A look at a high school teacher who became a legend by his daring methods of instruction, after the jump ……
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With tomorrow being the 8th of January: it seems appropriate to feature a song commemorating a miltary event that took place 201 years ago. The Battle of New Orleans was an unlikely "saga song" that wound up as #1 on the pop charts and even won a Grammy in 1960. Yet it is the back-story that made this song so noteworthy.
Last month, I noted the death of the innovative (and flamboyant) foreign language professor John Rassias (whose ten-day immersion program I took several years earlier). To many young kids, foreign languages are a requirement that they’d gladly do without … in many cases, it’s the method of instruction that makes it unappealing.
The same is true with the teaching of history: always fascinating to me, but when taught via rote memorization, asked to recall names of generals … well, it can get dry in a hurry. Then one schoolteacher had a desire to make American history more interesting …. who along the way became a force in both music and cultural history. I have noted him in my weekly music profiles, yet not as an educator.
He was born James Morris in Arkansas back in 1907, but the world came to know him as Jimmy Driftwood which became his stage name (then legal name later on). A graduate of Arkansas Teacher's College (today, the University of Central Arkansas) he began writing songs as a means to entertain his high school students about the teaching of history - eventually, he composed over 5,000 songs about some aspect of American history.
As Bruce Eder of the All-Music Guide noted, the only comparable songwriter was Lee Hays of The Weavers who - because of his activism - never got the opportunities that Driftwood did ... like performing for Nikita Krushchev on his first U.S. visit, for example.
With the folk music boom of the 1950's, Driftwood found his work being spoken of by scholars, and he received offers to speak at universities. Don Warden (a pedal steel player for Porter Wagoner's band) had begun a publishing company, and helped him win a contract from RCA Victor in 1957. His album Newly Discovered Early American Folk Songs even had backing from Chet Atkins on guitar. It sold modestly but got little airplay (especially in the South) due to the use of the words ...... "hell" and "damn". While he continued to write and record, his story might have ended there.
Enter the Los Angeles-born (but Texas raised) singer Johnny Horton who had become a success recording songs such as "Honky Tonk Man" in 1956 and becoming popular on the rockabilly circuit. After a few more hits, his luck had begun to dry up before a 1959 hit "When It's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)" revived his career - and then he was given a copy of Jimmy Driftwood's album and decided to record “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1959.
The rest is history as - in this five-year period after the Day the Music Died in February, 1959 and before the advent of The Beatles in February, 1964 - songs that may not have broken through on the pop charts before (or after) had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do so. Horton appeared on TV and reached #1 on both the country and pop charts. Sadly, Johnny Horton died the next year (Nov, 1960) in a Texas car crash. Meanwhile, Jimmy Driftwood became popular as a result of the song's success and had to leave teaching (to some dismay).
After the success of "The Battle of New Orleans", other tunes of his (including "Tennessee Stud", "Sailor Man" and "Wilderness Road") were covered by people from Eddy Arnold, Odetta, Homer & Jethro and his fellow Arkansan Johnny Cash, and made the charts. Driftwood moved to Nashville, appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride.
Eventually he left the music business (other than performing free shows at schools) and devoted himself to three cultural and environmental pursuits: helping to launch the (now annual) Arkansas Folk Festival, beginning the Ozark Folk Center— dedicated to preserving the heritage and lifestyle of the Ozarks (and which exists today as part of the Arkansas State Park system) ....... and leading the fight to stop the damming of the Buffalo River by its coming under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service (signed into law by President Nixon in 1972) which led to his song “Beautiful Buffalo River” after the fight was won. This led to Jimmy Driftwood's appointment as head of the Arkansas Parks and Tourism Committee, as well as an adviser of folk art to the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Jimmy Driftwood died in July, 1998 at the age of 91. His work helped influence a generation of performers and won several Grammys for his lifetime work. A great life's work for a schoolteacher, huh?
As a younger man ……… ………... and later in lifeThe song also known as "The 8th of January" but more commonly known as The Battle of New Orleans was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002 as one of its "Songs of the 20th Century". And below you can hear Johnny Horton sing it from more than fifty years ago on the Ed Sullivan Show.
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In eighteen and fourteen we took a little trip along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British near the town of New Orleans
We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago We fired once more and they began to runnin' down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise if we didn't fire a musket 'til we looked 'em in the eyes We held our fire 'til we seen their faces well then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave a yell!
They ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles They ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go They ran so fast the hounds couldn't catch 'em down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
x YouTube Video Now, on to Top Comments: -------------------------------------Nothing from the field this evening.
From Ed Tracey, your faithful correspondent this evening ........
In the front-page story about Alabama’s theocratic judge Roy Moore — whose latest diatribe is aimed at gay citizens — a frustrated Shy Daniels expresses the sort of frustration that liberal Alabamans must bear each day. And in the front-page story about how the honeymoon is already over for new Speaker Paul Ryan— with a wonderful photo of the lunatics wishing to run the asylum — NoMoJoe compares one of the renegades to an automobile insurance company ad.
| TOP PHOTOS January 6, 2016 Next - enjoy jotter's wonderful *PictureQuilt™* below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. |
NOTE: Any missing images in the Quilt were removed because (a) they were from an unapproved source that somehow snuck thru in the comments, or (b) was an image from the DailyKos Image Library which didn't have permissions to allow others to use it.)
And lastly: yesterday's *Top Mojo* - mega-mojo to the intrepid *mik* ...... who rescued this feature from oblivion:
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