Uncle John Scruggs was born a slave, [and] is a good example of white-influenced black music as it probably sounded at the end of the 19th century. He is performing the folk ballad “Little Log Cabin Round the Lane” in a minstrel style.
Whereas, according to the “for old times sake” blog, “[Scruggs’] music is an example of an Afro-American banjo playing tradition than predates that of white settlers in the Appalachians.”
Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta has some interesting things to say about Uncle John Scruggs, particularly the tradition of black banjo playing and the significance of the “Uncle” in front of this performers name at the time. He also has some interesting things to say about minstrelsy and its enduring popularity amongst black and white audiences through the 1950s.
This video clip not only captures some amazing music, but the setting itself (with the children dancing and chickens feeding) seems like an almost archetypal vision for how our culture has come to think about the post-bellum conditions for black share croppers in the South, and all of this right here in our own Virgineyeyeah.
Here is a wild moment in film/TV history via the ever entertaining Classic Television Showbiz blog. The two video clips below are from a 1977 episode of “The Mike Douglas Show,” featuring interviews with Star Wars cast members Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and Harrison Ford. The film is still in theaters at the time of the interviews, and you can kind of tell by the conversations that it is already gaining a sacred, wondrous space in the popular imagination.
One take away for me is how cool Mark Hamill seems, and what a blowhard Harrison Ford is. To be honest, I have held a deep grudge against Ford ever since Charles Bronson died back in 2003. Why? Well, because I read in the New York Post that when asked about his feelings about the passing of a fellow action star legend and thoughts on Bronson’s career, Ford was quoted as responding with something like the following, “Well, I was never much of an action film fan myself, so I can’t comment too much on his career.” What?! Is that your eulogy for the great Charlie Bronson? Pathetic. Now he may have been misquoted, it was the New York Post mind you, but how can I live with such a paltry, pompous ass quote as a remembrance of the great Charlie Bronson? I’m scarred for life.
I do enjoy working at a university, for on a regular basis new cultural gems come my way. I’ve been working with Gary Stanton on his “Memory and Culture in American Vernacular Music,” and through this course I came upon Jimmie Rodgers, also known as “the father of country.” A quick search on YouTube delivered a short film featuring Rodgers titled The Singing Brakeman (1929). Since I starting watching The Singing Brakeman early yesterday morning, I’ve been transfixed by this guy’s style.
I’m sure those folks who know something about the history of music are yawning by now, but this musician and film wer a wild discovery for me. Watching him perform “The Blue Yodel” (also known as “T is for Texas”) immediately made me think how much his style embodied the best of both Robert Johnson and Hank Williams –not a light combination of 20th century musical legends. More than that, he yodels. The guy yodels like there is no tomorrow and it’s beautifully tortured. In this short nine minute film he sits sheepishly in front of the camera with his guitar, throwing in some brilliantly subtle riffs, and making just about everything else on the screen disappear but his sound.
The film features three tunes, “Waitin’ for a Train,” “Daddy and Home,” and “Blue Yodel.” They’re all good, but “The Blue Yodel” is an absolutely amazing tune. I have to republish the lyrics below because it reads like a blues song of the highest order, and the yodels and his guitar licks bring it to the next level in my mind —not to mention his pronunciation of Georgia as “Georgie.” Here’s the video of “Blue Yodel”:
What I particularly like about this nine minute film is the way it depicts Jimmie Rodgers as a railroad worker stopping in for a cup of coffee and belting out three amazing songs while waiting for his train. Rodgers came from a family of railroad workers, and was one himself before contracting tuberculosis. What’s more, he’s one of the earlier popular music stars (although he had a rather short career) during a historical moment when mass media was exploding; distribution of his music could be mediated more widely than ever before given the popularity of film, the emergence of radio, and high quality recordings. The film kind of captures this transitional space, a Mississippi country boy waiting for his coffee framed for an entire nation in a short film that is staged, but not all that unreal. He’s not a celebrity in the sense we might understand it now, but rather a local musician reaching the world at large. Makes me think (hope?) that in our moment the opposite trend might be at work. As celebrity fades the re-emergence of the local musicians occurs, especially given the means of capturing and distributing media have changed so radically that the role of the musician as global pop star is finally seen as more of a manipulated marketing product of the artificial forces of capital than the capturing and fostering of a talent.
Lyrcis for “The Blue Yodel, No. 1”
You’ll notice these lyrics are different than the those he sings in the video, and there were several different versions of this tune, suggesting a kind of constantly riffing and improvisation. A fluid, arbitrary process of interpretation.
I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Oh, yeah, I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Said, T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me
Well, if you don’t want me momma
You sure don’t have to start
Ah, if you don’t want me momma
You sure don’t have to start
‘Cause I can get more women
Than a passenger train car
Yeah, I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Whoa, T for Texas
T for Tennessee
I said, T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me
I’m gonna buy me a pistol
Just as long as I am tall
I’m going to buy me a pistol
Just as long as I am tall
I’m gonna shoot down old mean Thelma
Just to watch her jump and fall
I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me
Gonna buy me a shotgun
With a great long shiny barrel, oh yeah
I’m gonna buy me a shotgun
With a great long shiny barrel
Gonna shoot down that rounder
That stole away my girl
I’m going where the water
Tastes like cherry wine
Yeah, I’m going where the water
Tastes like cherry wine
‘Cause the water down here in Georgia
Tastes like turpentine
I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Oh I said, T for Texas
T for Tennessee
I said T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me
Oh yeah, women make a fool out of me
Update: it seems this issue is only happening on Firefox 3 with Mac Intels. Anarchy Media player is apparently working fine on Firefox 3 for PCs. Go figure 🙂
When putting a series of videos in a post or page with Anarchy Media Player, I get the following bug when viewed in Firefox 3:
Anarchy Media Player, Firefox 3 bug
Seems like one or two videos will show up, then the subsequent videos show just a part of the play button, and no sign of the video anywhere. Are others having a similar issue? I tested it on more than one WPMu install, and the same issue occurs in both. Seems like it is triggered when there are several videos in one post.
