From the Trenches World Report
Enforce our Bill of Rights
The artist known as Prince has died … TMZ has learned. He was 57.
Prince’s body was discovered at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota early Thursday morning.
Multiple sources connected to the singer confirmed he had passed. We’ve obtained the emergency dispatch call for a “male down, not breathing.” Continue reading “Prince Dead at 57”
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Shortly after Woodrow Wilson took office there began in Colorado one of the most bitter and violent struggles between workers and corporate capital in the history of the country.
This was the Colorado coal strike that began in September 1913 and culminated in the “Ludlow Massacre” of April 1914. Eleven thousand miners in southern Colorado … worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies. … Continue reading “Ludlow Massacre: April 20, 1914”
In his 1968 song Mama Tried, Merle Haggard sang of turning 21 in prison. Haggard, who died Wednesday in California at age 79, had done just that, though not, as he sang in the song, “doing life without parole.”
Haggard’s youth of petty crime, financial insecurity and freight-car hopping eventually informed songs that spoke plainly but not predictably of social outcasts, blue-collar concerns and persistent restlessness. Continue reading “Merle Haggard dead at 79”
Keith Emerson, founding member and keyboardist of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and a prog rock legend, died Friday. He was 71. His bandmate Carl Palmer and the trio’s official Facebook confirmed Emerson’s death. TMZ reported that police found Emerson with a single gunshot wound to the head, though they could not confirm that Emerson died by suicide. “We regret to announce that Keith Emerson died last night at his home in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, aged 71. We ask that the family’s privacy and grief be respected,” the band wrote. Continue reading “Keith Emerson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer Keyboardist, Dead at 71”