This is a bittersweet blog post that has potential to be cathartic or a catalyst.
The 4th of July has never been celebrated more by the patriot and less by the peon. It marked the 250th anniversary of the US. Unfortunately, it also marked the first killing of a US citizen by the National Guard deployed to cities that don’t support the political views of the executive branch. It is a fiat and failure of self-government experimentation. To ignore either side is give up the dream, and the only way forward is to start over and try again. The tree of liberty was watered not by the soldiers blood this time by the citizens. The taxpayers paid the soldiers and bought the bullets that took the life of Tyrin Johnson, a 20 year old father out celebrating Independence Day in Memphis. The voters put the party in charge of the Memphis Safe Task Force. The family that mourns his loss is mine. My flag flown in Iraq and Afghanistan will be buried with him.
That is the cathartic part, now for the catalyst. In March I sent the Library of Congress, Office of Copyrights, a group of unpublished music titled The Mass of the Lamb. This week I received back the certificate of copyright for it. It is a mass ordinary that I first started composing in 2004.
Listen here…
Sheet music is available for purchase and download in the store. My next step is to get the choir at church to start practicing this.
Last year, on Buffalo Soldier Day I announced that the grave of Mingo Sanders was restored to honor with the addition of his rank First Sergeant. This year, on the same day I released the 2nd edition of his biography Buffalo Sergeant. In this version you’ll get the complete story and pictures of the grave marker, maps of his military deployments, and a bunch of edits for clarity that are inevitable when you self-publish. I took the opportunity to add some more dedications. Also, this edition includes page numbers, which actually take up a lot of page space so it looks a lot longer now because of that. Lastly, the cover is different, closer to what I imagined, I used AI to create this cover.
