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10
Feb 17

Jo Stafford sings stuff for us

Sometime after I discovered big band music I really discovered Jo Stafford. She had the most divinely studio voice. A pure, opera-trained soprano and what they called a natural falsetto. Sultry and enchanting and she somehow always seemed to keep her distance from you, too. Even as you thought, if you squinted real hard and you imagined this was an old fuzzy AM radio and you weren’t always in such a climate-controlled environment that the “you” in her songs just might, in fact, be you.

Well.

Today I was looking for something else and I discovered that in 1961 Stafford and her husband were in London. They produced a nine-show series there. (There was a variety show in the U.S. in the 1950s) And I discovered that the great Ella Fitzgerald did a medley with Stafford.

Can you even?

Yes, you can:

Fitzgerald was the first black musician to win a Grammy. She’d win 12 more and sale more than 40 million records. Stafford had a Grammy. And midway through her career she was tapped as the best-selling female singer in the world.

Now, 1940s Jo Stafford is my favorite. By the time she was making the rounds on television she was in her mid-30s and on. Here she is with Bing Crosby in 1959 and it is incredible, but the whimsy of youth is replaced with the confidence that comes with well-earned wisdom. The one-liners come with their own answers and have a little skepticism and acid in them:

She’s able to not be overwhelmed by Bing, and he was kind enough to let her stay up there where she belonged.

This is 15 years previous, in a 1944 movie. She had six top 20 hits that year. She would have been 27 or 28 then, and The Pied Pipers had been working on these tight harmonies for about six years. She had no idea of the complete arc of her career then:

Because here’s Jo Stafford in the 1970s … she’d been doing a parody act for a long time with her husband. That was where her Grammy came from, a 1960s comedy record. She had what might have been one of the first alter-egos in pop music. “Darlene Edwards” was a hapless lounge act sort. And this was a 1979 hit:

Hard to reconcile that this is the same voice. This was her biggest hit:

Not hard to see why.

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3
Feb 17

I remembered to forget to remember

Some kind of busy day. It started last night.

I got in at about 10 p.m. last night, just in time for frozen pizza and then bed. Woke up a half hour earlier than usual this morning. I grabbed a bit of breakfast on the way into the office and, when I got there, I loaded up a cart worth of stuff to send to the surplus store.

If you need a handful of old standard definition television cameras or other outdated gear, I know where you can get it.

After that, the morning show:

The two ladies on the right are national champion cheerleaders. They told me it gets harder every year. They’d know. One has two championships, the other has three. Their team has won five of the last six titles. Harder every year. But, for one, her cheer career is almost over. She wants to work in that business, perhaps as a coach. The other is planning to go to medical school.

So this was the second episode of the new morning show. It looks promising and you’ll see it here when they upload it.

I pretty much lived in the studio today. After the morning show there was anchor training and then some other folks came in and used the room for some interviews. We did critiques of the news shows and then I went back to the studio for more of those interviews and a series of pesky emails and so on.

When the day was over I headed to the grocery store. On the way I found a local country station, a 3,800 watt shop with a liner that says “Fox News is coming up next, after this country classic!”

And then Elvis played. “Devil in Disguise.” Even in 1963, with his powers not yet fading, saw that song go top ten on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B charts. That was no country song. Neither was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” but it showed up a few songs later. There was also Linda Ronstadt and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and there was nothing wrong with any of that. But Elvis? Or, that Elvis?

He had 54 hits on the country charts, including 11 number ones. Altogether, he stayed on the country chart for almost 12 years. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of contradiction on the individual song data online, but this was Elvis’ most successful country song:

Thirty-nine weeks on the country charts. It was written by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers wrote it, two more Mississippi boys. It was covered by everyone so it is basically a standard. Should have heard that on the radio.

Oh, which reminds me, I met Elvis once:

Barbecue restaurant, out in the pine tree woods of Georgia, like you do.

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27
Jan 17

The last line in the song is “Ice to your blood, friends!”

We started a morning show today. Well, Lydia and Gabrielle did:

That opening is pretty great:

Fun fact, I used to do a morning show that used “Morning Mood,” which is a part of Opus 23 of Peer Gynt. And now there’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

I wonder if they know the meaning of the song.

This was their first episode, so it’ll be interesting to see where they go with it. That’s always the challenge, grow something new. Three of the four other shows they are producing right now have been around before we all got here. Last term we launched The Toss Up, a sports talk show, out of thin air. And soon we’ll have a night show to go along with this morning show.

