celestialmonochord

Amazing Cat Facts

In honor of Ralph, visit the Animal Humane Society, or just check out some amazing cat facts. They are some pretty cool little buggers, them cats:

The worlds fattest cat was a neutered male tabby named “Himmey” When Himmey died of respiratory failure he weighed a whopping 46 lbs 15.5 ounces! He had a 15 inch neck, was 38 inches long, and had a 33 inch waist.

Worlds Most “Prolific” Cat was a tabby named “Dusty” gave birth to 420 documented kittens in her lifetime.

Cat’s urine glows under a black light.

In ancient Egypt, killing a cat was a crime punishable by death.

Hunting is not instinctive for cats. Kittens born to non-hunting mothers may never learn to hunt.

Cats sleep 16 to 18 hours per day.

Besides smelling with their nose, cats can smell with an additional organ called the Jacobson’s organ, located in the upper surface of the mouth.

Cats can’t taste sweets.

The average cat food meal is the equivalent to about five mice.

Cats cannot see in complete darkness but they can navigate by sound, smell, and the sensitivity of their whiskers.

At the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, historian Ted Landsmark said he often gives talks to groups of nice, middle-class, African American church ladies, who reverently listen to him talk about black history. He brings along the usual objects of veneration — quilts and talking sticks and all that.

Then he brings out the banjo.

He said you’ve never seen a group turn on anybody so quickly. He tried to impress upon the Black Banjo conference attendees just how disgusted these audiences are that Landsmark, as a black man, would even be seen touching a banjo. It never helps much to explain that, of all the material culture produced by African slaves in the New World, the most persistent and successful is the banjo.

Well, given this taboo, it’s nice that Taj Mahal is taping a segment for the PBS series History Detectives in which he researches the possible authenticity of a banjo once owned, supposedly, by an African slave. Taj was chosen for the segment because he is a knowledgeable banjo historian and player — and is, of course, a famous black bluesman. The show was taped in Cincinatti and will air some time this summer.

John Prine at The Library of Congress

John Prine

Today, my wife met Ted Kooser, the current Poet Laureate of the United States. That was neat. Even better, he told her out that he recently brought John Prine to The Library of Congress for a discussion and concert.

I highly recommend the webcast of Prine’s appearence, which is riveting — all 90 minutes of it. (You’ll need the free RealPlayer to watch it.) Prine said of his appearence, “You can bet I’m looking forward to it — taking all these people in my songs to the Library of Congress and letting ’em look around a bit.”

Prine’s first album in ten years will be released on April 26. Last time I saw him in concert, he said he releases an album every ten years whether anybody asks him to or not.

The Banjo and Africa

I just returned from the conference, “Black Banjo: Then and Now,” held in Boone, North Carolina. This blog will plunder my memories of it for months, no doubt, but for now let me tell you a story …

I sometimes hand my banjo to somebody who’s never held one before and invite them to “make some noise.” They always do very strange things with their fingers. They might rest their thumb on the “drum” head, above the strings, and pick up with their index and middle fingers, like an electric bass player. Maybe they’ll rest all four fingers on the head below the strings and pluck down on the strings with their thumb. Maybe they’ll sit like a classical guitarist and use their thumb and all four fingers to pick the strings.

It’s interesting to watch what they do, and it’s immediately obvious that they have no knowledge of any of the banjo-playing traditions.

But — in one incident after another, stretching back many decades — Oldtime banjo players hand their banjos to West African players of a Senegambian instrument called the akonting, and they immediately play clawhammer like they’ve been playing the banjo all their lives. Alternately, a banjoist will pick up the akonting and play like a master griot, much to the amazement of his West African hosts.

The banjo is an African instrument and clawhammer is an African playing technique. The instrument and the technique simply survived slavery and are alive and very well today in America, albeit generally in the hands of white Oldtime musicians. Knowing this fact, and fully imagining it, has been a profound shock and inspiration to me.

Orphan Songs
Part 2: Why so many?

Orphanage
Children in yard of Home for the Friendless
New York City, about 1870

I’ve cataloged a lot of songs about orphans (or the death of parents) from the old 78s of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as later songs inspired by them. I’ve begun to wonder — why are there so many of these songs?

For starters, there simply used to be a lot of orphans around to sing about. Today, I suppose they would be in state-run foster care systems and wouldn’t be called “orphans” at all. Contraception and safe and legal abortions probably keep their numbers down. Certainly, parents are kept alive and families are kept together longer by less dangerous childbirth, safer working conditions, and a longer life expectancy.

But there must be a more permanent reason to sing about orphans, considering that the songs are still well-loved today. Maybe it’s that, as I said in Part 1, parents usually die before their children, so we are almost all “orphaned” at some point. And most of us, in turn, make more orphans when we die. It’s almost the fabled “universal experience.”

These songs seem to have blossomed in the 1800’s, when Americans had a peculiar obsession with Death, fetishizing and sentimentalizing it in ways rarely seen today. The outpouring of public grief over the death of Abraham Lincoln was an expression of this, as were momento mori, the gothic novel, and the many sentimental death-songs that appeared then. The artists of the 1920s and 1930s plundered the sheet music of the 1800s in search of material for the new recording industry, so I think a lot of these attitudes got a “second wind” as a result.

