…Who from Their Labours Rest
[About the image: apparently in June of every year, the English village of Fornham All Saints* holds a Scarecrow Festival, for which residents and businesses create scarecrows — such as the entries above — which they place all around town. The theme this year was “Characters from Cartoons or Adverts.” (For more, see Dave Catchpole’s album on Flickr.) I don’t recognize the cartoons or adverts from which these were drawn, but I do like the scarecrows!]
From whiskey river, in fine holiday form this week:
At no other time does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
…and:
There was a time when the coming of this night meant something. A dark Europe, groaning in superstitious fear, dedicated this Eve to the grinning Unknown. A million doors had once been barred against the evil visitants, a million prayers mumbled, a million candles lit. There was something majestic about the idea.
(Robert Bloch)
…and:
It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.
(Robert Bly)
Skimming Tangentially Against the Agented Universe, and the Scriptwriting One
[Don’t read too much into this RAMH post’s title.]
Last night, I and 40+ others participated in an interesting webinar called Agent Reads the Slush Pile. It lasted from 8pm Eastern time until close to 10:30. Each of about forty authors submitted the first two pages of a manuscript, including as “identifying” information only the title and genre — i.e., no names. Each of these mini-manuscripts was assigned a random number, which determined the order in which they’d be read. And then the agent… well, the agent read them. Commenting as she went. The idea was to reproduce, aloud, what it was like for an agent to just dive into a batch of unsolicited manuscripts. (And to answer the unspoken question: no, she hadn’t seen any of the submissions in advance.)
How it worked, more precisely: an agent at the agency read the mini-MSS aloud, one at a time, while the lead agent moderated her progress through the reading with little instructions like, “Okay, stop right there for a second…” and “Okay, pick up at the next paragraph.” At each point of interruption or discontinuity she’d point out something like a pattern of word choices or details which were helping (or, more often, hurting) the story at this point. (Considering that it’s the first two pages of a novel, one definitely wants not to include anything like impediments.)
We also had plenty of opportunities to ask questions, which didn’t need to be restricted to the reading/critiques.
I won’t get into details of the critiques. But I will say that it all drove home to me the importance of three precepts, as if you don’t already know these things:
- Choose your genre well and carefully.
- Choose the details you include — also both well and carefully.
- Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
Midweek Music Break: Rising Appalachia, “Swoon” and “St. James Infirmary”
My brother and I (and The respective Missuses) have, quite independently, developed great fondness for the Asheville, NC area. It’s one of those little pockets of the universe where elements of climate, scenic beauty, services, and culture have all somehow come to pool together in a broth of magic.
When he recently returned from a visit there, he shared a couple of musical discoveries. They included a group with the (to me, at first) unpromising name Rising Appalachia. Before I actually checked them out, I figured it to be a bluegrass/New Americana/mountain-music collective, maybe. What a surprise, then, to find in Rising Appalachia a duo — sisters, raised in the South — with a taste for music almost independent of genre:
- “world, folk, soul” (Wikipedia)
- “They grew up playing traditional Appalachian music and soul, kind of gospel styles of music. They play banjo, fiddle, guitar, and single two part female harmonies.” (David Block, who works with them on a joint project called the Human Experience)
- “…poetic harmonies, soul singing, spoken word rallies, banjos, fiddles, organic bass and groove rhythms, and community building through SOUND. With an array of incredible collaborators, they are joined by everything from jazz trumpet to beat boxing, Afro-cuban percussion to Appalachian fiddlers, poets to burlesque and circus art.” (Their own site)
- “Appalachian-swamp-string-sister soul album complete with live percussion and bass beats, lyrical magic and spoken word, trumpet and cello wails, and double vocals-double banjos-double fiddles. Crunk-folk as well as soothing songs to heal the global soul.” (Promotional copy at various sites (e.g., CDBaby, re: their Kickstarter-funded new release, Dirty Filthy South)
…all of which bumped them, in my mind, from “unpromising” to “unlikely.” What the heck were they, anyhow?
Herewith, to illustrate the classification (non-)problem, a couple of selections from 2010’s The Sails of Self. First up, their video for “Swoon” — whose lyrics focus not on the one swooning, I think, but on the one provoking that response.
