celestialmonochord

Banjo Spikes

Banjo spikes are little L-shaped pieces of wire that old-time banjoists, especially, drive into their banjo fretboards, underneath the fifth string (sometimes called the short, drone, or thumb string). They use these spikes like permanent capos for the 5th string — just tuck it under the spike to raise its pitch, usually in combination with a regular capo on the other four strings.

So, here’s the thing: They’re called “spikes” because they’re literally railroad spikes — used by model railroaders to hold down their HO-scale model train tracks. Banjoists have to buy them at hobby-train supply shops.

If you like your metaphors straight up, and no chaser, this is your poison: That banjo string is the lonesome old Long Steel Rail. Sometimes old-time banjoists die with a teeny-tiny little hammer in their hand, trying to beat that itsy-bitsy steam drill …

For vivid, multi-page instructions on installing railroad spikes in your banjo, see Richie Dotson’s BanjoResource.com.

Lost Globe Just Misplaced

A guy vacationing in Naples has stumbled across one of the most desparately sought pieces of ancient scholarship, long thought lost forever when the great Library of Alexandria Egypt was destroyed around 400 AD.

Apparently, it had been right in front of millions of tourists for decades.

A statue of Atlas carrying the Universe on his shoulders turns out to have used the lost celestial globe of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer who first discovered the precession of Earth’s axis, observed a nova, precisely calculated the length of the year, and invented the stellar brightness scale used today.

And he also made this newly-rediscovered, amazingly accurate star map, complete with celestial equator, ecliptic, and Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

Cooking with Banjos

The round drum of a banjo is called the “pot” — you say your open-back banjo has an 11-inch pot, and so forth.

Obviously, I’m not the first to notice the cooking association. One of the best-known stringbands before WWII was The Skillet Lickers. It’s like guitar “licks,” except played on a banjo, which if you hold it by the neck, looks like a skillet.

The signature song of the great banjo songster Uncle Dave Macon was “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”. I like that the design of a 5-string banjo is “written into” this song’s tune. The SKILL syllable is high and loud and you can easily play it by snapping the high 5th string. The word TIME in the rest of the line (“Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time”) slides up several notes each time it’s said, so it goes: “Keep my SKILLet good and greasy all the slide, slide, slide”. The melody seems to spring naturally from the design of old-time fretless banjos.

There’s also an old banjo tune called “Sugar in the Gourd,” which may refer to the fact that banjos used to be made from gourds, and there’s a great sweetness to the sound of a gourd banjo.

Of course, all of this might be sexual innuendo, as well.

The Vatican Observatory

Father George V. Coyne, S.J.
Director of the Vatican Observatory

Pope John Paul II died a few hours ago. One of his first actions after becoming Pope in 1978 was to appoint a commission to study the matter of Galileo, with an eye toward formally setting the record straight regarding the Church’s attitude toward his condemnation 350 years before. In Vatican jargon, John Paul wanted to move toward Galileo’s “rehabillitation.” In 1984, the commission presented its findings and acknowledged that the Church had been in error when it put Galileo under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The “pardon,” as it was popularly called, was taken as high symbolism by the public, but from a point of view within the Vatican, I doubt it was much of a stretch.

John Paul II said, without much fanfare, that the Bible holds no specific scientific information and discusses natural phenomena for metaphorical purposes only. He was alright with Darwin. Long before John Paul II, the Vatican had never been as backward about to astronomy as people imagine. A Vatican observatory was built in the 1500s to help with calendar reform, and was formally established as The Vatican Observatory in 1891. Since then, it’s been among the most advanced astonomical institutions in the world. It’s staffed by a bunch of Jesuits, naturally.

Corn Stalks and the Milky Way

My momma done told me … when I was a boy … that when she was growing up on a Wisconsin farm, the corn would grow so fast in late summer you could hear it grow — it was noisy. Being a suburban kid, and a born skeptic, I didn’t believe her at first. An April Fool’s joke?

She explained that at the height of the growing season, little fibrous strands on any given stalk of corn will snap on occasion, maybe once a week or so. But when you have a whole field of many thousands of stalks of corn, the field crackles like a campfire.