It is cool to see students producing work, creating new things. But to watch them start a new program from scratch, that’s particularly gratifying.

Today passed quickly. I spent no time in front of a computer today. There was a meeting and then that show and then another appointment and then a critique session and some other batch of errands and that was a full day. I sat in a parking lot and started reading the day’s news at the end of the day. That took almost all night. And, now, here we are.

books / Friday / history / memories — Comments Off
20
Jan 17

James and Willie and me

You go through your young life in Illinois and enlist the Army right out of high school at 17. By the time you are 20 you have fought in Guadalcanal, been wounded and learned both your parents died while you were away. You go AWOL three times before, finally, your bouts of drinking and fighting become too much to overcome, you get discharged. And then you write classics like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line.” That was Jim Jones. Later still, he was also a journalist covering Vietnam. And I bring him up to you because he was a friend of Willie Morris, that Mississippi scoundrel who was editing Harper’s Magazine by the time he was 33. They become such good friends that Jones asked Morris to finish his last book for him after he died. And he did, “Whistle” became the last of Jones’ war trilogy, and Morris wrote the last three chapters in 1977-78.

Two decades later Willie died. He’d been teaching at Ole Miss after he moved back from New York and had compiled and released a book of his essays that I’d find in a bookstore. I wish I could remember which one. It doesn’t matter, but it probably does. Either way, Terrains of the Heart he wrote at Oxford and I bought it in Alabama, quite literally because of the cover.

And this was a great choice. Willie, like all gregarious storytellers, was pleased to hold court in the warm embrace of a room of people that loved his stories. Willie, like the best storytellers, could make a place come alive and — no, that’s not quite accurate. Willie Morris, who was concerned about entropy and stillness and mortality and life could make the South hum. He could bring the sweet smell of the South to your mind, through your nose, and the dew in the fields to your heart through your toes. And Willie taught me the second thing I learned about writing. The first was that if you can figure out how to bring a smell into the story you’ve done some serious writing. And the second was I wanted to teach myself how to write like Willie Morris.

I tell you this because on this day, every four years, I think of a conversation Willie Morris recounts of his friendship with James Jones:

Who knows what all we’ll think four years from now, or at any time in between, but that’s an important observation to keep in mind.

family / Friday / photo — Comments Off
13
Jan 17

We come to sing true praises

We buried my step-grandmother today. This is my step-father’s mom and she was just a gem of a human being. A lovely Southern lady, through and through. She lived a full life and was independent, and fiercely so, right up to the end. She still traveled, alone, at 92. And to know her was to be charmed by her and to be charmed by her was to be a person who said something like “I hope I’m like her at that age.”

The pastor gave a nice little service and then Rick, my step-father, stood up and talked about his mother. And in front of a room full of people that had known him his whole life and her their whole lives, he really painted the picture well. Her niece talked and then a nephew. A former college professor colleague of hers (she taught English and reading) and a friend of hers spoke about her as well. It was a celebration, which is what they had wanted. There was a reception afterward. And then we all took a long drive so that she could return to the place from where she came, surrounded by her family again. And in that there was a little history lesson for the family, too.

Another preacher offered a graveside service and it was lovely and somewhere in all of this someone had this great notion that essentially said our elders give us love and we repay them with joy and happiness. And that seems like something you really would hope is true.

It was cold, but the rain had stopped. We placed our pall bearer flowers on the coffin. Right after the service concluded this large flock of birds that had been just a bit away in the cemetery, the size of which you don’t often see anymore, decided to start singing and flew off to the west. We heard them all, and I managed to catch the last few on my phone.

I saw this on her porch yesterday, and if there’s ever been a more apt thing said about a person or her philosophy on garden decor, I don’t know what it would be.

“O, Tiger-Lily, I wish you could talk!” says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass.’

“We can talk,” the flower says, “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

And she was one of those, because she wanted to listen to everything, because she was interested in everything. The thing about people that invite you into their circles — and I’ve had some experience with this — is that when they welcome you in you don’t often want to leave. And she was good about that, bringing you in, making you feel welcomed and the center of things. So it is with the rest of her clan. Near the cemetery is a family ranch, and we went there for a visit. It was more of the family, and more neat history that we got to learn about. I’ll write a few things about that next week.