[Lyrics]
I really like that the heart of that song switches from the overt “I seduce you” message to one more personal to the protagonist, if not the songwriter: I don’t know what it is about me, I just know that I love this sound. In a PBS interview with Billy Collins which I caught last night, he spoke of how the poet is never alone when writing a poem — at a minimum, s/he is always in dialogue with the form of the poem. This line in “Swoon” cracks open a door into songwriting and lets us see a similar conversation taking place in that medium.
Below, they put a reverb-drenched, swirling-voodoo-priestess jazz spin on a classic, “St. James Infirmary”:
[Lyrics]
If you look around the Web for photos of Rising Appalachia, you’ll encounter a lot of silvery bangles, apparent body piercings, bandannas and scarves, and (temporary) tattoos and other body art. Other than in performance, these photos often feature them in run-down urban settings like old factories, warehouses, and chain-linked dirt lots full of big corrugated-steel shipping containers. Maybe they’ve adopted this witchy-punk-queen aesthetic just for promotional purposes; I don’t know. But it’s of a piece with what seems to be their musical persona: a haunting mix of old and new sound, and of interior mental state and outer form.
Hat tip to The Brother for passing along the word.
Bedeviled
[Video: Trailer from Demon in My View, allegedly an “Edgar Allen Poe BioPic” from the apparently fictional (or at least moribund) Singularity Pictures. I could not find any reference to this film (vs. a student film by the same name) other than on YouTube — and of course, on sites (now like this one) which link to it. The title comes from Poe’s poem (not often quoted), “Alone” (q.v., here). That is — and perhaps I should add allegedly — Vincent Price in the voiceover.]
From whiskey river:
I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.
But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do — the only thing — is run.
(Lauren Oliver [source])
…and:
The Exam
It is mid-October. The trees are in
their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green,orange) outside the classroom where students
take the mid-term, sniffling softly as ifidentifying lines from Blake or Keats
was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in wordsthey never saw before. I am thinking
of my parents, of the six decades they’vebeen together, of the thirty thousand
meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of themore than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept
under the same roof. I am wonderingwho could have fashioned the test that would have
predicted this success? Who could have known?
(Joyce Sutphen [source])
…and:
The catalogue of the Musée Guimet of Paris describes a Mandara, in which the highest Buddha in the center of the group is surrounded by a number of his incarnations of various degrees and dignities. These are the Bodhisattvas, prophets and sages of the world, who have either taught mankind or set them good examples by their virtuous lives. On the right we see a group of personified abstracts, piety, charity, science, religion, the aspiration for progress. On the left is a third class, consisting of the ugly figures of demons, whose appearance is destined to frighten people away from sensuality, egotism, and evil desires.
The devils of Buddhism, accordingly, are not the enemies of Buddha, and not even his antagonists, but his ministers and co-workers. They partake of Buddha’s nature, for they, too, are teachers. They are the rods of punishment, representing the curse of sin, and as such have also been fitly conceived as incarnations of the Bodhi. In this interpretation, the Buddhist devils cease to be torturers and become instruments of education who contribute their share to the general system of working out the final salvation of man.
(Paul Carus [source])
Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 2 (Pérez Prado’s “Patricia,” and the Mambo in General)
[Image: Pérez Prado, in the imaginative eyes of the Mexican cartoonist (Saul Herrera) calling himself “Qucho.” I found the image on the Web right away; Qucho, only with some hunting. And I’m not sure this image appears even there, on his blog.]
It’s been a few months now since I posted the first of these Midweek Music Breaks on Latin-music earwigs from the 1950s. That post dealt with “Blue Tango,” by decidedly non-Hispanic classical composer Leroy Anderson. This week, we take a look at one of this genre’s hits penned by the self-styled “Mambo King,” bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado.
First, an (apologetically pedantic) aside about that name: Dámaso was his given name; Pérez, his paternal surname; Prado, his maternal surname. Thus you’ll find many references to him as simply “Pérez Prado” — which “feels,” at least to a native English speaker, like a first/last name combination. For all I know, this was common during his lifetime. Maybe he even got used to it: when someone shouted out “Pérez!” on a street corner, maybe he turned his head more readily than when they called for Dámaso. But really, it’s never quite correct to refer to him as plain-old Prado — like the Spanish national art museum. Speaking from experience, this is harder than it sounds. Nevertheless “Pérez Prado” is right — just like the dark-and-stormy-night author is never called simply Lytton but always Bulwer-Lytton.
Pérez Prado cut something of an exotic figure on the mid-20th century American musical landscape. Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1916, he started out studying classical piano. By the 1940s, he had moved entirely into popular Cuban genres, specializing in the rhythm called the mambo.
