{"id":66436,"date":"2019-07-22T14:04:44","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T18:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/?p=66436"},"modified":"2021-05-28T11:18:36","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T15:18:36","slug":"jim-johnny-and-the-orange-blossom-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/blogs\/mornings\/2019\/07\/jim-johnny-and-the-orange-blossom-special\/","title":{"rendered":"Jim, Johnny And The Orange Blossom Special"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9Q87yOxpyC8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I had just turned eight years old when I first heard Johnny Cash.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was \u201c<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Orange Blossom Special\u201d <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">and it was playing on my Great Uncle Jim\u2019s 1950\u2019s Clairtone console. Jim had served with the Canadians at Vimy Ridge in 1917. I had seen the scars from the shrapnel wounds on his shins many times as a child. He was a tough man who had seen things. Many of those things were extremely unpleasant.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">He was then in his late sixties and the youngest and the last of the 8 Valey brothers left alive and the only one I had ever met. The others, including my grandfather, David, passed away before I was born.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">After the war, as the legend of Uncle Jim goes, while most discharged servicemen were marrying pretty girls and buying homes in the suburbs and working in the factories. Uncle Jim was travelling to exotic places like Tibet and New Zealand and Borneo and the deep south of America.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">He was a \u201chippie\u201d before there were hippies. A true original.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">He actually escaped in the middle of the night from some town in Georgia in 1949 after getting involved with an early civil rights group, trying to get African Americans registered for the vote. A rock with a note attached, that crashed through the window of the hostel he and others were staying at, convinced him to leave. It simply said -\u201dleave or die KKK.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sorrow, Sun Records, racism and Rosa Parks, moral tribulation and redemption and a man in black\u2019s complicated bond and emotional relationship with trains and myriad metaphors contained within are difficult concepts to grasp as a 8 year old. These are things Jim talked about.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately that day, the \u201c<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Special\u201d,\u00a0 <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Johnny and Jim didn\u2019t <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">overwhelm<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> an impressionable and burgeoning\u00a0 8 year old music nut by trying to solve all the world\u2019s problems. What they did do, was smartly infuse a melodic curiosity and plant an intellectual seed that enabled me, as that seed grew &#8211; and I grew, to seek out the deeper meanings behind those ideas and the philosophies surrounding them and to know to work diligently to understand and hopefully master them and mostly, why that is important.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cWhy are those people mad at that black man?\u201d I asked, as the black and white television screen itself almost burst into flames; flames of rage, as we watched the news footage roll from Detroit during that long hot summer of 1967.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cBecause they\u2019re ignorant\u201d said Jim.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cWhat\u2019s ignorant?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cIt means they aren\u2019t very smart and have a lot of hate in their hearts.\u201d he patiently answered.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cDon\u2019t EVER let hate take hold in your heart and don\u2019t EVER judge someone just because they\u2019re different from you\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was thinking about Jim and Johnny today and the \u201cOrange Blossom Special\u201d and what an amazing and wonderful gift they gave me all those years ago! <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I had just turned eight years old when I first heard Johnny Cash.\u00a0 It was \u201cOrange Blossom Special\u201d and it was playing on my Great Uncle Jim\u2019s 1950\u2019s Clairtone console. Jim had served with the Canadians at Vimy Ridge in 1917. I had seen the scars from the shrapnel wounds on his shins many times","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":80952,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"featured_img_display":"No","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mornings"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-28 07:37:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"react_link":"https:\/\/cknx.ca\/blogs\/mornings\/2019\/07\/jim-johnny-and-the-orange-blossom-special\/","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66436"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66441,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66436\/revisions\/66441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/cknxam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}