Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) Late Nite Radio.
Every note of music, every voice that ever stirred the air prior to advent of the earliest sound-recording technology is gone forever. No one will ever hear Chopin playing his nocturnes, or an ancient Greek bard singing of the exploits of the gods as he strums his lyre, or hear the ringing voice of an 18th century Scottish balladeer. Because of a unique confluence of particular circumstances, though, tonight’s featured performer moves the line back – just a bit – and provides a tantalizing window into the pre-recording era sounds of mid-19th century American music.
David Harrison Macon was born in 1870 in Tennessee, the son of a distiller and former Confederate civil war captain. When he was 12 his father purchased Nashville’s Broadway Hotel, a famous hub for an assortment traveling minstrels and vaudevillians, where Macon would soak up hundreds of songs and lyrics and styles from older performers, some of whom had been playing their songs continuously since well before the civil war. After his father was stabbed to death the hotel was sold, and Macon began his 30-some year career as a muleskinner. Hauling goods between the towns of Woodbury and Murfreesboro, he always had his banjo with him as he sung to his mules and entertained passersby. By the time the voluble, musically deft and wisecracking Macon entered an early studio for the first time when he was in his mid-fifties, he was a real-life character, first and foremost; his recordings weren’t carefully-scripted studio creations but rather a documentation, replete with foot stomps and shouts and hollers, of a lifelong entertainer whose sensibility and music had been forged in an earlier era.
This wisecracking, entertaining, human-jukebox known professionally as Uncle Dave Macon takes us as close as we will ever get to hearing the sounds, styles and mannerisms of the US civil war-era music. In this 1926 recording mash up of “A-Monday Was My Courtin’ Day” and the 1844 song “Old Grey Goose”, he avows with a wink that he won’t get drunk no more Way Down The Old Plank Road.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.
Couldn’t find the link at Macleans but in this week’s issue is more fodder for Kate’s Tony Blair’s Britain.
‘A woman who rescued a five-year old boy stranded for 45 minutes in a tree at the Manor School playground in Melksham, U.K. wound up in trouble with school authorities and the local police. Kim Barrett, 38, a part-time cleaner, was chastised for trepassing on school grounds after seeing the boy safely back to class.
Head teacher Beverley Martin said health and safety rules prohibit tree rescues. “Our policy when a child climbs a tree is for staff to observe the situation from a distance so the child does not get distracted and fall.” Barrett says no one was watching the boy. “When I took him in they had no idea he was missing.”‘
Guess the school must just wait for the child to finally fall out of the tree if it can’t get down on its own as they are prohibited from rescuing it! Wow.
Quebec blocheads have, predictably, responded with outrage to a proposal that Quebec move closer to the amount of seats in H of C that it’s population would warrant.
“After recognizing the Quebec nation, the government is now invoking representation by population in order to reduce the political weight of Quebec,” said Bloc MP Claude Debellefeuille in the House on Thursday.
Invoking rep by pop as if that’s somehow akin to invoking the War Measures Act or something.
http://tinyurl.com/ye5dz4g