What exactly is mambo, anyhow? Unfortunately, most of the descriptions of it are cast in terms of other styles which — presumably — you already do know enough about to discuss intelligently. One Joseph Levy, about whom I can report pretty much nothing at all, seems to have taken a special interest in Pérez Prado. At his site, he says of the mambo:
Prado’s conception of the mambo began to develop in 1943. He later said that four, five, and sometimes six musicians would often play after hours jam sessions on the tres (a small Cuban guitar) and the resultant cross rhythms and syncopation give him the idea. Jazz writer and critic Ralph J. Gleason reported that “Prez” talked to him about the mambo as being an Afro-Cuban rhythm with a dash of American swing. According to Prado, the mambo is “more musical and swingier than the rhumba. It has more beat.” He also explained, “I am a collector of cries and noises, elemental ones like seagulls on the shore, winds through the trees, men at work in a foundry. Mambo is a movement back to nature, by means of rhythms based on such cries and noises, and on simple joys.”
…The mambo as we know it today is actually a rhythm whose tempo may be slow or fast, and almost any standard tune can be set to its tempo. The saxophone usually sets the rhythm pattern and the brass carries the melody.
That reference to “cries and noises” and the squawks of seagulls may allude to Pérez Prado’s own style of band leadership. Often, you can hear him grunting aloud as though to punctuate the rhythm; sometimes these grunts are actually exultant variations of the imperative “Dilo!” (“Say it!”) and sometimes they seem — at least to me — just, well, grunts.*
Pérez Prado’s departure from Cuba is sometimes described as though he’d been ridden out of town on a rail, for tainting the purer strains of local music with foreign jazz elements. Well, maybe. Maybe the musical establishment of mid-twentieth-century Cuba was fiery, conservative, nativist; maybe people really did (still do) work themselves up into a frenzy of distaste over such matters, and not just in Cuba. What seems more likely, given what we could later tell of Pérez Prado’s ambitions: he just felt too constrained by a narrow — oh, say, island-sized — popularity, and left on his own. Whatever the case may be, when he left, he left for Mexico. And except for his big but fairly brief success in the US, from then on he seemed to present himself as a citizen of Mexico rather than Cuba.
His first introduction to US audiences came via across-the-border radio broadcasts from Mexico. He had a big hit there with a number called “Que Rico del Mambo,” which was repackaged and -recorded by American bandleader Sonny Burke as “Mambo Jambo.” That song’s success first brought Pérez Prado to the US.
“Patricia,” in 1958, was the last of Pérez Prado’s releases to reach #1 on US charts. To characterize it as infectious (as I, at least, am tempted to do) is to gloss over the recording’s supreme oddness. The orchestra’s swing is punctuated not so much by its leader’s vocal cries — it doesn’t seem to feature any of them — as by weird little bursts of horns and percussion which almost suggest to me a burp, or the compressed-lips Pppppbbbfffflllt! of a raspberry/”Bronx cheer.” But the tune itself seems to pinpoint a moment in time, in pop culture, captured by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita:
[source]In [1960], even the composer Nino Rota would turn to mambo, reworking “Patricia” (Perez Prado) for the La Dolce Vita soundtrack. The song is used on several occasions, including in the “orgy” scene… As [the character of Nadia] prepares to take it all off, an inebriated guest calls for some “Middle Eastern music.” But in a truly exotica moment, the hi-fi needle falls into the groove of “Patricia.”
If you’re not familiar with that scene in the film, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
To celebrate her recent divorce from Riccardo, Nadia performs a striptease to Pérez Prado’s cha-cha [JES: ???] “Patricia.” The drunken Marcello attempts to provoke the other partygoers into an orgy. Due to their inebriated states, however, the party descends into mayhem with Marcello throwing pillow feathers around the room as he rides a young woman crawling on her hands and knees.
(Ah, the early Sixties…) Of course, you can see this scene on YouTube, starting at around 3:55 into that seven-plus-minute clip.
Anyhow, here’s “Patricia,” as recorded by Pérez Prado’s own orchestra in 1958:
Momentary Pastures
[Video: if anyone’s having a moment right now, it’s Welsh folk singer/songwriter/harpist Georgia Ruth,
who just won the Welsh Music Prize for her debut album — which, like this opening track, is also
called Week of Pines. Regular readers of RAMH will understand that one of the things which appealed to
me about the album was its mix of English- and Welsh-language songs.]
