Will Dockery 1970s Chronology

Carver High and Dan Barfield
In Fall of 1973 Will Dockery was bussed to Carver High School, a tough ghetto school which was actually the perfect setting for his wanna-be Beatnik hipster pretentions and goals. Goats Head Soup was at the top of the charts and an older girl told another person that he looked like "Mott The Hoople" so he started wearing sunglasses and grew his hair out into a giant 'fro.

During this school year Dockery began reading Jack Kerouac, along with the brilliantly written Kerouac biography written by Ann Charters, still probably the best, most readable biography on Kerouac yet, even though at least a dozen are now on the shelves, starting his lifelong habit of reading these books over and over, and any Beat Generation writers in any way related:



"Jean-Louis 'Jack' Kerouac ( or ; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American poet and novelist. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas Pynchon. Critics of his work have labeled it 'slapdash', 'grossly sentimental', and 'immoral'. Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the Hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward it. Since his death Kerouac's literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody and Big Sur."

This was before the later resurgences of Kerouac interest that seems to happen every few years. Kerouac had been dead just four years and pretty much every one of his books were then out of print, actually On the Road and Dharma Bums were the only two available on amass scale, as Signet paperbacks these two books could be found in almost any well stocked book store. Charters' biography had just been published in hardcover and paperback, and was fairly easy to find, as well, and the writing style of Charters was excellent, he story of Jack and his comrades was an adventure of it's own.

====I Know It's Only Rock-N-Roll But I Like It====

At the end of 1973, Bob Dylan came back into the public eye with his return before the flood with The Band, and another long term observation began. Not long after that, Rock And Roll Animal from Lou Reed formed yet another giant influence that lasts 40 years later into modern times, perhaps now more than ever in Will Dockery's work.

Bob Dylan came to Columbus, Georgia for the first and last time for a performance on October 30th 1997, which set the entire local poetry, music and arts community on fire, and set the influence of Folk Rock music and Folk Art culture in stone with local workers and to this day this genre dominates the culture of the Columbus-Phenix City scenes.

Columbus, Georgia setlist of Bob Dylan concert of October 30, 1997 at Columbus Civic Center.

Maggie's Farm Lay, Lady, Lay Cold Irons Bound You're A Big Girl Now Can't Wait Silvio Cocaine Blues (acoustic) Tangled Up In Blue (acoustic) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (acoustic) 'Til I Fell In Love With You Not Dark Yet Highway 61 Revisited (encore)

Like A Rolling Stone It Ain't Me, Babe (acoustic) Love Sick Rainy Day Women #12 & 35



In 1975, Will Dockery's first in-person teacher, with specific truths to tell and life lessons, and similar goals, only a decade on, and regrets of The 'Nam behind him, came new English teacher Dan Barfield, real life Hipster novelist-painter-poet.

I have often been asked by fans and groupies for the influences that have shaped my "philosophy of poetry." I rattle off a few well known names and a few well known "schools" of poetics which seems to satisfy them, mostly the basics, my infamous heroes of the Beat Generation, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso & so on, as well as the obvious poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, The truth is....I don't have a "philosophy of poetry", nothing quite as pretentious as that. My poetry grows out of living & the lives (such as Dan Barfield who taught me to think on my feet & record what I see) & philosophies of life from the experiences of the life that I live and have lived, and, by reflection and action/reaction - call/response, those of my friends & others close to me. Yes, I had read "about" these & other artists putting this on-the-street method & so-called "philosophy" somehow to use in their art, be it painting, poetry or song, it was when I met Dan Barfield (first as my English teacher in 1975, although he'd say we studied /together/) that I learned when the art is action oriented, there's no amount of academia that can provide the education that getting down in the field and living to tell of it can give you. As a recommendation then, of Dan Barfield, there's unlikely to be anyone I'd rate higher as a walking, talking personal "philosopher of poetry" for me... in Shadowville, such moments & figures are all-too rare.



During the 1970s and 1980s, the poetry was written and published at an untrackable level (High water marks bein a lost 1974 poetry novel called Whiz Kid that Dockery gave to a girl he thought he loved and told her to burn... which she did. All that he or anyone else can remember about that writing was that it was something like Bob Dylan's Tarantuala, but with personal details, plot and references who knows, maybe somewhere out there Gina Childs still has it in her box, where she keeps her, '  poetry and stuff' ? and stacks of poetry glued into blank books, and yet another Book Movie named Ersatz Glass And Pieces of the Dawn ("two guys who drive off to live with the Lizard People..." -Dan Barfield) which does exist in tiny hand printing, the big Underwood typed manuscript also given to a girl Dockery did and still does love, again with directions to ' burn this' , which she apparently did.), while in real life Dockery married Kathy Strickland with whom he had two children, Clay Dockery in 1978 and Sarah Milam in 1986.

