .”<\/i><\/span>
\u2014 Gregg Allman, “Dreams”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was a kid growing up in the small mill town of Asheboro, North Carolina, I fell deeply and passionately in love with the Allman Brothers Band. In my 2004 book, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South<\/em><\/a>, I describe exactly how and why I \u2014 a young white Southern kid coming of age in the early ’70s \u2014 came to identify with this group of blues-based rockers from Macon, Georgia:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Allmans dressed in flannels and jeans, like I did. The singer, Gregg Allman, crooned with a melancholy I’d never before heard from someone who shared my reality. It was as though he were speaking directly to me. In the band’s 1969 psychedelic-gospel dirge “Dreams,” Allman moaned the words “I went up on the mountain \/ To see what I could see \/ The whole world was falling \/ Right down in front of me.” I was only eleven years old the first time I heard that song, but I felt I knew what Gregg Allman was talking about. In the years following desegregation, the mood of the South was chaotic. Times were changing. Wrong seemed right and right seemed wrong. The Allmans embraced that chaos, combining country, blues, jazz, and gospel into an otherworldly musical stew that allowed me to feel conflicting emotions: sadness, joy, sorrow, pride. Between 1969 and 1973, the Allmans sang of what it felt like to be saddled with pain (“Dreams,” “It’s Not My Cross to Bear”); they sang of redemption (“Revival”); and they sang of falling in love with (and within) the awesome beauty of the rural South (“Blue Sky,” “Southbound”). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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What I didn’t<\/em> say in that paragraph is that I’d often lie back on my bed, stare at the ceiling, and listen to the Allmans’ “Dreams” on my record player over and over and over. Each time it ended, I’d get up and put the needle back at the beginning of the song. I was obsessed with the uncomfortable longing for something that’s never clearly stated in the lyrics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Dreams”<\/a> had everything I looked to music for: a deep and mournful melody, passionate improvisation, expressions of hurt that don’t come with easy solutions like “Let It Be” or “All You Need is Love,” two Beatles songs from the same period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gregg Allman expressed a hunger for dreams he’d never see. Never<\/em>. That, to me, was big.<\/p>\n\n\n\n