From whiskey river:
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you — sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
(Lauren Oliver [source])
…and:
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering backfrom the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhereexcept underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castleof unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. ThisI try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumnflares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay — how everything lives, shiftingfrom one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
(Mary Oliver [source (and elsewhere)])
Midweek Music Break: Trainsong (A Playlist)
[Image: still from Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 film, Mystery Train (highly recommended!)]
A lyrical burst from Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960, by Peter Doyle, in discussing Elvis Presley’s recording of “Mystery Train”:[source] I can’t think of any mode of transportation that’s inspired or just plain been referenced by more music — instrumental or vocal — than trains. (Walking? Maybe horses. Maybe.) Plenty of fun songs celebrate the automobile in general, or specific cars. But cars have got a looooong way to go to catch up to trains, and I don’t believe that’s just because trains have been around longer. Cars are instruments of solitude, of friendship, of family, as much as they are instruments of travel. But trains speak of greater distances, of community; you yourself don’t even have to be aboard, just within earshot.The first words — “Train I ride, sixteen coaches long” — “back announce” the electric guitar and bass figures mimicking the sound of a train in the distance. The song is thus placed within that large body of songs — hillbilly, country, R&B, jazz and popular — that deal with trains. Songs about railway people, engineers, hobos, brakemen, or songs that chronicle train wrecks or celebrate particular rail lines. Songs in which voices or instruments mimic the minor third sound of train whistles approaching and passing by or that make use of rhythm to simulate the mechanical sound of the steam locomotive; songs that begin with a shouted “All aboard!” Songs about ghostly trains, trains to hell, gospel trains to heaven, trains that take all day to pass by, trains that take away the singer’s beloved, or (less often) bring her back. Eerie night trains that symbolize freedom to jailed singers, last trains to anywhere, trains heard in the distance, trains that take the jubilant singer away and then trains that promise to take the world-weary singer back home. Trains from which the singer is existentially excluded and trains that call individuals together into religious, social or political collectivities. Lonesome trains, blue trains, honky-tonk trains, trains of love…
The first trainsong* I ever learned was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which starts out conventionally but — at least as we sang it in elementary school — devolved into a surreal narrative about someone named Dinah, who may or may not have been in the kitchen, and… was it…? strumming on a banjo? Huh? (Later in life I might have seen a double entendre in that line, but I didn’t know about such things in the mid-’50s.)
It didn’t make a lot of sense to pick just one of these songs today. Instead, I put together a little playlist of fourteen of them — ones I had in my own music collection. They don’t have anything else in common; one performer (Gordon Lightfoot) appears twice, and they range in length from twenty-two seconds (John Hammond, from the Matewan soundtrack) to 7:05 (Lightfoot again). Total length is somewhere around fifty minutes.
I’m not saying these are the only ones I might have included — just in keying in that sentence I thought of a couple more — but I had to get them online sometime while the term “midweek” still fit!
# | Title | Artist | Length |
---|---|---|---|
01 | Mystery Train | Junior Parker | 2:26 |
02 | Chattanooga Choo Choo | Glenn Miller | 3:29 |
03 | Steel Rail Blues | Gordon Lightfoot | 2:50 |
04 | Just Like This Train | Joni Mitchell | 4:25 |
05 | Orange Blossom Special | Johnny Cash | 3:06 |
06 | On The Tracks | John Hammond | 0:22 |
07 | Waiting For The Train To Come In | Peggy Lee | 3:09 |
08 | Train To Birmingham | John Hiatt | 3:39 |
09 | Downbound Train | Bruce Springsteen | 3:38 |
10 | Last Train To Clarksville | The Monkees | 2:47 |
11 | Take The “A” Train | Duke Ellington | 3:01 |
12 | Railroad Wings | Patty Griffin | 4:02 |
13 | Canadian Railroad Trilogy | Gordon Lightfoot | 7:05 |
14 | Mystery Train | Elvis Presley | 2:29 |
* No, I don’t think that’s a real word. But if I had to make up a word to go there, it works, doesn’t it?
Seen in the Proper Light
[Image: “Night Visions,” by user lacomj on Flickr. Interestingly, this is not a black-and-white photo; says the caption on that page: “There is a lot to see up in the sky at night in infrared!”]
