A Song for Crystal Mason

A Song for Crystal Mason      

A song for Crystal Mason, music video by Bette Korber

A Song for Crystal Mason, free download from CD baby


This song (lyrics and chords are at the end) and video are for Crystal Mason, an American citizen and mother of three. Crystal was arrested for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election, because she was considered by election officials to be ineligible. For this she was sentenced to 5 years in prison. In Texas, felons have the right to vote after they are released from prison, but [here is the fine print] not while they are still under supervision. Crystal had served prison time for tax evasion, but by 2016 she was released and was back home with her family, had a job, things were going well. She did not know she was still ineligible to vote, so her provisional ballot was cast, but it was never counted. My heart broke for her and her family when I heard her story on Democracy Now. A 5-year prison sentence is an outrageously harsh response to a simple misunderstanding, and it seems such an excessive sentence was not about justice, but about voter intimidation. I was deeply moved when I heard the strength and dignity of her response to this situation. In the middle this, she was encouraging her own kids to vote, and to make a difference. Her spirit lifted her story from being one of voter intimidation to one of voter inspiration. So this song is for her. Civil rights groups are working with her on an appeal, and a hearing to review the case is set for Sept. 2019 – as I’m writing, it is just a few days away.

There is gofundme site for Crystal, to try to help her keep her house and keep her extended family afloat in this very hard situation; please consider helping her and her family if you can. Deepest thanks to those of you who already pitched in.

Crystal's gofundme, justice4crystal

If you would like to read more about Crystal's story, see:

Texas Made An Example Out Of Crystal Mason — For Trying To Vote 

ACLU on Crystal Mason

 Democracy Now on Crystal Mason


A bit more about this song video, if you’re curious. 

Butterflies.
Crystal really loves butterflies, as a symbol of hope and new beginnings (see the story by Sam Levine). Butterflies are such a part of her it seems that a few of them just flew out the creative commons and into this video, and landed in the song.

Thank you, Crystal.
I had no idea if Crystal would be OK with this song when I wrote it, and I was worried about how she would feel about it. I tried to keep the story as true to her as I could from reading the news about her case. When I found her at last, and asked her permission to put this  online, she not only said yes, but she kindly shared some lovely pictures of herself, and of her friends and family to include in the video. I am also grateful to for Allison V. Smith, a Dallas based photographer, for sharing a couple of her beautiful photos of Crystal and her family.

Amazing Grace.
I’m ending with a harmonica instrumental version of Amazing Grace for the video credits, as Crystal is a person of faith. This hymn is important to people in my family; it was my Uncle Scorp's favorite song, it helped him through very hard times. He used to ask my sister Dorothy to sing it for him. So this little harmonica tune is to honor Crystal's faith, to honor the loving memory of my Uncle Scorp, and to honor my sister's 12-string guitar; it goes from my family to hers.

Voting Rights.
Over the past two decades voting rights have systematically been diminished in our country, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly chosen not to protect our citizens’ right to vote. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed to ensure that states and local governments did not pass laws or implement policies that deny American citizens the right to vote based on race. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in a overwhelming bipartisan vote to support our democracy: 390-33 in the House (all 33 were Republicans), 98-0 in the Senate. But in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court overturned a critical part of the Act, a part that had prevented discriminatory voting laws from being implemented in jurisdictions with a history of discrimination. Since that decision, according to Common Cause, 20 states have passed restrictive new voting laws.

Voter ID laws are one way that voting restrictions can specifically target and disenfranchise people of color. For example, in 2018, North Dakota implemented a voter ID law requiring an ID with a physical address, to vote. This made tens of thousands of North Dakotans suddenly ineligible to vote, and most of the disenfranchised were Native American, because it was common among people who live on reservations to have just a PO Box on their IDs. The Supreme Court in Oct. 2018 decided not to block the North Dakota voter ID law, so this law went into effect just one month before the Nov. 2018 elections. This left almost no time for Native Americans to figure out how to get a new IDs issued with a street address before the election. Native Americans vote predominantly Democratic, and in Nov. 2018, the Democratic incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp lost the election to Republican Kevin Cramer.

I’m fed up. Enough with gerrymandering, with allowing massive corporate donations to essentially buy elections, enough with voter intimidation, with the ID laws that deny our citizens the right to vote, with the archaic electoral college! Enough with turning eligible voters away from the polls, and making the polls inaccessible to people.  Enough with tolerating voter intimidation. Enough with allowing Russians to meddle with our social media and spread lies that pit us against one another.

