12 Jan 2004 06:00
Jesse Benton Lyman
John Presco <prosemont <at> yahoo.com>
2004-01-12 05:00:01 GMT
2004-01-12 05:00:01 GMT
Jesse Benton married Mel Lyman who claimed he was God, and with the inheritance from her famous father, founded the Fort Hill community. As a coincidence I lived in a commune three blocks down the street, and we knew some of the members. Jon http://www.trussel.com/lyman/harps.htm http://www.trussel.com/lyman/forthill.htm Lyman had become involved with Jesse Benton, a talented singer and the daughter of the painter Thomas Hart Benton. They bought some property in the Fort Hill section of Boston with a commanding view of the city, and as others joined them, a community began taking shape. The Fort Hill group helped to found Boston's first underground newspaper, Avatar, which spread Lyman's teachings including the notion that folk music was a gift from God that had to be preserved and nurtured within the counterculture. "Because," Mrs. Benton Lyman says, "they made a fortune doing the same thing with Charles Manson, and they equated us with the Manson Family and wanted to sell that many newspapers again, and most of it was libel and we should have sued them but we passed on the whole thing." The Boston Phoenix, Section Two, July 16, 1985 by Michael Matza We still are family: The Lymans of Fort Hill then and now ...The winter of '71 brought those devastating back-to-back issues of Rolling Stone, in which copy editor David Felton presented a scathing,(Continue reading)
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