ONLINE NOW: ”Birmingham Jazzman: Frank ‘Doc’ Adams,” in this month’s Pavo.
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2009 PAVO articles: “20 Birmingham Songs”; “Hank Penny’s Cowboy Swing”; “Greencup is Dead: A Eulogy.”
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ON STANDS NOW: “When I Say Get It: A Brief History of the Boogie,” in Southern Cultures’ third annual music issue.
“I like to boogie-woogie,” Madonna proclaimed in the title track of her 2000 release, Music: “it’s like riding on the wind and it never goes away.” The boogie-woogie—or just boogie for short—born one hundred years before Madonna sang its praises, had survived into a new millennium and, as far at least as that pop songstress was concerned, would be around forever. The boogie (at any rate, a music by that name) had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century among black piano players in the rural South, had migrated to the city, and had been embraced in turns by white pop-crooners, middle-class concert-goers, jazz pioneers, and electric hillbillies. It had helped give birth to rock ‘n’ roll and had lent its name and at least some of its ethos to glam rockers, disco dancers, and gangsta rappers. By the time it reached Madonna, by then a long way from its roots, the boogie was not just a musical idiom—indeed, it was no longer that at all—but a kind of drug, an oxygen and Holy Spirit: “it touches everything I’m in,” Madonna sang, apparently using the phrase “boogie-woogie” interchangeably with “music” itself; “got to have it every day.” Whatever it was, this boogie, it seemed to be at once everything and nothing, impossible to pin down, define, or explain: the wind.
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ON STANDS NOW: “Kasper ‘Stranger’ Malone: In His Own Words,” in The Old-Time Herald, August-September 2009:
“Now, I played at Yankton like being in a factory: you punch a clock when you go in, and punch it when you come out. But I would play during that time with a Bohemian orchestra–we played Czech-ish music–and then I had a program with a German band, and I had my own program where I did clarinet and piano and singing; and then I even rang the bells for the sacred service, it was at ten o’clock. I was the factotem, I had to be here, there, and everywhere, just like Figaro, Figaro!”
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~ from The whales will fuss over me (Lady Muleskinner Press, 2009, available here):
He married her, mainly, for her teeth. She was not pretty and really he hardly knew her, but her teeth were made of gold and every time they kissed he dreamed he was eating money.
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~ from Singing Governors, Fiddling Senators, and Other Country-Music Politicians: A Guide (Lady Muleskinner Press, 2008, available here):
Probably the most storied political fiddlers of all time were Tennessee brothers Robert Love (Bob) and Alfred (Alf) Taylor, who ran against each other on opposite tickets in the governor’s race of 1886. The brothers traveled the state, debating by day, singing and fiddling by night, and often sharing a hotel bed before moving on to their next engagement. Tennesseans dubbed the race the “War of the Roses,” as Bob’s supporters took to wearing white roses and Alf’s to red. Ultimately, voters’ minds were swayed more by politics than fiddle prowess: Bob, the weaker fiddler but a Democrat in an era of Southern Democrats, won the election.
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The predominant image of old-time music and dance remains overwhelmingly, sometimes exclusively, based on white musicians. When African Americans do enter into this picture, they are typically represented under a “roots” framework-which highlights their long-ago contributions to contemporary white traditions-or as cultural anomalies. Black old-time musicians of the past and the present become, in fact, doubly anomalous: they don’t quite seem to fit into the conceptions of old-time or country music, and they fit equally uneasily into popular conceptions of black music. An excellent place to reground the conversation is in the recorded work of artists like Stovepipe No. 1, Andrew and Jim Baxter, and Henry Thomas. Only by persistently exploring the similarities between white and black traditions-and the square dance provides one excellent entry point-is it possible to accurately decipher the differences that shared traditions reveal, whether across racial, geographic, generational, or other cultural “lines.”
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~ Album reviews and artist bios, The All Music Guide. Including these:
The Memphis Jug Band: State of Tennessee Blues
Grayson and Whitter: Complete Recorded Works
The Rose Grew Round the Briar: Early American Rural Love Songs, Vol. 1
Various Artists: Sinners and Saints (1926-1931)
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~ from “Bluegrass Meltdown: Mountain Music, Rock and Roll, and Family Tradition in the Music of Ralph Lewis and the Sons of Ralph,” in the North Carolina Folklore Journal, Fall-Winter 2004:
Just as their recordings borrowed from each other’s arrangements, Elvis and Bill Monroe shared with each other a mutual respect and what would seem to be an unlikely friendship. “Bill said that Elvis would call him up real late at night wanting to talk,” Ralph Lewis recalls, “like, three, four, five o’clock in the morning. And couldn’t sleep, and wanted to ask him this, that, and the other. And Bill always called him the Punk. Said, “What’re you doing, Punk?”