We need to elect just leaders and judges who will protect the First Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, people who will protect our democracy. So for the past few years I’ve been proud stand with my good neighbors near election time, and volunteer to try to call up the vote, to walk up the vote, to stand with organizations I believe in, just to do what I can. I’m even trying to sing up the vote. Figure out what works for you to do, and do it. Be kind, listen, but talk politics, please! We are a democracy, for Heaven’s sake! Its our responsibility. We are each just one person, but together we make a nation.

"Voting is the foundation stone for political action." -- Martin Luther King

The American people not only have to get out the vote, we have to do it at a level that enables us to overcome these deliberate obstacles, and turn things around while we can. If we can do this I hold out hope we can elect leaders who will move us towards a fair democracy, and towards human and environmental justice. But we first need leap past these deliberate hurdles. We have to hold despair at bay, because our only hope to succeed is having enough hope to act, and this begins with the courage and determination to vote good people into office despite the hurdles.

This will require that eligible voters step up in numbers like never before. American citizens have this bright spark of power, the right to vote. Let that spark shine: learn, think, speak, and vote, and together we can create a better future. Given the climate crisis, and America’s place in the world, it in fact may be our only hope for any future.

Reason to hope.
 In 2018 it was heartening to see the United States House of Representatives beginning to actually resemble the people it represents – 24 people of color were newly elected, a record for our nation, so I added their official portraits to the song.  Also, in January 2019 more women stepped into the House to represent us than ever before.

Russia’s Pander.
I am unreasonably proud to have thought of something that rhymed with gerrymander. It wasn’t easy.

Finally, are you registered to vote? If not, please register, and, “get out there and make a difference – right now!”


A Song for Crystal Mason         
By Bette Korber                         Copyright Feb. 9, 2019

[Adapted Creative Commons Copyright (see below) with the following addendum: Anybody is free to sing this song live on any occasion, but if you would like to record it to sell it, please get it touch and we can discuss.]

Intro                                                                
     Am                                                          E7
Crystal Mason stepped out of the prison gate       
    Am                   E7
Into the Texas sun,                       
      G                                            Dm
Breathed the sweet air of freedom
               Am        E7         Am   
Folded in her family’s loving arms.               

Crystal, she got her story straight,           
Convicted once for tax evasion,                
Now her children had their mother home,            
She had a job, was getting education.           

2016, November comes                         
So Crystal went out to vote.                    
Name’s not on the registrar’s list,                
Provisional ballot, filled with hope.            

Chorus
  Am                                                              E7
Wake up wake up wake up sweet democracy       
 Am                            E7                
Wake up sweet democracy                   
 F                                      Am
Money doesn’t equal wisdom               
  Dm                                                Am                    
Don’t you let them buy your mind.               

Texas felons have the right to vote,            
After they’ve served their time,               
But not while under supervision               
No one told Crystal this would be a crime.       

Springtime comes to Tarrant County Texas,        
Police come to Crystal’s door               
She was arrested for not knowing,               
Prosecutor’s moral compass hits the floor.       

If you’re white, and make this fine print mistake,   
The judge will slap you with a fine.               
If you’re black, with Lady Justice weeping,           
The judge will see that you serve jail time.           

Repeat Chorus

“Crystal Mason, do you plan to vote again?”               
“I do. I do. I’m encouraging my kids… ”                   
“To get out there, and make a difference right now.”**   
Head held high, courage in her vow.       

Our many colors make us beautiful,               
Our many stories make us wise,                       
When the will of our free people is expressed       
America’s heart and strength will rise.           

Repeat Chorus

Outro
Am                          E7
Disenfranchise, gerrymander,                           
Am                                     E7
Intimidate, obfuscate, Russia’s pander            
Am           E7
ID laws, address denied,                   
Am                             E7
No time off work, long lines besides           

   G               Dm             Am
ENOUGH! ENOUGH! RISE UP!
   G               Dm             Am                
ENOUGH! ENOUGH! RISE UP!               
 C     G     Am
Wa-ke   Up                               
Am   G     Am
Rise and Shine.           

** This bit is quoted from Amy Goodman’s question and Crystal’s response on Democracy now.

Music Credits.

