1778 image based on 1762 painting by Mason Chamberlin / Philadelphia Museum of Art
It has been a long day and I don’t have the time or inclination to do a deeper dive, but I would be neglectful not to mention that Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Silas Deane, and their French counterparts signed the Treaty of Alliance on this date in 1778, 245 years ago today. I don’t think I grasped until a fateful visit to the Museum of the American Revolution in 2017 how intertwined the world was even in the eighteenth century. We think today that globalization is new, but really each generation for centuries has had its own manifestation.
I hope everyone’s weekend is going well. I’ve been staying in and working on a writing project about which I will divulge more when the time comes. I’m having my coffee and gearing up for another day here in my little command center. I slept in today, which is rare for me. I ground out 500 words yesterday and am hoping to repeat that today. Writing is an exhausting process whose basic tenets never get easier. One thing I will say is that the piece I’m working on includes William Alexander, who among other things fought at the Battle of Long Island. Alexander died 240 years ago today on January 15, 1783 in the waning months of the Revolution. I don’t want to say more because I want to save some for the project I’m working on.
The week before the holidays I was having lunch with someone during which we were talking about what sites we may try to visit in the coming year. I even sent my friend a running list of venues potentially to explore. I don’t know what is there to see but I’m going to add Lord Stirling Park in New Jersey to my list.
≈ Comments Off on Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, 1893-1987
Of all the individuals discovered or rediscovered during the Folk/Blues Revival of the 1950s and 1960s by far my favorite is Elizabeth Cotten, who was born 130 years ago today. Ms. Cotten was left-handed and instead of restringing her guitar simply flipped it over and taught herself how to play it backward. Here is a bit more from Smithsonian Folkways. In that great Folk/Blues tradition, the article lists a different birth year. I have seen other years given in yet other sources as well. By most accounts however, including Cotten’s, she was indeed born on January 5, 1893. For one thing she played a commemorative show at Folk City in Greenwich Village in January 1983 a few days after her 90th birthday.
Seventy years ago at this moment Americans were waking up and hearing on their radios that Hank Williams had died in the backseat of his car on the way to a show in the early hours of 1 January 1953. There is a saying that the Blues is for Saturday night and Gospel for Sunday morning. What is fascinating about Country is that the sacred and profane are equally embedded in the mix. For no one was this truer than the King of Hillbilly himself. I have been listening to Hank Willams for 40+ years now, and can say that listening again in full middle age brings its own rewards. People grew up faster in the early decades of the twentieth than they do today. In his twenties Williams was singing about work, marriage, death, and salvation. There are no songs here about curfews missed or allowances being taken away.
I don’t romanticize the notion of the artist tragically dying young. Hank Williams left us far too early so much still to say. He was also a husband and a father. Still it is difficult to imagine him adjusting to the changes that took place in Country Music in the years immediately after his death. How he would have reconciled to the Nashville Sound is something we will never know. In a piece David Halberstam wrote for the July 13, 1971 edition of Look magazine, later anthologized in The Hank Williams Reader, the journalist asked, “And what would he be like now [at 47]—bald, pudgy in the middle, his sharp, reedy voice gone mellow, his songs backed by violins, pianos and worse? On the late-night talk shows beamed from New York, and dressed in Continental-cut suits?”
These are all good questions. I would add to these how Hank Williams might have adjusted to the rise of the twelve inch, 33 1/3 long playing record, which was invented in 1948 and only coming into its own at the time he died. Here is one he the Drifting Cowboys recorded for his Mother’s Best Flour radio transcriptions when Hank was still in his full powers.
≈ Comments Off on Edson Arantes do Nascimento, 1940-2022
Pelé with ball vs Sweden in World Cup final, 29 June 1958 / El Gráfico
I’m here with my coffee gearing up to proofread a project before sending it back to the editors. I’ve been off this week but intentionally staying away for most work- and writing-related things. The past twenty-four hours I’ve been reading of Pelé’s passing with great sadness. It was not unexpected; news of his illness was widespread during the World Cup. Still, when someone so iconic passes away it is always a shock. Soccer is not something I follow regularly and although losing interest the last few cycles due to people and events related to the organizing bodies, I do enjoy the World Cup when it comes every four years. There are different ways of putting it but watching makes you feel like an international citizen, or something like that. Not to mention that the game is, well, beautiful.
Pelé is the only player to have won three World Cups, in 1958, 1962, and 1970. I don’t think I quite understood until reading some of the obituaries and tributes the extent to which his playing elevated the nation of Brazil in those decades just after the Second World War. Prior to Brazil’s 1958 victory the only three nations to have won the Cup were Uruguay, Italy, and West Germany. England won in 1966 before Brazil’s third title in 1970. The symbolism of this seventeen-year-old from the barrios of Brazil leading his country to victory at the height of the decolonization movement would not have been lost on many. The details are different but he was much like Muhammad Ali in this respect, which explains their respective international stature. I remember when he played for the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos in the mid-1970s. Pelé’s best playing days were behind him at this point, but his presence brought soccer to millions of Americans who otherwise would never have been exposed. And oh yes, he led the Cosmos to the Soccer Bowl title in 1977. (I was having lunch with someone a week ago when we got on the topic of ins and outs of the NASL shootout.) If you want to read a good book and/or watch a good film, check out Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos. You want to talk about 70s excess? Yikes.
Like all persons Pelé could sometimes disappoint. I found it unseemly the way he sometimes denigrated the accomplishments of later players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. I never understood why he felt the need to do that. Still, people’s feet of clay are part of their humanity and thus what make them even more interesting. I feel fortunate to have lived in the world at the same time Pelé was in it as well.
≈ Comments Off on Trivial . . . Vulgar . . . Noisy . . . Crude
I was in the city at 7:30 this morning freezing my head off on the way to some appointment when the above message caught my eye. It was on one of those electric signs that rotates little factoids in between giving the temperature, subway delays, and other tidbits that pedestrians might find helpful. Thankfully I got my phone out and snapped the image a nanosecond before it flipped over to the next one. Just for fun I went to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, whose reviewer submitted the following in the next day’s edition. I love the way he employs the adjectives he does as compliments.
Excerpt from 14 December 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle review of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”
Thomas Gage by John Singleton Copley / Yale Center for British Art
December 8 is the anniversary of the wedding of then-Colonel Thomas Gage to Ms. Margaret Kemble of New Jersey. For all who celebrate, here is a piece I wrote last year for the Morristown National Historical Park about that 1758 event.
St. Andrew’s Society Parade, Montréal circa 1831-1859 by James Duncan / Royal Ontario Museum
In recent years of one my small pleasures has become what for lack of a better expression I’ll call lesser holidays, annual observations unknown to the vast majority of the general public but commemorated and meaningful to certain populations. Such holidays, for instance, may be observed in other nations but not the United States; or, observations once widely celebrated here but eventually forgotten due to cultural and demographic change. How and why they got to be forgotten can be interesting in its own right. Evacuation Day is one example. And if you don’t know what that is, I rest my case. Some holidays have been forgotten here but are still very much observed in other parts of the world, and if so it is a connection to others elsewhere. This is all a long-winded way of saying that today is St. Andrew Day. Above we see Canadians on Rue Notre Dame celebrating on some November 30th in the early decades over the nineteenth century.
The Strawfoot 