I knew a lot of folk singers in the 60s and 70s. I was friends with many of them. I regret as much as anything having lost touch with so many people over the years. I have spoken of publishing The PaPeR, an underground newspaper in Miami in the late 60s. Many friends gave me pieces to publish in it, but it petered out before much of it could be. I have kept these treasures for decades in my personal files, and am publishing them here, partly in hope that these folks will see their work and contact me and we will be back in touch. Many of these friends were older than me, and I know many have probably passed on. But hope springs eternal.
Chuck was one of the more dynamic and interesting performers that I knew. I have spent these past few months since beginning this site trying to find him. I found a website with a bio (put the cursor on the link and do a control + click to see it: http://www.mitchellsong.com/bio.php ). I sent a message to the site; no response. Here is one bio I found about him on the web from a coffee house he had performed in:
“Chuck Mitchell started singing in Detroit folk clubs in the 1960s. In Toronto, on his first out of town gig, he met Canadian songwriter Joni Anderson. They married, and as a duo Chuck and Joni Mitchell played the coffeehouse circuit, and gin rummy, until they divorced in 1968. Mitchell’s credits include A Prairie Home Companion and repertory theatre in Texas and in England. He has played Harold Hill in The Music Man and Woody Guthrie in Woody Guthrie’s American Song. Most recently, he wrote and produced Mr. Foster & Mr. Twain, in which Stephen Foster joins Mark Twain for an evening of story and song. A Chuck Mitchell’s show combines his seasoned skills as an actor, singer and guitarist with a selection of delightful material. He sings cabaret songs by Brecht and Weil — “Mack the Knife” and “The Bilbao Song” — and whimsical songs by Flanders & Swann — “The Gnu” and “Have Some Madeira, M’dear”. He roves the room singing “Freeborn Man” by Ewan McColl, or “Necessity” from Finian’s Rainbow. He weaves poetry by Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot into his shows. He has been called a renaissance man, and thinks he is old enough to be one.”
As with so many of these pieces that friends gave me those many years ago, I have transcribed them for easy readability followed by the scan of the holographic (hand-written) manuscript.
By Chuck Mitchell
March 5, 1970. I am in Coconut Grove, but the stillness seems to cover Miami. It is eleven o’clock on an overcast evening –warm, moist, gray— the air unusually still and close, so fecund that overnight (I imagine) will grow two feet, just like in the movies, and in the morning the jungle will have swallowed the city. The bay breeze, that phenomenon which I have come to accept as nearly as regular as time, is late tonight, and may not come at all. The city lies in its lights like a glow worm, subdued beneath the gray lowering clouds which linger from the tropic downpour of the afternoon.
Yes, I say, a soft tropic evening. I leave my little house to walk and run, heading to Biscayne Bay, to Fair Isle bridge, to have a look at the water, the stars, if any, to hear the Australian pines sigh in the breeze if it rises: these are my night rituals, very important to my wellbeing. Most of the rest of the world is asleep, or hooked into national video-talk, or both.
Quiet, strange, no night sounds, no peepers and creepers and frogs, the surf roar of Dixie highway traffic far away. Something is different. As I go along, I notice that the grand savory stew of tropical odors, which should be magnified in the night air, is nearly absent. There is the rank odor of mango trees in bloom, and a trace of damp-decaying vegetation wetted by the rain — oddly like, it occurs to me, Indian summer nights in Michigan. But where I usually encounter a great puddle of night-blooming jasmine, and walk through it, breathing deeply, there is nothing. And oddly again, Michigan flashes back, summer cabins, cool night, stoves to take off the chill. Kerosene. What on earth? Yes, the strong odor of kerosene, covering up the subtler green growing scents, cancelling even the jasmine. And I’m suddenly quite aware of the roar of a jet, headed southeast out over the bay, one of the many coming and going all day and all night to and from the corners of the world via Miami International Airport. I realized I’ve become inured to the roar, most of the time, but now it reminds me of something I read on jet engine effluent, that black cloud of soot 80 or 90 pounds of it, disseminated by the jets burning kerosene inefficiently at low altitudes. To stifle me, and the jasmine.
I walk on, toward the bay, thinking of the cool water and the lift it always gives my spirits. I begin to catch another smell raw and pungent, like burning linoleum, smoldering mattresses.
Where is that fresh cool bay breeze? By this time, I have reached the landward side of Fair Isle Bridge. But there is no solace in the still, slick water. The air is stale. My lungs and me do not feel that exhilaration, that fresh healthiness which usually comes at this point in my wanderings. A sort of heartburn assails me. All systems are raw, fatigued, and for a moment I wonder if I have somehow been displaced from the city of sun and fun to Cleveland on a hot summer night… But no, a big heron flies overhead, croaking disconsolately. And to the north, past Mercy Hospital, the twinkling lights of the Rickenbacker Causeway, over the glow of downtown Miami, a pall of incinerator smoke, thick and foul, lies caught between the low banked rain clouds and the land. I look to the south, over the Coconut Grove Bank and Sailboat Bay. The Grove incinerator stack spews another reeking cloud slowly seaward, held undiluted under the natural cloud cover. These, I note, are night rituals of a different sort. If you burn off your garbage at night it’s not as noticeable, until the air is still for a few hours.
A puff of air, flat and stale as the air around me, stirs by. No shroud and stay sailboat bells, no line of pelicans pumping mysterious and purposeful under the moon. Beautiful Miami, Coconut Grove, America, the World, my home.
Good God, it’s quiet.
How much time have we really got, when the absence of a night wind covers all the green growing things with the smell of kerosene and burning linoleum.
I am one person seeking solace by the sea, and on this night I have not found it, not at all. Slowly, I turn and walk my mile home. On the high ground, the air is warmer, dryer, but no cleaner. All is still.
Friday, March 6, 1970. It is now one o’clock in the morning. During the time it has taken to write this, the wind has risen, the sky has become miraculously clear, full of starts and fair fleets of scudding clouds. The air is sweet, and once again
If the jasmine don’t get you,
You know the bay breeze will.
Thank you, Vince. Hip hip hooray, fellow citizens.
“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”
-30-
Vince was Vince Martin, one of the first folk singers to make Coconut Grove their home base.
“-30-“ is a printer’s code that the piece ended here.