Adapted Creative Commons Copyright for the song: CC BY-NC4.0 for “A Song For Crystal Mason” with the following addendum: Anybody is free to sing this song with attribution live on any occasion, including in venues where they intend to make or raise money. But if you would like to record it to sell it, please get it touch with me and we can discuss.

For the video, please use and share it as you like, but respect the CC copyrights noted in the credits and continue to attribute the work images included in the video and their copyrights.

Luminous

 

Luminous                                                               Copyright Dec 2, 2018

Lyrics by Bette Korber, music by Bette Korber and Lisa Carman

This song is played in a standard guitar tuning, but riddled with non-standard chords.

As I don’t know what I’m doing, I made up a way to try to write this down.

“h” is my way of trying to write a non-standard chord played up on a high fret. It means fingering like a simple E or A, but played “high” up, on the fret number indicated (like the 7^th or 9^th fret)

I tried to guess from the notes what the chord might actually be on the left. Good luck!

B=Eh on 9^th  fret,  A = Eh on 7^th,  

E= Ah on 9^th, D = A on 7^th fret, C = A on 5^th fret, Bb = A on 3^rd fret

Intro -- instrumental

Actual chord              (chord form/fret)

B / B / A / A /              (E 9^th E 7^th)

B4 / B4 / A2 / A2 /      (E 9^th E 7^th)

B4 / B4 / A2 / A2 /      (E 9^th E 7^th)

D2 / A / E / E              (A 7th, A, E)

E2 / D2 / E / E            (A 9^th, A 7^th, E)

Chorus: piclk                                                                        Actual chord              (chord/fret)

Your words are trailing stardust                                           B / B / A / A /             (Eh 9^th Eh 7^th)

There’s moonlight in your eyes                                           B / B / A / A /             (Eh 9^th Eh 7^th)

Reason leads to the knowledge you find                            B / B / A / A /             (Eh 9^th Eh 7^th)

As the Music of the Spheres plays in your mind.                D / A / E / E /             (Ah 7th, A, E)     

Verses: strum

Henrietta’s stars are dancing,                                            B / B / B / B /     (Eh 9^th)

Shining with rhythms of light.                                             A / A / A / A /     (Eh 7^th)

Finding meaning in their tempos,                                      B / B / B / B /      (Eh 9^th)

She gave distance to the night.                                         G / G / F / F /     (Eh 5^th, Eh 3^rd,)

                                                                                               

E  / F / G / G    ( E , Eh 3^{rd ,} Eh 5^th)

Cecilia untangled starlight,                                                          

Found the fabric of the universe.                                     

White fire in her  alchemy                                                 

Heats the sun and warms the Earth                              

                                                                                               

Chorus: sing  

Aaaahhhhh break    strum

E (Ah 9^th)        D (Ah 7^th)         C (Ah 5^th)     Bb (Ah 3^rd)     A    A               E / D / C / Bb / A

Ah –a               Ah – a              Ah – a           Ah –a-aa-a    a-a Ah            pause

Verses:

Vera danced with Galaxies,

They swirled her in their arms,

She found matter in their darkness,

Shaped their patterns and their forms.

Sweet Beetle weighed the universe,

Held omega in her palm

She saw dark and light together

Expand into Forever’s song.

Chorus

Your words are trailing stardust                                      

There’s moonlight in your eyes                                       

Reason leads to the knowledge you find                                  

As the Music of the Spheres plays in your mind.                     

Outro: strum

Luminous, Mysterious, Luminous, Mysterious             E/ D / E/ D (Ah 9^th, Ah 7^th)

Luminous, Mysterious, … Women’s minds.                 E / D / E / E   (Ah 9^th, Ah 7^th)

Luminous Video 

Luminous Song 

 

This song and video were created as a tribute to four women astronomers: Henrietta Leavitt (Leavitt’s law, period-luminosity relation), Cecilia Payne (the composition of stars),  Vera Rubin (Dark Matter), and Beatrice (Beetle) Tinsley (galactic evolution and the expanding Universe).

 

Adapted Creative Commons copyright 

Song copyright, Dec. 2, 2018, video copyright, July 1, 2019)

Please feel welcome to sing Luminous live in any venue.

Please feel free to share or show the Luminous music/video in any non-commercial context, but please keep the credits at the end linked to the images to comply with their usage requirements.

If you would like to record this song, please contact Bette Korber or Lisa Carman at She Sings Studio, Bozeman, Montana.

