Some of you have no doubt heard of today's shooting at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS. That's about 100 miles from where I sit in Oxford at the University of Mississippi.
A history professor, Ethan Schmidt, was shot dead in his office; campus was locked down; an active shooter alert was issued.
It turns out the the lead suspect, still at large, is another professor at DSU: Shannon Lamb, who taught Geography. Apparently there was a love triangle. Early this morning, according to the emerging narrative, Lamb shot his live-in girlfriend down in Gautier, on the Mississippi coast, then drove 300 miles up to campus, confronted Schmidt, shot him dead, then fled. He's still at large.
Lamb turns out to be a German native, from Munich. He's been in Mississippi for a while, and he's a semi-pro musician, a singer/guitarist who plays rack harp and who gigs in Po' Monkeys and other local clubs.
He has a YouTube channel. Here's one video from his channel:
Here's another.
The whole thing is a goddamned shame. He's got kids, as did the other guy, and they're the ones who end up paying a huge price for this.
By the same token, who can be surprised that blues guys sometimes feel titanic, homicidal rages? Love hurts. Failed or cheated-on love hurts. What Lamb appears to have done is almost a cliche, in the long arc of the blues (and Mississippi blues!) tradition. What makes it unusual is that the protagonists--at least in the blues songs I'm familiar with; see "32-20 Blues"--have generally not been white guys, and they certainly weren't university faculty members.
Robert Johnson, we remember, was poisoned in a Mississippi juke by the jealous husband of a woman he was messing around with.
Note: Innocent until proven guilty, obviously. Lamb is merely a "person of interest." He personally reported the death of his girlfriend to the police. His car was then seen, later, on the DSU campus. He is currently being sought. His Facebook page is blowing up with friends telling him not to shoot anybody else; to turn himself in; etc. But obviously the story is still in its early stages.
Peace.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Sep 14, 2015 2:45 PM
"He's got kids, as did the other guy, and they're the ones who end up paying a huge price for this." Hm, those two who died are in my world the ones who paid the highest price. And I very much doubt the blues had anything to do with it; maybe I´m a pussyfoot but this kind of association makes me slightly uncomfortable. (Hopefully professor Lamb´s academic merits were of a higher order than his musical attempts ...)
Well, shooting and guns tend to be rather intimately connected. But the issue with gun availablitiy is a political one, and the US must chose its own path there. Also it´s a political topic and belonging outside this forum. However, quite a few of us from countries with a stricter gun control policy find the prevalence of various firearms in American society slightly disturbing. Even if they´re, like me, "conservatives". (I´ll say no more on the subject.)
First off, this is a tragic event. I don’t know the whole situation, but at some point, someone lost control of their emotions, as we all have at some point in our lives, and they then did an awful act of violence. Having said that…
The availability of guns had not a single thing with the lives lost. The gun was just a tool. The first recorded murder in history was done with a rock or stick. Thousands of years before gun powder or guns were even thought of being invented. Let’s not lose sight of the real issue of the matter. Someone lost control of their thought process and gave in to the heat of the moment.
I'd prefer that we not use this thread, or this forum, to litigate an American issue--the extraordinary prevalence of handguns, both legal and illegal, and the extraordinary number of murders committed by those guns--that makes the rest of the civilized world scratch their collective heads. Let's just let it go. We disagree. (I'm talking about we Americans, but also some Americans and many non-Americans.) Let's just let it go. The point, in this particular case, is the choice that a well-educated man made to shoot three people, stain a fine educational institution, scar a department, and ruin several families.
Well, focusing on the deceased person of interest's music, "Cocaine Blues" is usually attributed to Rev. Gary Davis, but he says he picked it up from an itinerant musician he saw at a carnival when he was a teenager. It was popularized by Dave Van Ronk. There's gotta be over 200 verses that have been made up by various people who have covered this tune.
Last Edited by hvyj on Sep 15, 2015 4:01 PM
