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about finalizing the tour line-up and writing a press release. Basically a jazz man, George was bemused by my vehemence over the choice of sidemen and let me get on with it as long as I didn’t go over budget. After a week on Warwick’s sofa (he was attending Columbia) I went back to Harvard to take my final exams.
    Finishing university meant I was prey to the Selective Service Organization, otherwise known as the Draft Board. I was duly summoned to meet a chartered bus in Princeton early one morning in February ’64 and taken to Newark for a physical. With me were about twenty-five mostly familiar faces: some I knew from grade school, some were friends of my brother’s, some had been team-mates or opponents in the summer baseball league. Most were from the Neapolitan or black communities in Princeton. I sensed I was probably the only one on the bus with a letter from his doctor about flat feet and a bad back. Years later, when visiting the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, I wondered whether the inscribed names included any of my fellow passengers from that day.
    After the examination, I stood in my underwear in front of a sergeant who looked at me as if I were an insect as he shot off a list of questions. I had longish hair and a bad attitude. When I said I was a ‘writer’, he repeated the word contemptuously as if it were a synonym for ‘pimp’ or ‘bank robber’. He scribbled something on my form and told me to get dressed. A few weeks later, my 1Y classification arrived. It wasn’t quite a 4F, but it put me at the end of the queue and freed me to pursue my life without worrying about the growing war in Vietnam. Within six months, so many freaks had shown up for their physicals tripping, claiming to be homosexual, with Dexedrine-fuelled heart rates, or applying for conscientious objector status that the army realized its aversion to ‘bad apples’ would leave them short of cannon fodder. Had it been the autumn rather than the spring of 1964, I would have had my head shaved and been sent straight to boot camp.
    With a month and a half to kill before the start of the tour, I decided to pay my first visit to the South. Like Andalusia for Spain or Transylvania for Hungary, the American South is the source of almost all the nation’s traditional musical forms. The year 1964 marked a climax of dramatic change in the region: black voters were being registered, lunch counters and buses integrated and schools forced to admit black students. The resistance by Southern whites was at its most intense. Overdue as these revolutionary changes were, I wanted to catch a glimpse of the old South before it disappeared.
    The first leg of the journey involved driving Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and some friends of mine to Eric Von Schmidt’s winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida. Despite knowing, as all Northerners did in those days, that certain counties in Carolina and Georgia paid no property taxes thanks to the money gouged from sun-seeking Yankees, we were caught in a speed trap and needed a $75 whip-round to avoid a night in jail. We bemoan the homogenization of American culture and accents, but generations of Northern drivers would be happy to have been spared the sight of a drawling, racist, sunglass-wearing, pistol-packing Southern cop pulling them over on a lonely stretch of Georgia highway.
    After some R&R on a Gulf Coast beach, I headed for Johns Island, South Carolina, where Guy Carawan was hosting a festival of local music. He took me to an Easter night ‘watch service’ at Moving Star Hall, a flimsy wooden box set on cement blocks. The congregation were mostly domestics who worked for white families in Charleston. They shivered in their thin clothes as the preacher opened the service in the Gullah accent unique to these islands: ‘This morning … at five o’clock… the Lord … blessed me … once again…with SIGHT! Praise the Lord!’
    They sang hymns in their own style. The clapping is slow for the first