Song Notes:

I write songs that tell stories, of people and places that move me. I was reading about astronomy, trying to understand what I could about how we (collectively) know what we know about the universe. As I read, I discovered the work of four amazing women whose ideas helped shaped the way we understand the cosmos:

Henrietta Leavitt (Leavitt’s law, period-luminosity relation allowing us to measure the relative distance to stars),

Cecilia Payne (Composition of stars and the sun), 

Vera Rubin (Dark Matter),

Beatrice "Beetle" Tinsley (Galactic evolution and the expanding universe)  

The work of these fine women was new to me, but of course they are not forgotten among those enjoy the history of science -- there is rich information about them available for the curious in terms of biography, essays, and letters. There are lonely craters on the moon, and asteroids streaking through the dark and cold of space, that bear their names. A mountain peak in New Zealand was favored with the name Mount Tinsley.  Even better, one can find them in the clear beautiful trails of understanding they left in scientific literature. But as far as I could tell, they were "unsung". So I fixed that.  I'm blessed to be able to collaborate with wonderful musicians who lift up my songs and give them some grace.  This song comes to you from:

Lyrics by Bette Korber

Music by Bette Korber and Lisa Carman

Lead Vocal: Lisa Carman

Mandolin: Jimmie Killingsworth

Banjo: Peter Oviatt

(Peter's and Jimmie's music is so entwined it flows together as one sweet shining stream of music through this little song)

Violin: Karina Wilson

Bass: Justin Bransford

Harmony Vocal: Adrienne Bellis

Drums and Percussion: Paul Pearcy

Sound Engineer: Jono Manson (Kitchen Sink Studio: Santa Fe, New Mexico)

Mastering: Michael MacDonald (AlgoRythms Mastering: Santa Fe, New Mexico)

Producers: Bette Korber and Lisa Carman (She Sings Studio: Santa Fe, New Mexico & Bozeman, Montana)

There is a moment of quiet at the end of the song, Karina's fiddle sings us out, then there is silence, then her fiddle whispers back in.  The silence between the fiddle lines is a wordless line of the song. It is for Vera Rubin, a Quiet to remember the many many long cold nights she spent in the high peaks of Arizona, minding the great telescopes, her mind in the stars of a dark sky, her thoughts entering distant galaxies. Observing.

Cover photo 

Comet Lovejoy, a photo by my husband James (theilr@flickr, Album: view from the gutter).

Thank you for listening.           

Scientist of the year, R & D 100 Magazine

Mosaics: Recollections of a scientific endeavor.
Note: There is some scientific jargon in this remembering; if you not a scientist in my field, but curious about the vaccine, please excuse me and just skip those bits.

This award was a lovely surprise. It took a "village", lots of folks many years, get this vaccine into clinical trials. So here is some history if anybody is interested, of those who moved this concept along. I was initially inspired to try this idea based on the global database that my team at LANL keeps -- HIV diversity is an incredibly challenging problem for a vaccine, and minding the HIV database convinced me we needed to try to address the diversity directly, by trying to "see" the virus the way the immune system does. I wanted to design a vaccine that could trigger immune responses by allowing recognition of the most common forms of an epitope simultaneously, and cross react with diverse HIV strains (an epitope is a small bit of viral protein that an immune response recognizes). I also wanted to leave HIV proteins intact in the vaccine, so they would be easy to deliver and be processed naturally, and so antibodies that recognized folded proteins might be elicited by the vaccine as well as T cells. I came up an approach to the problem, evolving sets of protein sequences on a computer, that in combination could potentially optimize immunological coverage. The idea was partly inspired by the way HIV evolves in nature, partly by a machine learning concept called a genetic algorithm. It took me a couple of tries at a grant to get it funded; the first reviewers thought the idea was completely nuts, that this kind of thinking could never EVER work. I eventually got funded to bring together the scientists I needed to do the "theory" part of the project through an internal LANL internal grant which fostered exploratory research (a DR). A wonderfully talented machine learning computational scientist, Simon Perkins, was on the team, and with input from my also wonderfully talented husband James Theiler, Simon fine tuned the algorithm, got it in a good computational framework, and coded it up.