Most of all, though, I think life in pre-WWII America was just plain lonesome and arduous for most people. Feelings of abandonment are part of what it means to be poor, especially in a country so full of other promises. It would seem natural to empathize with The Orphan.

America was, and is, a place of hard work, empty spaces, and physical displacement. It’s no wonder we love media like recorded music like we do — they keep us company. When they brought songs about how “sometimes I feel like a motherless child” and how “motherless children have a hard time,” wondering “will the circle be unbroken,” it’s no wonder they were welcomed into the home and taken to heart.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

“Einstein Was A Pig”

Somewhere around 1998, a book about Einstein appeared that (according to the evening news) detailed his relationships with women, showing that he was a fairly lousy husband and father.

The woman I was dating at the time said, “I knew it! Einstein was a PIG!”

“Well, in that case,” I thought to myself, “I guess objects with mass can travel faster than the speed of light.”

We split up a week or two later — purely coincidentally, as I recall.

Stalked by the Northern Lights

Often, great displays of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) do insane things. Several times, over many years, they seemed to hover directly over me, personally. They swirled wildly overhead, as if they knew where I was standing. Looking straight up, I saw:

I never understood how this could be … until one night, standing under a great display, puzzling very hard over the problem, it hit me. It felt like a Nobel-Prize-worthy discovery. ah-HA!

Imagine you’re lying on your back on the floor in somebody’s living room, looking up at a set of lace curtains. The curtains to either side of you will fall down in straight lines to your left and right. But directly above you, you’ll see a complex, maybe S-shaped curve, surrounded by lines radiating from a point above your head. If you move to another spot along the curtains, you’ll see the same thing, due to perspective.

NASA photos taken looking down from Earth orbit aboard one of the Space Shuttles confirm that this is pretty much what’s actually happening:

Aurora space shuttle

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
Part 1: Dem Bones

Third Man Ferris Wheel
(from “The Third Man”)

During a recent morning commute, a small-time public radio station played “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” by the obscure Selah Jubilee Quartet. Sounding like an intensely cool, rhythmic barbershop quartet, they sang about how the prophet Ezekiel saw a wheel “way in the middle of the air.” I’d heard such songs before.

But suddenly, they changed direction and broke into “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone …” The station then played two other Ezekiel songs from the quartet tradition, and they all sang about dry bones in the valley and how they’re connected.

Maybe you’re way ahead of me here, but …

It turns out all those Ezekiel songs (with their wheel in the middle of air), and “Dry Bones” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (it’s on the Harry Smith Anthology), and “Dem Bones,” which I grew up thinking of as a secular children’s song (shin bone connected to the knee-bone, etc.) are all part of the same song complex, held together by the Book of Ezekiel.

You know, maybe I should read that Bible thingy someday … NAH!

Part 2

The Oldest Story Ever Told

Oldeststory

The stars of the Big Dipper look nothing like a bear. But ancient cultures all over northern Asia — from Scandanavia to Siberia — did see them as a bear. Even the Greeks saw them that way. More strangely, a number of Native American cultures have traditions of seeing these stars as part of a bear narrative.

It’s hard to confirm, but the image of these very un-bear-like stars as a bear may well have crossed into North America with the migration of humans over the Siberia-Alaska land bridge during the last Ice Age. If so, this story, this metaphor, is one of the oldest acts of imagination we know.

Note, also, that one of the first signs that the genus Homo had begun to have a kind of imaginative life is the appearence of burials deliberately using bear iconography and bones to lay the dead to rest — the so-called “Bear Cult” of Europe.

I first read about it in an article in Sky and Telescope in the 1980s, but a good article is now online at The Discovery Channel, Canada.

Segregation and The Anthology

When I first heard the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was stunned by its implication that the folk music of The South has always been deeply de-segregated. It makes no mention of race at all, and it’s often hard to tell whether a performer is black or white. At least in the North, this was much of its impact when it was first released in 1952.

But after 7 years of thinking and reading, The Anthology has begun to change my notions of what Southern (and Northern) segregation were really about.

I grew up outside Chicago, historically one of the most segregated cities in America. You had to get in a car and really drive to see any African Americans. Drinking fountains labeled “Colored” and “White” would have been absurd in my hometown — not due to our great enlightenment, but just because our drinking fountains would have to wait years before ever seeing a black face.

I now see that there was rarely any place in The South so segregated in quite this way. Historically, the African American experience there has been largely rural (hard to picture for me), so rural whites and blacks breathed the same air, however uneasily. It wasn’t unusual for white children to be raised, to a degree, by black servants.

Many linguists even believe that the various “Southern accents” derive some of their characteristics from West African languages. If this is true, Northerners have no Southern accent because they have so few African influences.

Chicago was segregated geographically, physically, bodily. The South was more segregated by custom and law. It’s no wonder that the musical intimacy of blacks and whites in The South came as a shock to me. It didn’t square with my experience as a Northerner, studying old photographs of those drinking fountains labeled “White” and “Colored”.

Author: celestialmonochord