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Now into its second decade in business, B&B continues to draw regular customers both locally and nationally, whether for the guns, for the banjos, or for both. Clyde mentions a Birmingham banjo player, Craig Morris, who came through town a few years ago and, asking around about local gun shops, stumbled unsuspectingly into B&B. “He came in and he saw the banjos and the guns,” Clyde remembers, “and he said, ‘I ain’t believing this. I done died and gone to heaven-a gun and banjo shop!’
“He goes back home, he was telling his wife: ‘I found heaven,’ he says. ‘It’s up in Section, Alabama.’”
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~ from “Looking for Railroad Bill: On the Trail of an Alabama Badman,” published in Southern Cultures, Fall 2003:
Railroad Bill, the “notorious Negro desperado” of Escambia County, Alabama, stepped into Tidmore and Ward’s general store in the small railroad community of Atmore on March 7, 1896; he left the store dead, his body riddled with bullets, his face and right hand mangled. “About fifteen pistol, rifle and gunshot wounds were found,” the local Pine Belt News reported. “It was the opinion [of the examiner] that the first shot fired by [Constable] J.L. McGowan would have proved fatal.” The fourteen or so others, however, ceremoniously and beyond any lingering doubt closed the case. The full story ran the next morning in newspapers across Alabama. “The forces were all concentrated around Atmore,” Montgomery’s Daily Advertiser announced, “for they knew that that small station was destined to be the theatre where the curtain would be rung down on the last act of Railroad Bill’s bloody career. It was rung all right last night.”
Later that week, the Pine Belt News rendered the event in the same theatrical terms, proclaiming “the curtain was unceremoniously rung down on Saturday night.” The language of the “theatre,” the “last act,” and the “curtain … rung down” created a dramatic finale long awaited by many of Alabama’s citizens. For over a year, newspapers had indeed put on a show, a morality play steeped in melodrama and violence, and in a final, grisly climax the show had at last come to its anticipated end.
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This magazine is founded on the basic principle that everybody has a story to tell: a story worth telling, and a story worth the hearing. The pages you hold here represent one attempt to circulate some of the stories generated by a handful of individuals’ lives. The recollections, observations, and interpretations accumulated in these pages also tell, broken into pieces, the story of a place: a region of North Carolina and, in particular, one of its cities…
…The history of Asheville, and of Western North Carolina, has its deepest roots here: in the land itself, its mountains and fields, and in the people who are born and who die here. But the history of the place (and, most certainly, the future) is also made up in places like New York, Vietnam, Mexico, and Tennessee; the face of the region is also shaped by the experiences its residents accumulate and bring to it. The stories of this place, then, may begin anyplace, and each far-flung occurrence becomes significant to our own communal heritage.
~ from Speak magazine: Elisha & Charlotte Webber interview, Asheville, NC
How did you and Mrs. Webber meet?
Charlotte: Oh boy. (Laughs) That’s a story……Well, I had never drawn a picture in my life that looked like anything. And one particular day I was laying down on the couch at my mother’s house, and I woke up and I drew a picture of him just like he is-I had never seen him. And I went to my girlfriend, I said, “Do you know this fella?” And she says, “Oh yeah, that’s Webber; he’s the big man out at Oteen.” I said, “Well, really? What does he do, and where’s he from,” you know, this kind of thing. She said, “Well, I’ll see that you meet him.” And she sent her friend to bring him to my house, and that’s how we met. And I left and went to New York and stayed a while, and when I came back we decided we would make two one. So that-it wasn’t a very romantic story, (Laughs) but it was good for what it was.
~ from Speak magazine: Calvin Mullikin interview, Marshall, NC
All your country songs, good songs, are sad songs. But they’re beer songs; they’re barroom songs. And usually they make the best songs.
~ from Speak magazine: Virginia Rodriguez interview, Asheville, NC
I love poetry. And so it’s something that I enjoy, for myself. But at the same time I can see the cultural influence-in case, let’s say somebody has some discrimination against Latin people. When they can see that, you know, these people have feelings, these people create poetry and the beauty of life, they’re going to see them in a different light. And poetry can come, maybe from your mechanic or clean-the-toilet, but they have that inspiration.
Poetry’s a part of life. You are all the time doing poetry in your life, whether you realize it or not. And to me, life without poetry’s so boring. You don’t have to be a poet and write; it’s just this approach to life as a poet, you know. That you see poetry in common things in life. Maybe sometimes you sit down and write about it; sometimes you just feel it. And enjoy it. And that’s real, too.
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