Close enough for tarantellas

A musician is a musician is a musician. Here’s a wonderful example of musical versatility, with Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines in New York and New Jersey:

Playing popular tunes, as well as anything else requested by the crowds, added to their popularity and marketability. And if they didn’t know a particular song they just played the correct tempo for dancing. Shines commented that for waltzes “you could play anything just so long as you played it in cut-time, 3/4 time. You could make up your numbers; you just had to set the right tempo.” This ability to fake their way through any genre provided varied opportunities. While in New York City they were asked to return to Newark to perform at an Italian wedding. As Shines noted, they already knew polkas and Jewish music, and for the wedding they played primarily tarantellas, adapting some of their own songs, a few standards, and some new ones to conform to the traditional 6/8 tarantella rhythm.

Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019).

Up Jumped the Devil documents a life (not legend) in remarkable detail, even down to the recollections of one of Johnson’s teenage companions in fishing. My only complaint: I’d like more about the music. But that would have to be a different book.

Related posts
A New York Times obituary for Johnson : On slowing down Johnson’s recordings

[The post title is after Jonathan Turley’s witless remark about what’s “close enough for jazz.”]

State employees

In forty states, a basketball or football coach at a public university is the highest-paid public employee (ESPN).

I recall the first of my ten modest proposals to improve higher education:

Goodbye to Big Sports. The NBA and NFL can subsidize their own farm systems. Convert the money that supported Big Sports into increased adjunct pay, new tenure-track positions, increased academic support services, and need-based scholarships. Current players retain their scholarships.

A related post
Income disparity in higher ed

A school of somes

[Nancy, March 29, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s yesterday’s Nancy is a some-fest. Let ’s look:

First panel: some rocks, some more rocks, some trees.

Second panel: some fence posts.

Third panel: some tires, some trailer windows, some curved lines (above the mop).

The strip itself: some Nancys in some panels.

What is the collective name for somes? It’s school, which I just made up. Here is another school of somes, this one found in east-central Illinois.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]

Don Larsen (1929–2020)

“Larsen often said that a day didn’t go by when he did not think about his feat, and he drove a car with the license plate DL000, for his initials and the box score reading no runs, no hits and no errors”: from the New York Times obituary. I’ve known Don Larsen’s name since boyhood.

[Note to self: I have to get used to typing 2020.]

Holiday wars

Have you noticed that people are saying “Happy New Year” again?

The days of my PDF

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives, and of my PDF. Available via Dropbox, it’s a calendar for 2020, three months per page, all Gill Sans, with markings for New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Highly readable, even across a room. Maybe two rooms if they’re small.

[Just a second post to share this calendar. If not now, when?]

New Year’s Eve 1919

[“Hotels Anticipate Wet New Year Eve. They Prepare for an Old-Fashioned Celebration on a Generous Scale.” The New York Times, December 28, 1919.]

Prohibition in 1919? Yes. The Wartime Prohibition Act, meant to conserve grain, was passed on November 18, 1918, after the signing of the armistice. (An official end to the Great War was yet to come.) The act, which prohibited the sale of beverages with more than 1.28% alcohol (2.56 proof), went into effect on June 30, 1919. Two subheadlines from the Times article give an idea of what was to happen on the first dry New Year’s Eve: “To Invade Secret Caches,” and “Guests Will Take Their Liquors to Private Dining Rooms, for Which There Is Great Demand.” The Times reported that at one Manhattan hotel, “the flask party would be the most popular indoor sport.”

Brief items in the January 1, 1920 Times give an idea of what went on in other parts of the country. In Boston, “greater abandon of merrymaking.” In Philadelphia, “unlimited quantities of any drink ever seen here.” In Cincinnati, a “decidedly ‘wet’ celebration,” with the hip flask “much in abundance.” In Chicago, “large crowds who drank in wild revel,” aided by a legal ruling that provided a loophole for those drinking “on the hip.” In Milwaukee, where “beer cellars were depleted long ago,” champagne sold for $25 a quart. In New Orleans, restaurant customers “armed with their own liquor.” In St. Louis, “a wild night,” “with whisky in the lead.” And in Omaha, no cocktails, just “whiskey, brandy, gin, wine, home-brew stuffs and soft drinks.”

But in St. Paul, “little evidence of old-time frivolity.” Denver was “a drab affair.” San Francisco “found itself groping around in the gloom of a spiritless night.” And in Seattle, “less liquid cheer” than “at a Pilgrim Father’s barn raising.”

May 2020 be a year with greater reason for hope on Spaceship Earth. Happy New Year to all.

[Were those who drank from hip flasks hip? There appears to be no connection.]

Domestic comedy

[Too much Hallmark.]

“Is Kringlefest one word or two?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[I guess my typing decided it. But should it be camel-cased?]

“Not part of my portfolio”

“Immigration is not part of my portfolio, obviously”: uh-huh. She’s complicit.

“Each morning”

Stefan Zweig, writing in 1937 about the Jews’ Temporary Shelter, a London charitable institution that provided housing and meals to Jewish refugees:

Each morning the paper barks in your face wars, murders and crimes, the madness of politics clutters our senses, but the good that happens quietly unnoticed, of that we are scarcely aware. Such things are all the more crucial in an epoch like ours, for all ethical labour by its example wakens in us truly precious energies, and each man becomes the better when he is capable of admiring with sincerity that which is inherently good.

“The House of a Thousand Fortunes,” in Journeys , trans. Will Stone (London: Hesperus Press, 2011).

I’m reminded of the advice Fred Rogers said his mother gave him when he was a boy: “Always look for the helpers.”