From whiskey river:
Scattered Reflections
(excerpt)I had no idea what my real life was,
but I knew I had to look for it.
So one day I packed my car and took off.
I drove the whole country, examining
houses, stores, businesses, streets,
people … when all I was looking for was me.
I concluded that there was no me,
just flutterings, shudderings and shadows.
I think most people feel the same way,
and it isn’t bad, floating under the stars
at night like fireflies sending signals.
(James Tate [source])
…and:
The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet’s greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.
(Anthony de Mello [source])
…and:
The Buzzard and Reversal
(excerpt)II.
In the dream, there are rabbits. Quiet as ever,
but crowded and jostling round the fallen buzzard.They ignore the clover where the bird fell, dipping instead
into the dark thatch of feathers with their busy nibblings,
with their tiny snipping teeth. The impossible
softness of their fur is caked with blood. The bird isbroken: a collapsed umbrella. Its naked head emerges
and turns to watch itself drawn shining into the light.
(Michael Bazzett [source])
Midweek Music Break: Jo Stafford, “You Belong to Me”
As a generation, Baby Boomers are notorious for imagining that the world started, revolved around, and ended with them and their peers. The first hit recording we ever heard of a given song thus became the reference version, the one to which all others would be compared — usually to the others’ detriment. We had no history with earlier or later versions, and since we were the high point of pop culture (especially in the US), the other versions might as well not exist. (And if they did, they were frank rip-offs.)
Even knowing this about my generation, I admit I was surprised to find out — just a few years ago — that The Duprees were not the original artists for this song.
…which news, well, didn’t bother me that much. Because I’ve never gotten past one very important moment in The Duprees’ version: the concluding, drawn-out you… be-long… tooooo-oo… me-eeeeeeeeee. It sounds — has ALWAYS sounded — horribly flat to me. I always assumed they must be singing the song as actually written…
But no.
You may complain that I should not compare a 1960s doo-wop group who started out (as the saying goes) singing on Jersey City street corners with the vocals of a coloratura soprano, trained for opera, who just sort of fell into Big Band and later jazz. Maybe it’s not fair. And maybe I should apologize for that.
But gawd, this version just kills the one I grew up hearing…
[Below, click Play button to begin You Belong to Me. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:06 long.]
Now that I’ve read up more about the song…:
It was written in 1951 or ’52 by one Chilton Price (nee Searcy). Price was a record librarian for radio station WAVE in Louisville, Kentucky at the time, but she had aspirations as a songwriter. Not entirely unfounded aspirations, I should add: in 1951, she’d offered up a song to country bandleader Pee Wee King and his lead singer, Redd Stewart. Called “Slow Poke,” the song was King’s first and only #1 hit single. Because King and Stewart had done so much to promote the song — Price said she didn’t know anything about the music industry — she freely offered them joint songwriting credit.
Scroll ahead a few months: now Price had another song which she thought the fellows might be interested in. This one was a wistful tune about a pilot returning home from service in World War II, and — written for a woman singer, obviously — was called “Hurry Home to Me.”
This time around, King and Stewart took a more active role in the song’s composition. It’s not clear who’s right and who’s wrong; Price herself told Nick Clooney in 2002 that it was her words and her tune, while Pee Wee King’s autobiography, Hell Bent for Music, says:
Chilton wrote complete songs, and they were beautiful, but since she doesn’t sing, she didn’t know how they would sound… Redd and I took her songs and played them, singing and humming, changing words and notes here and there until we’d get a version easier to sing. At the time it was hard to get war songs recorded, so we gave “Hurry Home to Me” a new name and changed it into a kind of universal song about separated lovers.
Regardless of which version you believe, what seems beyond debate is that Price quite happily shared writing credit with King and Stewart on “You Belong to Me.” (In that Clooney interview, she conceded the issue quite charmingly.)
Jo Stafford didn’t record the song first. That honor went to a country singer named Sue Thompson, in 1952. And “You Belong to Me” didn’t just sit around on the shelves afterwards; by mid-1952, both Jo Stafford and Patti Page had recorded hit versions. From then on, it never really languished; it’s one of those pop songs which seems to get picked up by every (yes) generation. It’s been covered by Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Bob Dylan, Jim Reeves, Connie Stevens, Eddie Vedder… But it was Stafford’s recording which really broke out first, going to #1 in both the US and the UK. (Even The Duprees couldn’t push it that high, only getting up to #7.)
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- …
- 183
- Next Page »