Frank O’Hara on film

A short film by Richard Moore from 1966, made just weeks before O’Hara died: USA: Poetry: Frank O’Hara. My favorite scene: FOH typing a film script while talking on the telephone.

Mississippi John Hurt: Sing Out!

[Sing Out! February/March 1967. Photograph of Mississippi John Hurt by David Gahr. Click for a larger view.]

I ordered this back-issue of Sing Out! as a teenager. As you can see, I still have it.

Mississippi John Hurt, Discovery

Mississippi John Hurt, Discovery: The Rebirth of Mississippi John Hurt (Spring Fed Records, 2011)

Cow Hookin’ Blues : Interview: John & Jessie Hurt (by Tom Hoskins) : Nobody’s Business : Casey Jones : Stack O’Lee : Richland Woman Blues : Coffee Blues : Do Lord, Remember Me : Take My Hand : Candy Man : Waiting for You : Conversation : A Song for Mr. Clark : Got the Blues : Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me : Ain’t Nobody But You : Pallet on the Floor : Spike Driver Blues : Preaching on the Old Campground / Glory Glory : Louis Collins / End of session

Recorded March 3, 1963, Avalon, Mississippi
Playing time 68:17

John Smith Hurt (1892–1966), Mississippi John Hurt, was a guitarist and singer from the hamlet of Avalon, Mississippi. Recommended to a recording agent by the fiddler Willie Narmour, Hurt recorded thirteen sides for Okeh Records in 1928, twelve of which were issued. He then returned to life as a farm laborer in Mississippi. Harry Smith included two of Hurt’s 1928 recordings, “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues,” in Folkways’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), the rich and strange compendium of pre-WWII rural black and white revenants that would shape the folk boom of the 1960s. (Listening to the Anthology, it is impossible to believe that its musicians lived on the same planet as, say, Bing Crosby and Kate Smith, much less in the same country.) Hurt’s two Anthology sides contain, in a curious way, the twin appeals of his music for later audiences: “Spike Driver Blues” is a piece that might make any fairly competent player think I can do that, while “Frankie” is the work of a master guitarist. The one recording puts the music of the past within fairly easy reach; the other puts the would-be performer to a task that, if accomplished, will dazzle. The story goes that Andrés Segovia, listening to “Frankie,” believed it to be the work of two guitarists.

Hurt was rediscovered in 1963. “Rediscovery” was a curious phenomenon of the early 1960s (and a crucial part of my musical education). The word describes the efforts of record collectors who found, against long odds, some of the great blues musicians of the 1920s and ’30s, men whose scantly documented lives would seem to have defied any possibility of retrieval. “Rediscovery” was a phenomenon with troubling implications: in some cases, the finders became keepers, tying rediscovered musicians to publishing and recording contracts of dubious merit. The words of Hurt’s “Avalon Blues” — “Avalon’s my hometown, always on my mind” — and an old map led Tom Hoskins to Hurt’s shotgun shack on March 2, 1963. The rest was musical history: several years of modest fame for Hurt followed, along with deep affection from young folk audiences. And hundreds if not thousands of guitarists figured out how to fingerpick by listening to Hurt’s recordings. The elements of his style — solid, unvarying bass, lightly syncopated figures on the upper strings — are everywhere.¹

These recordings give us John Hurt in the circumstances in which he must so often have made music — in a parlor, singing for, and sometimes with, family members (present are Hurt’s wife and ex-wife, his ex-wife’s sister, and two grandchildren). Hurt didn’t own a guitar at the time; playing Hoskins’s Gibson, he is is a bit plodding and insistent, not nearly as nimble as he would be on later recordings. His attempt at “Candy Man” falters: the chops just aren’t there yet. He is in good voice despite a cold: there must have been much singing in this house through the years, guitar or no guitar. To listen to these recordings is to hear Hurt in two worlds at once: the one a world of private jokes and laughter and the occasional rooster, the other a world in which he was hardly at ease but, it seems, game. The recording ends with talk of having to go feed Mr. Perkins’s cows. Less than five months later, Hurt was playing the Newport Folk Festival.

My debt to John Hurt’s music is large and unpayable. To hear these recordings, now available for the first time, is to discover that music all over again.

Related posts
Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt for Chevy

¹ Listen, for instance, to the Beatles’ “Julia” with Hurt in mind.

