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Odds & Ends: News/Humor (with a "Who Lost the Week?" poll)

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. Hope that everyone in the USA had a Happy Thanksgiving ... and to all, a fabulous weekend/week ahead.

ART NOTES— a 150th anniversary exhibition entitled About Time: Fashion and Duration will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC through February 7th.

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   From 1870 to the present

YOUR WEEKEND READ #1 is this essay by Alex Pareene— about how the traditional term checks-and-balances has now been corrupted by the right wing.

THURSDAY's CHILDREN are named Chief, Blaze, Ember, Cinder, and Smokey the Cats— left in a (perforated) cardboard box outside a California fire station, and all have been fostered-out.

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     Seven week-old kittehs

SADNESS at the loss of one of the two buildings — to a raging fire — at the renowned Jacob's Pillow dance school/performing center in western Massachusetts (where Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Margot Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov have appeared) and which brought a response from near-and-far.

YOUR WEEKEND READ #2 is this essay on Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor John Fetterman and what he thinks the political road lying ahead has-in-store.

FRIDAY's CHILD is named Ellie the Cat— an Indiana kitteh who went missing two months ago and eluded capture several times … before Facebook tips did the job.

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            Ellie the Cat

YOUR WEEKEND READ #3 is this (rather lengthy) essay by Tim Alberta in Politico about how the GOP in Michigan were prepared to accept a loss …. until other states (whose legislatures allowed them to count mail-in votes early) came in Election Night for Trump and had to pressure everyone to please Dear Leader.

BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… looks like neither the NY Times quiz (nor the one from Slate) appears this week.

SEPARATED at BIRTHJimmy Fallon& Englishman Matt Berry (both born 1974).

SEPARATED at BIRTH - TV host Jimmy Fallon and Matt Berry ("What We Do in the Shadows"). pic.twitter.com/ZMfq2o3p5A

— Ed Tracey (@Ed_Tracey) November 24, 2020

...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… if all they had done was introduce the world to Sam Cooke, then the Soul Stirrers would have merited a place in history. Yet over the course of their history, they both adapted to (and innovated on) not only Gospel but also vocal music in general, with quite a story.

The antecedent for the group was singer Roy Crain, who in 1926 formed a quartet with other teens he attended church services with in Trinity, Texas. While they didn’t last, a fan told Crain their music … “stirred his soul”. Upon relocating to Houston in 1932, he joined an existing vocal group ... on the condition they change their name to the Soul Stirrers. The group’s fortunes began to rise when R.H. Harris joined them, with a distinctive high/falsetto voice. Roy Crain died in 1996 at the age of eighty-five — the last surviving founding member. (Harris had died in the year 2000 at the age of eighty-four).

The group began in the traditional jubilee style (patterned after the Fisk University Jubilee glee club) with restrained, reverential tones and with defined roles for their ensemble singers. In time, the Soul Stirrers began to adapt to the harder Gospel style of Mahalia Jackson and sister Rosetta Tharpe.

The group also began to innovate themselves: ad-libbing at times, singing in delayed time and departing from the traditional lead-and-backup singers with using “swing leads”— with the lead alternately shared with two or more singers.

In 1936, they became famous when the traveling musicologist Alan Lomax recorded them for the Library of Congress, and the group relocated to Chicago where they hosted their own weekly radio show. They toured regularly and some of their popular songs that they recorded for the Specialty Records label of Art Rupe (who is still alive at at age 103) included By and By and In That Awful Hour.

R.H. Harris left the group in late 1950 to form his own group and the group’s future was in doubt. A year later, the group enlisted a nineteen year-old Sam Cooke— and his voice stirred them to even greater heights in the vocal music world, with hits such as Jesus Gave Me Water. When he left in 1957 to pursue his popular music solo career, the group was able to recruit Johnnie Taylor (who also later left to pursue a secular music career).

With numerous line-up changes (and the changing music scene of the 1960’s) the Soul Stirrers career began to wane, and while I cannot determine an end-point: it appeared that they carried-on at least until the 1990’s.

They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (by Al Green) in 1989 (in the “Early Influences” category) and into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2000. There is a Specialty Records compilation album, there appears to have been a 2008 reunion, and if that was the end-of-the-line: an eighty-year career sure ain’t bad. 

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Soul Stirrers (1950’s) ……..

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……….... and an early 1980’s version

One of the mysteries surrounding the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 … what was the song played by the ship’s band as the end was drawing near? In Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember (and in the subsequent film version) it was asserted that it was the spiritual Nearer my God To Thee. However, others believed it to be a waltz entitled Autumn. After researching it, Snopes ruled it as “Undetermined”. Either way: here is Sam Cooke leading the Soul Stirrers in that spiritual.  


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