The Silvery Slippers Choir and Friends "RIVER OF JORDAN Benefit for Palestine"

This album was recorded over 20 years ago but is only now being released. Why the delay? Is it still relevant? While we are very
happy to finally be putting this out, we are sad and angry that the project is even more necessary today than it was when it was first
recorded. Twenty plus years ago this was meant to be sent to the organization Grassroots, International for their work with
Palestinian farmers. We will still be sending the funds to Grassroots, this time for their Palestine Emergency Fund, which is
responding to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as well as providing support to farmers.
This project was originally conceived as a way to raise money for Palestinians suffering the effects of Israeli Water Apartheid. One of
the daily realities of life for Palestinian farmers is that they are routinely denied access to the water under their feet. Most the water
taken from the Jordan River and the West Bank water table is diverted for use in Israel, or by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and
Gaza. A settler is allowed to build a well pretty much anywhere they want, while an Indigenous Palestinian must procure special
permission, which is more often than not denied. Palestinians are expected to buy their own groundwater and river water back from
Israel, plus purchase sea water treated in desalination plants at inflated prices. Heavy machinery producers Caterpillar, Inc have
designed a specially armored tank, the D9, just for use by the Israeli military to destroy Palestinian homes, olive orchards, and wells.
I originally came up with the idea for this project almost 25 years ago, back in 2000, after the Al Aqsa Intifada began. I went to my
partner Raquel Mogollón with whom I was singing in a project called Bucko and Tita, and to my friends from the band Golden Boots.
We started in earnest following the 9.11.2001 attacks on New York and Washington, DC. We reached out to a few local artists and
generally creative “counterculture” types – largely a mix of underground musicians, hippies, punks, activists, landscapers, bicycle
mechanics, artists, and puppeteers. We put together the Silvery Slippers choir.
We even had a benefit concert to raise funds to print and release the album. However, those funds were a portion of what we
needed. Soon, my attention had shifted to the brewing second invasion of Iraq, and I found myself in the center of local organizing
against that. Between working full time as a landscaper and organizing, I got overwhelmed and the money collected went to the
Tucson Peace Action Coalition and the CD project got buried in boxes and put away in a closet.
Until a few days ago…. I was sorting through old recordings and found the Silver Slippers CD and gave it a listen. Yes, it’s raw—but I
loved it. And the timing…. Gaza is undergoing a genocidal assault that has shocked the world. As I write, the US has for the third time
vetoed a UN resolution for a ceasefire. Over 30,000 persons have been killed in the US funded bombardment, and most are women
and children. Almost all of Gaza’s 1.9 million residents have been displaced. The UN reports that one in four Gazans are starving. We
were shocked to witness the Flour Massacre, when 118 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded by the Israeli military as
they waited to receive food aid. The need for aid to Gaza is desperate and has to be our priority. We are happy to work with
Grassroots, International, a trusted organization known for their solidarity and commitment to peace and justice.
The production of this album was a community experience. The Silvery Slippers Choir was a rag tag choir that was so very much fun,
from the rehearsals to the recording to the one and only performance. The voices of this choir were consciously raised in song and
solidarity. On key or off key, they came fully from the heart.
Some of the voices on this CD are no longer with us. Rey Tester, who helped hold down the tenor section was one of my closest
friends and is sorely missed. Jim Marshall, of Beyond the Vortex, was an under credited and unrecognized (by all but a few) improv
saxophone player who left an indelible mark on the development of free jazz through his work with the Human Arts Ensemble as
well as Beyond the Vortex, who contributed the closing selection.
While the album was and is a community project, it started from a very personal place. Forgive me if it seems self-indulgent to go
into this. However, I think it’s necessary because the heart of this album—the choir songs—applied here against invasion and
occupation, have their own historical connection to these themes. I think that has to be addressed, and some explanation given to
how we hope to present them in a transformative and liberating way.
I mostly grew up in rural parts of the South and the Midwest. I am the son and grandson of Baptist preachers from the hills of
Northeast Alabama and Northwest Georgia. I come from a musical family, and we listened to, played, and sang all kinds of music.
Both my parents taught me traditional Appalachian songs, and it was from my father that I learned about, and grew up singing, the
mountain music known as Sacred Harp. All the songs by the choir are Sacred Harp songs except two. One is the song River of Jordan,
which is an old spiritual that was sung by enslaved Africans dreaming of freedom. I had learned the version from a Carter Family
recording, and only later learned of its older roots. The other is Raquel Mogollon’s Mountain Song, which was inspired by Southern
Arizona’s Dzil Nchaa Zian (Mount Graham). All the choir songs touch on the subject of water.

For the Appalachian people who sang these songs, they truly weren’t singing about Palestine or the Jordan River or Canaan, even if
they used those words. Appalachia is one of the poorest places in the nation even today. Many of those who came there beyond the
original indigenous inhabitants were a combination of escapees from slavery and servitude as well as people looking for a way out of
poverty, vagabonds, adventurers, outlaws, and, yes, settlers. When people sang about the Jordan River’s “Sweet Rivers of
Redeeming Love,” or when they sang “I am just going over Jordan, I am just going over home,” they were not singing about literally
going home to the Jordan River. They were singing out of a thirst for hope, for a better, easier life, all of it truly hard to find in this
one.
The story of Appalachia is complicated and has far too many parallels to the forced displacement, genocide, and settlement of
Palestine. At the foot of Lookout Mountain, Sequoyah invented the Cherokee alphabet. Dragging Canoe organized a free militia in
the area of mostly Indigenous, but also African, and poor White people to fight back against the encroachment of settlers trying to
take possession of the land. Andrew Jackson, cursed be his name, waged wars of genocide against the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the
Creek. I come from an area where there was a short-lived Gold Rush that had long term and devastating consequences for the
Indigenous people: it was the starting point for the Trail of Tears in Alabama. These songs of hope also were songs sung by settlers
following this forced displacement.
But the other side to this settlement is that many of the historic families who moved there other than the Indigenous, came as
refugees in some way or another. Africans escaped slavery to be absorbed into Indigenous communities. Irish families came
escaping famine. Poor people escaping the domination and repression by the rich in flatter lands.
The huge Indigenous and African influence on Appalachian culture has until recently been mostly buried and ignored, and the
culture had been seen almost exclusively as an extension of Scottish, English, and Irish culture. That is part of the enduring legacy of
genocide in the founding and development of the US. It is a profound misrepresentation. All Appalachian people owe a deep debt of
gratitude to the indigenous people who shared the secrets and abundance of the land and who contributed much to the music and
stories and food that represent the region and who continue to contribute to and provide the foundation of this culture until today;
and to the African people who brought the banjo and the fiddle styles and so many other components to what people so often
erroneously consider “White” music.
The area where I came from produced the First Alabama Cavalry of the Union Army, where poor white mountain men fought
alongside African soldiers (unique in Civil War history) to liberate the area from the Confederates. Appalachia is a land of occupation
and settlement, but it is also a land of multicultural resistance even to this day. It is in that spirit that these songs are sung and
recorded. As an Appalachian heritage person, I feel it is both my right and my duty to reinterpret the songs and transform them
towards a new purpose. And as a citizen of the world and an internationalist, today when I sing and listen to these songs, I think of
something, of people, I hadn’t thought of before. I hear these songs of longing, lyrics that testify, “I’m going there to meet my
father/mother, I’m going there no more to roam. I am just going over Jordan, I am just going over home.” Today, those words always
make me think of the many Palestinians who continue to be displaced from their homes, who still long for the right of return.
I grew up hearing about Palestine, Israel, Canaan, Zion, the River of Jordan, and similar places not as real places in real time, but as
spiritual and metaphorical concepts. However, one Sunday morning in 1982, I was struck in a profound way by the reality of the
conflict. The top headline of the newspaper announced the slaughter of some 3,500 civilian Palestinians and Shia Muslims at Beirut’s
Sabra neighborhood and Shatila refugee camp. The victims were lined up and executed by Phalangists while the occupying troops
led by Ariel Sharon stood by doing nothing.
So, 18 years later, in September of 2000 when Ariel Sharon decided to enter the Al Aqsa Mosque (aka the Temple Mount aka the
Dome of the Rock) accompanied by an armed guard, I understood immediately that this was an offense designed to provoke. And it
did. Palestinians flooded the streets in what became known as the Al Aqsa Intifada (uprising). The Israeli military attacked with
overwhelming force.
I was prompted to learn more. I began to find out specifically about Israel’s “water Apartheid.” The next thing I know, I had this idea
to seek out a few of these songs about the River Jordan that I’d grown up with, and to put them to work against occupation and
settlement, not for it.
The dream of the Sweet Rivers of Redeeming Love will not be dried up by hate, nor washed away by injustice. I hope, instead, that
those rivers can help us quench the thirst of all who hope for a better world from Tucson to Palestine and back again.
James Patrick Jordan,
Tucson, Arizona
March 6, 2024