I also tested it on Safari, where the videos show up fine. Any ideas?
Update: There’s a great article on this very retrospective by Benjamin Strong on the Moving Image Source titled “Morning in America.” He positions this retrospective as genre readings of the Reagan 80s, yes, that’s it!
As if you need any more proof that the BAM’s film programming is far and away the best out there, check out the just finished Four-Pack of Carpenter series. These folks are good…very, very good! What I would have given to have been in the BAM for eight hours consuming all of this 35 mm magnificence. It’s probably better that Matt “old gold” Gold didn’t tell me until after the fact, cause I would have just been depressed for four days straight.
4-Pack of Carpenter at the BAM
The four films by John Carpenter they showed are Big Trouble in Little China (1986), The Thing (1981), They Live (1988), and Escape from New York (1982). Now, I just got done praising the programmers, and I stand by that, but I for one think Big Trouble in Little China and They Live are kinda weak spots in the line-up. Big Trouble in Little China is one of those beloved Carpenter films (for many a favorite) that I never really cared for or understood why so many people liked it so much. I mean let’s be honest, if you are going to have a small retrospective of Carpenter, the four films would have to be Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing —am I right? Of course I am, Halloween, while not my favorite (that would be an even tie between The Thing and Escape from NY), has to be Carpenter’s most perfect film. It framed the aesthetic, pacing, and camera angles for a whole decade of horror films, and it features unbelievable performances by both Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. In fact, I watched it yet again recently and remain amazed just how well it stands up in every way, it’s the Carpenter film.
Now, I know They Live is going through a renaissance of sorts as of late and I’m all for it, fun film and a great plot concept with the consumer/message zombie/monster thing. Yet, it pales in comparison to the pure philosophical genius of The Thing, or the brilliant plot frame and post-apocalyptic setting of Escape from NY. In fact, I think Big Trouble in Little China and They Live are lesser Carpenter because they move into the intentionally corny, a facet of his film making that by the time we come to a film like Escape from LA renders it unwatchable. Carpenter’s films were always a bit comic book and hokie, it’s one of the things I love about all the movies in my 4-pack. It just seems by the time he got to Big Trouble in Little China the move from horror/sci-fi master to mediocre b-comedy was complete, and the latter didn’t really wear to well on him (with In the Mouth of Madness (1995) being the one exception).
OK, I’ll admit it. This is really just hair splitting, I understand that, I would have gladly gone to all four films with butter-drenched popcorn, Coke, and Dots in hand, greedily stuffing myself while consuming the true beauty of 35 mm Carpenter. This caddy response may be a result of my intense dejection that I wasn’t at the BAM to witness all this first hand. At the same time, we have to maintain a standard for our b-movies, or else everything just becomes artistic schlock 🙂 And as an unintentional side effect, this post has helped me figure out a perfect life for myself: I would run UMW Blogs on the side, and attend and blog every film being shown at the BAM on a regular basis for the rest of my natural life. That, my friends, would be heaven. Sometimes I miss Brooklyn, but I always miss the BAM Cinematèk (looks like the got ride of the whole Cinematèk thing, and are just going with BAM Cinema now–glad they dropped the elitist European name with accent, this is America damn it! We invented film!!!).
Two weeks into the semester and UMW Blogs is a non-stop post party.
Blog Activityon UMW Blogs as of 9-6-08
And while I get excited about the activity and the overall usage, it’s often the tidbits that get me going. Like Fumanchu’s random video post about the Triadic Ballet from the 80s.
UMW Blogs is about a different kind of teaching and learning resource, it’s the interstitial space of sharing that happens between people, and that’s why it’s unique in its beautiful chaos. It’s not about collecting institutional data, or some staged brochure for the world at large. It’s a complex series of intersecting roads that have no routinized map for learning. Rather, an online community driven by the engines of inquiry which randomly seeks out inspiration in the most unsuspecting spaces. Together we have built a highway leading to nowhere and, to misquote Gus Haynes from the final episode of the fifth season of The Wire, “we just want to see something new everyday.”
I liked Sean Penn in Fast Times a Ridgemont High, Jeff Spicoli was possibly one of the single most beloved and influential film characters of the 80s. But it wasn’t until seeing him in Bad Boys that I became a huge fan of the early Penn. Now he ain’t much of a director, and his latest film Into the Wild (2007) confirms that without question (was it simply a bad Eddie Vedder music video that forced Hal Holbrook to run up a mountain?). So, in tribute to my favorite Sean Penn role as the Chi-town badass Irishman Jimmy O’Brien, here’s a hard hitting clip from Bad Boys.
Produced in 1973 [by Richard Serra and Carlota Ray Schoolman], “Television Delivers People” is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power-the corporations that maintain and profit from the status quo. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world.
A historical lesson for the potential futures of the internets?
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
I do enjoy working at a university, for on a regular basis new cultural gems come my way. I’ve been working with Gary Stanton on his “Memory and Culture in American Vernacular Music,” and through this course I came upon 
I liked Sean Penn in 