I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted
CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead. Hope that you are enduring under the strain.
ART NOTES— an exhibition entitled Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl— with some exhibits being a blend of glass, wood, resin, metal and …. sugar — is scheduled to be at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles to August 23rd.
EVEN THOUGH this story is nearly ten years old ….. I gotta re-post this account of an Atlanta strip club that was opened with the notion of playing only Grateful Dead music — then closing the next day, due to lack of interest — with the money quote from a municipal employee saying, “I was definitely intrigued, but when I drove by there was this overwhelming sense of … patchouli. I just couldn’t do it.”
THIS PAST WEDNESDAY was the 87th birthday of Willie Nelson — and the late photographer Jim Marshall had this 1973 photo of him: clean-shaven …. and with Neil Young sideburns.
WINE NOTES— Wine from South America has long been thought of as coming from its more temperate climates in the south (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay). Yet there are vineyards in the Bolivian region of the Andes— 6,500 feet above sea level, resulting in more tannin — that are beginning to make the region transition from making cheap wine (for its small domestic market) to better wines for export, despite the higher transportation costs and an overvalued currency.
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Oliver the Cat— a kitteh from parts unknown with a penchant for settling into tight (and unusual spaces) in a series of photos.
YOUR WEEKEND READ is this short excerpt from a recent book (on combating voter suppression) about the ill-fated Kris Kobach ‘voter fraud’ commission — how the Democratic secretary of state from Maine was determined to be a team player when he was nominated to it: and yet found himself in the role of Bob Woodward in-the-parking-garage …... just to find out what the commission was doing.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Mookey Honey the Cat— a Michigan mother of four kittens who wound-up stuck in a tree for three days … before a tree service company rescued her (and would not accept any payment).
ARCHITECTURE NOTES— workers have now installed the final deck of a bridge in Genoa, Italy— replacing a bridge which collapsed in 2018 (killing forty-three people) — so that a key trans-national motorway link can reopen in July.
BRAIN TEASER - try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC.
YOUNGER-OLDER SISTERS? — Fox contributor Kat Timpf and TV star Melissa Rauch (The Big Bang Theory).
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… in his last series of American Recordings (made over his final ten years of life), one song that Johnny Cash made popular was a recording of the song I’ve Been Everywhere— that name-drops many North American cities. Yet he was the first to note that he did not write the song (which was true of many of those final recordings).
In fact, the song has an unusual provenance: from Australia to the US (with a Canadian touch) and then around the world. Just as the song Better than Everything (written in the early 60’s) name-dropped Huntley and Brinkley and Kildare and Casey …. subsequent renditions have been updated (to bagels and cream cheese, and chile rellenos for example).
The concept holds true for tonight’s journey.
The original version was written over sixty years ago by Albert Geoffrey McElhinney who went by the name Geoff Mack— an Australian songwriter and airplane mechanic who entertained Allied troops during WW-II as a singer/guitarist, and was a radio DJ later in the war. For his work he was awarded the Order of Australia and died in July, 2017 at the age of ninety-four.
He did not, as near as I can tell, record the song himself. Instead, that fell to a fellow Australian musician, Leslie William Morrison — with a stage name of Lucky Starr—to make the song famous with his 1962 rendition. The song name-dropped all Australian cities and reached #1 nationwide. He later re-recorded the song using places in the British Isles and also for neighboring New Zealand. He will turn age eighty at the end of December, had an album release five years ago and still performs on occasion.
At that time, Geoff Mack’s publisher offered the song to a veteran country music star in Nashville, who told him that the song had potential… if the places could be re-written to cover North American places. And so Geoff Mack (working off a North American atlas his publisher gave him) did just that.
Yet the Nashville star in question (uncommonly, at that time) was not a native Southerner. Instead, it was the Nova Scotia-born Clarence Eugene ”Hank” Snow— who overcame childhood poverty (and physical abuse) by learning the guitar and becoming a regular performer on Canadian radio/stage, modelling himself on his idol Jimmie Rodgers. Yet just as New York has a gravitational pull for jazz musicians: so does Nashville for country musicians, and Hank Snow relocated there with his family at age thirty-five in 1949, becoming well-known for his colorful stage attire.
Hank Snow recorded the re-worked song on June 27, 1962 (with Chet Atkins producing) at the historic RCA Victor Studio ‘B’ in Nashville, reaching #1 on the country charts and even reaching #68 on the mainstream pop charts.
He went on to have a six-decade career, recording 140 albums and charting more than 85 singles on the Billboard country charts from 1950 until 1980. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame.
He died just eleven days before New Year’s Day of 2000, at the age of eighty-five.
The song has been translated/adapted into numerous other languages and adapted to other countries’ cities (Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, et al) and has been recorded in the US by Lynn Anderson, Asleep at the Wheel, Kris Kristofferson, plus a children’s version by the jazz group Medeski, Martin & Wood … and numerous parody versions. In 2003, the publishers granted permission to have yet another re-worked version — this time, as a 2003 presidential campaign song for Florida senator Bob Graham, “I’ve Done Every Job, Man”.
Yet it was Johnny Cash’s 1996 rendition (with his back-up band being Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) that has become the new paradigm: being used in the film Flight of the Phoenix and in advertising for the Comfort Inn hotel chain. You can listen to it at this link. Sixty years on: Geoff Mack’s original Australian-themed song has truly gone global.
Let’s hear the two lesser-heard versions: the original in 1962 from Lucky Starr:
And a 1965 live version (of the North American version) from Hank Snow: