Cleveland Hill Fire survivors tagged posts

We all have a core narrative or two or three by which we define our lives, a kind of baseline that self-identifies us and courses through a good part of our relations with the world. Often, they owe at least something to hard luck and trouble overcome—the classic hero’s journey that serves as the core for so many novels, self-help tomes and Hollywood movies.

Sometimes, however, hard luck and trouble just get worse, with even more woe piling on and beating down defenseless souls who can’t seem to catch a break, or who lack the emotional agility and resilience to climb out from under misfortune’s wreckage.

So goes the tragic life story of Buffalo, New York-born singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank, a one-time friend and esteemed fellow musician of Paul Simon and many other luminaries of the 1960s...