On November 1978, a son, Clayton Dockery, was born to Will and Kathy at the Medical Center in Columbus. In this era, smoking was allowed, sometimes even encouraged, in public places, allowing Dockery to pace and smoke in the waiting room, as Kathy struggled through a 16 hour labor. In the waiting room on the night of November 26, Dockery remembers seeing an episode of the television show Dallas for the first time. Two years later, "Who shot J.R.?" became a major cultural blip, in the Summer of 1980.

At the Taco Stand: A sonnet
At the Taco Stand

I often think of my past and the best tacos I'd share with Kathy on Victory Drive; when the taco stand closed long ago, the Thursday special was a buck for five. Back in 1980 at Buena Vista taco stand, over from the Zodiac and Mickey's, that music row at the little table there I'd hold her hand eating a taco after the rock show. The red and green sauce there were made from scratch, hard to decide on which, both mighty fine though we did decide the green sauce had no match at the taco stand, her eyes staring into mine. Nostalgia, alone with chilling wind and visions of my Lady Katherine.

- Will Dockery

And does this mean there is a clear divide between the point where the 1970s end and the 1980s begin? There was supposed to be, and if there isn't, then we go out of our way to make one.

Besides the fact that 1978 was a year filled with possibilites that only slightly were panned out, that 1979 was a dismal year of wrong moves and pain, and backstepping in many ways that may define Will Dockery's basically defeat-filled life, and then the bright glimmers of light, the possibilities that Atlanta offered, and were just, yet again, almost cracked, grasped, nailed... Alas, that's the pattern, right down to the present day. Take what we can get offer what we can, it is all defined by the losses, the... Magic And Loss, I reckon.

But, that's jumping ahead a bit, since it took a while to get to that ' happily ever after'  moment, and the one after that, and the one after that, as we ask...

"What is Art, Jean-Luc Godard?"



Dockery's Farm Questions
Just slightly off-topic, but seems to be a good time to restate again, that I'm no direct relation to the "Will Dockery" who had the farm Charley Patton lived on, besides the fact that all the Dockery family comes from Ireland, and seem to be related from that starting point.

I was actually named after my grandfather on my mother's side, William C. Whitley, with my middle name from my father's father, my grandfather Abraham Dockery. Sometimes I get tired of the question, like at Pasaquan recently, and just play it off, but I understand it is a valid question, deserving some kind of clear response.

Even more-so when the question seems to be leading up to some ignorant attempt to smear me and my name.

And so it goes.

Here is the biography (from Wikipedia]] of the earlier "Will Dockery":

Will Dockery (1865–1936) built from scratch the Dockery Plantation, the famous home of such original Delta blues musicians as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, and Pops Staples.

Dockery's parents left the Carolinas sometime before the American Civil War and settled in Mississippi as farmers, but were left poor by the war's end. Dockery was born in Love, Mississippi, and went on to graduate from the University of Mississippi in 1885. He left the family farm and purchased, with a $1000 gift from his grandmother, tracts of forest and marshland outside of Cleveland, Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta between the Yazoo River and the Sunflower River. First he went into the lumber business, cutting trees and building a sawmill. As he made more money he acquired more land; realizing that the bottom soil was rich, he cleared the trees, drained the marshes of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and began to plant cotton. It subsequently became known that Dockery needed manual labor, and he was willing to pay for it, so laborers flocked there. Eventually, Will Dockery built a large cotton gin, a post office and a company store which produced its own money. By the 1930s, Dockery plantation covered 28 sqmi of rich fertile river delta lowland. Will Dockery earned a reputation for treating his workers fairly.

Over the years, black laborers began to migrate to the Dockery Plantation, to work in the fields and become tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a system  in which they leased land to cultivate, paying the owner a share of the crop. The families lived on their land and grew their own gardens. Often peripatetic blues musicians were attracted there for itinerant work and they lived in what were called the "quarters" for bachelors, known for the partying and drinking going on there. Here musicians, often drunk, played their music far into the night. The guitar was particularly suited to the rural Mississippi Delta musician.

The Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historic marker at the site of the plantation in recognition of its enormous importance in the development of the Mississippi blues.

Although the complete history will never be known, there is a central theme to the development of what is known as the blues, and that is the plantation that Will Dockery built outside of Cleveland. Although Dockery was unaware of the music his laborers played in their quarters at "house parties" during their off hours, his plantation provided a particularly fertile atmosphere for musicians to gather and play their music while others listened and danced. It is difficult to know what Mississippi music would have emerged without the musical mix of Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson.

A marker designating Dockery Plantation as a site on the Mississippi Blues Trail is an acknowledgment of the important contribution of the plantation to the development of the blues in Mississippi.

The marker was placed in Cleveland, Mississippi. Governor Haley Barbour stated:
 * I’m pleased to include Dockery Plantation on the Mississippi Blues Trail. Apart from the town’s unique historical legacy, which includes printing its own money, Dockery was home to famed Bluesman Charley Patton and played a significant role in the development of the Delta Blues.