“Tot 50” “gag line” contest winner

The “Tot 50” “gag line” contest has a winner. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Stapler contest that began on Monday ends today, in just a matter of hours, really, as time marches on

The end is near. If you’d like to win a c. 2003 shiny red Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature staples, still in the blister pack, enter now. This contest ends today at 6:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. (In the American heartland, that’s noon Central Standard Time.) I’ll announce the winner on Monday.

Recently revised

E. B. White on W3 When I began working on this post yesterday, I wanted to make note of E. B. White’s brief comment on Webster’s Third International Dictionary. I thought that cheers for The Elements of Style and boos for W3 were related, and I was happy to see that White thought so too. But I ended up writing a post that tracks a story of selective quotation, borrowing, misquotation, and misattribution, involving Dwight Macdonald, White, and David Foster Wallace. I went back to this post several times yesterday, tweaking and adding to get things right. Now it’s done.

Stapler contest continues, expected to end tomorrow, experts say

The contest that began Monday rages on, or forward. If you’d like to win a genuine Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniaturized stapling units, enter today.

E. B. White on W3

Yesterday I wondered: Did E. B. White have anything to say about Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (W3), the dictionary that some thought marked the decline and fall of American English? White did, in a postscript to his 1957 essay “Will Strunk.” The postscript appears in The Points of My Compass (1962) and as a shorter prefatory note to the essay in Essays of E. B. White (1977). After suggesting that the success of The Elements of Style (1959) resulted from a reaction against “the permissive school of rhetoric,” White writes:

It was during the permissive years that the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary was being put together, along new lines of lexicography, and it was Dr. Gove, the head man, who perhaps expressed the whole thing most succinctly when he remarked that a dictionary “should have no traffic with . . . artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.” This approach struck many people as chaotic and degenerative, and that’s the way it strikes me. Strunk was a fundamentalist; he believed in right and wrong, and so, in the main, do I. Unless someone is willing to entertain notions of superiority, the English language disintegrates, just as a home disintegrates unless someone in the family sets standards of good taste, good conduct, and simple justice.

I realize that despite all my inclinations toward the dowdy, I’m poor company for the likes of White (at least this White), as I am poor company for any kind of fundamentalist. I think that W3 is an idiosyncratic and lively monument — the best kind of monument. That other monument, the Oxford English Dictionary, is a descriptive dictionary too: if things are flying to pieces language-wise, they have been doing so for a very long time.

And now, if you’d like to follow me down a rabbit hole:

The passage that White quotes appears in W3’s editor Philip Gove’s essay “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography” (published in the October 1961 issue of the Merriam-Webster newsletter Word Study). Gove is not writing about the dictionary; the it in this passage refers to lexicography:



White has borrowed the quotation, it seems, from Dwight Macdonald’s “The String Untuned” (New Yorker, March 10, 1962). Here’s Macdonald:



Same mistaken referent, same ellipsis. And very selective quoting, ignoring Gove’s insistence that lexicography “has no reason to scorn sprachgefühl, or to apologize for depending on it.” In the essay “Tense Present” (Harper’s, April 2001), David Foster Wallace appears to borrow from Macdonald and introduce new errors:



In Wallace’s Consider the Lobster (2005), where “Tense Present” becomes the expanded “Authority and American Usage,” the misquotation changes again:



And in both Harper’s and Consider the Lobster, Wallace misidentifies Gove’s essay as the introduction to W3. W3 has no introduction, only a two-page preface, a wholly different document from “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography.” If you’re going to fly by the seat of your pants, I guess you might as well fly first class.

Related posts
DFW blues howler (another problem with sources)
E. B. White, the fact that (on the same postscript)
Review: David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t (on Webster’s Third)

[Gove’s essay is reprinted in Dictionaries and That Dictionary: A Casebook on the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers, ed. James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt (1962). The “/8/” at the end of the passage marks the pagination of the original.]

Stapler contest continues moving forward

The contest that began on Monday continues to move forward. (Has it a choice?) If you fancy the thought of winning a bright red Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature (yes, miniature) staples, enter here, today. (Have you a choice?)

Got Wings ?

[Charles “Buddy” Rogers as Jack Powell, Clara Bow as Mary Preston, Richard Arlen as David Armstrong.]

We wondered why we had to wait so long for Wings (dir. William Wellman, 1927), not realizing that the film was recently restored and must have been in a zillion queues. The film (which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture) was worth the wait: Wings holds up very well.

Here is a triple-bill for some theater of the imagination: Wings, Design for Living (dir. Errnst Lubitsch, 1933), and Jules et Jim (dir. François Truffaut, 1962). Triangles, triangles, triangles.