I tried to get my old friend Satish Pillai to come work on this project with me as a postdoc, but he was busy with a new job at UCSF, and even green chili couldn't get him back to New Mexico. (See, Satish, I _told_ you it was going to be a good project!) Satish of course now has his own lab, and 2018 found us still working together -- a bit on music, and a bit on an HIV therapeutic strategy, tugging on some crispr threads. But back in the day, Satish was a no, and so I hired Will Fischer instead, an unknown at the time, but a man who very clearly loved to think about evolution, so the project was a very good fit. Now Will is a long time friend and colleague, but then he was a newly minted postdoc. He helped me put Simon's code through its paces, and we explored together how it performed "in theory", working out ways to visualize the comparisons we needed to make (James also helped a lot with this part), and how to best inform the design of the actual vaccines for testing: global versus regional, one, two, three or four proteins sets, which proteins to include. Karina Yusim, Carla Kuiken, and Tanmoy Bhattacharya also helped us think about this. Mosaic code does not require a fancy computer, and we never used supercomputers on the mosaic project. Still this was all tricky business, with multiple false starts and restarts as we were getting going (like initially trying to add in HLA, then realizing, partly inspired by Steve Self, and partly simply by the very high density of epitopes in the database, that we could just treat every epitope-sized bit of the protein as a potential epitope and leave aside HLA complexity and frequencies). Once we had the basic code, we needed to address parameter optimization, tweaks were added to make the code run faster, and we made gradual improvements in output and interpretation. Our goal was resolving what might matter biologically as well as we could based on information in the database. For me it was several years of very very long days, and this comes with a high life-cost. And it wasn't trivial; things always seem more obvious in retrospect than when you are in trenches making something new.

As we worked, I regularly talked through the progress of the theory, for over a year, with my dear friends who were experimentalist colleagues, Bart Haynes, Beatrice Hahn, and Normal Letvin (now passed away), getting their input and advice. They shared good ideas. The four of us had gotten some NIH funding so we could turn the mosaic design theory into some experiments to test it. Bart and Norm did some initial studies, and Bart continues to work on mosaic related vaccine concepts with me currently, and we are working on second and third generation developments. We shared the mosaic concept with Dan Barouch in early days, and we made him some global designs, and happily Dan ran with them. Dan wanted us to only have two mosaic components per protein; given that constraint, we tried to design something with a chance at being able to work all over the world, Africa, US, Europe, Asia... It was Dan's experiments over many years that lead to the current clinical trial, and it is Dan's "vector" that delivers the HIV mosaic vaccine. The mosaic would not be in human efficacy trials now without his many ideas about good ways to express the vaccine insert, and his thoughtful and careful preclinical experimental work, and his collaborative spirit bringing in an industry to help take it forward.

We won't know if this vaccine will protect people from HIV for another couple of years; so this "scientist of the year" is a bit premature, though I'm really happy and honored that it happened. On the hopeful side the mosaic vaccine does significantly slow down infection of virus exposed monkeys, and if vaccinated monkeys finally do become infected after multiple exposures, they stay healthier and don't progress to AIDs. We don't know if this will translate to preventing infection in people who will be confronted with HIV in all its natural diversity "in the wild", or if it will help them fare better if they are infected. We cannot know that until it is tested, and it takes time. But I harbor hope. If it doesn't protect people, still we will learn some things from trying.

Meanwhile, there are many other good HIV vaccine ideas in the pipeline -- and a few of them are my own! Its why I can't retire yet, I want to see the ones with promise through.

Thanks to everybody who has sent kind notes and good wishes.

I'm keeping some pretty classy company in this award, the nerds among you will know some of the names of past recipients:

Dr. William Pickering 1967 JPL
Dr. Wernher von Braun 1969 NASA MSFC
William Lear 1971 LearJet
Dr. Mary Good 1982 DOC
Dr. Justin Rattner 1989 Intel
Dr. Kary Mullis 1991 Nobel Laureate
Dr. Susan Solomon 1992 NOAA Ozone Hole
Dr. Tim-Berners Lee 1996 WWW
Dr. J. Craig Venter 1998 Human Genome Project
Dr. Eric Lander 2003 MIT/Whitehead Institute
Dr. Anthony Faucci 2005 NIH
Dr. Steven Chu 2011 DOE
Dr. Robert Langer 2012 MIT
Dr. James Tour 2013 Rice Univ.
Dr. Karl Deisseroth 2014 Stanford Univ.
Scott Kelly 2015 NASA
Dr. Dharmendra Modha 2016 IBM
Dr. Cori Bargmann 2017 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative