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.
ART NOTES— a traveling exhibition entitled We the People: Portraits of Veterans in America— watercolors painted by Mary Whyte of diverse service veterans in the nation — is at the Huntsville, Alabama Museum of Art to September 26th.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #1 is this account of a NYC pilot program— sending social worker teams instead of police officers to respond to mental health crisis calls— is showing success: more people are receiving help and these teams requested police assistance just seven times in the program's first month, while the NYPD requested assistance from the behavioral health teams … twice as much.
LAST WEEK marked the 150th anniversary of London’s Royal Albert Hall— where I was fortunate enough to see one of the Cream reunion shows in 2005 — and the venue celebrated with its first concert since March 2020.
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Minka the Hero Cat— an Edmonton, Alberta kitteh who rushed into a burning barn to rescue her kittens … was only able to save one of them (Francis) yet is recovering from her burns at a local shelter.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #2 is this essay in The American Prospect on the GOP misconception of public transit— and how it affects Infrastructure Summer.
LAST WEEKEND sixty-five years to the day the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria sank after colliding with the Swedish ocean liner Stockholm off the coast of Nantucket Island: her long-submerged foghorn (located in the waters five years ago) was sounded ... after a thorough restoration.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Mini Max the Cat— a Massachusetts kitteh who has been reunited with his family six years after escaping through a loose screen in a third-floor condominium building.
HAIL and FAREWELL to a Moroccan immigrant in 1966 who became the senior bellman at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, Jimmy Elidrissi— ineligible to run for President, yet met nine of them (including Barack Obama) — who has died at the age of seventy-four. He always had to greet a guest as either "Sir" or “Madam" - even if he knew their names well - just in case someone (who had never stayed there) wondered ... just how Jimmy knew their spouse’s name.
BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… and the usually easier, less UK-centered New York Times quiz (no common questions).
OLDER-YOUNGER BROTHERS?— recently indicted Trump inauguration chairman Tom Barrack and Academy Award-winner J.K. Simmons (for “Whiplash”).
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… in the first half of the 20th Century, forms of American music from rural areas came-to-prominence in a few ways, if they were not discovered by local radio stations, etc. Some were record label talent scouts working on tips (Columbia’s John Hammond comes to mind), and most prominently the musicologists — such as John Lomax and his son Alan, making field recordings via the Library of Congress and research grants.
Last weekend on the public radio program American Routes, I learned the name of someone else with that distinction: and Harry Everett Smith (will use HS from hereon) achieved it by simply being a prolific record collector (at a time when that was quite uncommon) and sharing it with the rest of the world. The 1952 anthology he helped compile is cited by many musicians as inspirational, and while this profile concentrates on his music: he had a role in film and other forms of art as well. Thirty years after his death, he deserves to be better-known.
Born in Portland, Oregon in 1923, his family moved to Washington state near a Native American reservation, where he heard their music at a young age. He also had several years of arts education, which was to set him on a career path — if you could call-it-that: music biographer John Szwed mentioned on American Routes that the eccentric HS had no steady income after age twenty-five.
Born with a curved spine that kept him out of WW-II, he worked as a mechanic at a Boeing military plane assembly plant, using some of his spare income to study anthropology at the University of Washington and buy country and blues records. During this time, old 78’s were being converted into shellac for the war effort and so HS became a preservationist in his own small way.
He moved to San Francisco in 1945 and began buying more blues and country records from junk dealers and shops going out of business. He also began attending the new, post-war bebop jazz concerts and creating avant-garde films to accompany the music. In 1950, he received a Guggenheim grant (for an abstract film) and moved to NYC, where he spent the rest of his life.
When the grant money ran out in 1952: he made the fateful trek to the offices of Moe Asch (the founder of Folkways Records) bringing with him several of his classic 78’s, hoping to sell some of them. Moe Asch went one-step-beyond: asking HS to compile them into a collection (using the newly-emerging 33-1/3 album format) and offering him studio space to edit them. Prophetically: the recording engineer on the project was Péter Bartók (son of the renowned composer Béla Bartók), who died just last December at the age of ninety-six.
This collection (in three separate volumes) combined early recordings of blues, folk, country, Cajun and spiritual music, with Smith adding the liner notes. Among the artists were the Carter Family, Mississippi John Hurt, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson. HS also credited the Lomaxes in his liner notes, as they had published a list of folk singers via the Library of Congress that he found useful in guiding his purchases over the years.
These releases were cited as influential by future stars such as Joan Baez, John Fahey, Bob Dylan, Beck and others, with Dave Van Ronk saying it became “our Bible” — “We all knew the words to every song on it, even the ones we hated.”
There were plans to have a fourth volume — this one focusing on songs from the Depression — yet somehow the always on-the-move HS never followed-through on this, moving back to film work (it was finally released in the year 2000).
HS did convince Moe Asch in 1965 to record the group formed by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, the avant-garde and satirical band The Fugs— by using the words “jug band” in his description to Asch — and went on to work more often in film and other forms of art over the next twenty-five years, all while battling insolvency, poor diets and health issues.
In 1991, HS was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammys, and Harry Smith died later that year in November at the age of sixty-eight. In his notes to a 2006 revival CD, Elvis Costello wrote: "We're lucky that somebody compiled the Anthology as intelligently and as imaginatively so that it can tell a series of stories to future musicians and listeners, and be a starting point."
The American Routes show dedicated to him can be found at this link.
What to choose? Two songs that spawned much later cover versions.
Here’s one from the Carter Family, Single Girl, Married Girl— released in 1928 — that was recorded eighty years later (on the bassist Charlie Haden’s last album before his death) and sung by his triplet daughters at this link.
Another that stood-out was Minglewood Blues— written by Noah Lewis and recorded by him with Cannon’s Jug Stompers in 1928. Noah Lewis later reworked it into New Minglewood Blues (with new lyrics) in 1930 under his name at this link.
That second version was adapted forty-seven years later by the Grateful Dead for their 1967 debut album (with altered lyrics) at this link as New, New Minglewood Blues. It just shows-to-go-you … how old songs are re-made into modern ones.