So, in that Wisconsin farmhouse, late at night in the dog days of summer during the Depression, with the windows of her bedroom wide open, she used to fall asleep listening to the corn grow … crackling, crackling, all night long.

This was a lesson in statistics: very rare events happen all the time. I thought of it years later, reading how radio astronomers map our galaxy.

The vast, star-forming clouds in our Milky Way Galaxy’s spiral arms are mostly made of hydrogen atoms — simply, one electron circling one proton. They both spin on their axes like tops, usually in parallel directions. But very rarely, the electron will flip and spin in the opposite (or anti-parallel) direction from its proton. When this happens, the atom emits a light wave at a wavelength of 21 centimeters — a radio frequency.

It only happens to a given hydrogen atom every 10 million years or so, but because our galaxy contains trillions of hydrogen atoms, it happens everywhere, all the time. So radio astonomers can map the galaxy, because the Milky Way softly hums with radio noise, all night, all day, for billions of years.

World’s Largest Banjo?

I know what you’ve been thinking: “When is he gunna tell me about the world’s biggest banjo?”

Well, unreliable sources claim that an object in Branson, Missouri is the World’s Largest Banjo, but I doubt it’s a real banjo. To qualify as a true banjo, you need vibrating strings and you need these vibrations to be transmitted to a membrane via a bridge for the purpose of amplification. A website describing Branson’s disturbing monstrosity makes me suspect that what they have there is a mere sculpture of a banjo:

“The neck holding five fiber optic strings is 47-feet long. A true replica of a collectible Gibson banjo, the huge fiberglass shell has a sturdy frame of over 3,000 pounds of steel.”

Perhaps Gibson’s factory in the Opry Mills Mall in Nashville (top) holds the record instead. The search continues … By the way, see Cecilia Conway’s book for an extensive analytical treatment of the features that constitute the essence of a banjo.

Sundogs and Sweet Angles

Sundogs (and Sun)

Astronomy has always been my first love, so people sometimes ask me what causes sundogs, rings around the sun or moon, light pillars, etc. I used to say, “Uh, it’s ice crystals.” That seemed to satisfy most people. But when I read the book “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories,” I learned what it really meant — how, exactly, ice crystals cause the various spots, arcs and rings you see in the sky from time to time. Suddenly the whole sky really came alive for me all over again.

Sundogs are the colorful spots you sometimes see on either side of the sun:

Sundog Sun Sundog

* O *
______________________________________ horizon

They’re caused by ice crystals shaped like hexagonal plates — like thick-ish stop signs, miniaturized. These little hex plates fall through the air with their faces parallel to the ground. So, picture billions of tiny quarters made of ice, all falling either “heads” or “tails”, not standing on the edge.

As they fall, the sun reflects off their faces and edges, and also passes through them making prismic colors (or not), depending on the angle of the sun and the angle from which you view them. There’s one particular angle that’s really sweet — an angle at which the sunlight passes horizontally right into the edge, along the plate’s face, and with the plate rotated “just so”. At that angle, the ice crystal passes a nice rainbow through itself.

Towards a certain direction in the sky, all the crystals that happen to be in this orientation “light up” that part of the sky. The direction works out to be about 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun:

* 22deg O 22deg *
_______________________________________

It turns out that various other angles are also “sweet” for different reasons. And ice crystals can have different shapes — for example, hexagonal cylinders, like pencils — which, in turn, creates a huge variety of wild arcs and rings and spots, which you can see if you are both lucky and alert.

Visit Les Crowley’s beautiful site on Atmospheric Optics or read “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories.”

Orphan Songs, Part 1: Poor Orphan Child

The Carter Family’s “Poor Orphan Child” is a catchy, jaunty jingle about how Death kills absolutely everybody.

The Carter Family’s 1927 “Poor Orphan Child” is a jaunty jingle about how Death kills everybody. The sound of the recording — its melody, tempo, harmonies — is as friendly and memorable as any advertising jingle. But the lyrics build a morbid argument:

Think of the many children, now
poor little boys and girls
who once had mother’s loving hands
to smooth their golden curls

The verses of the song obsess over the lonesomeness and poverty that result when dead parents leave orphans behind. And its chorus prays for those orphans to muddle along until they themselves “all reach that glittering strand” — that is, until the orphans themselves are dead.

It’s hard to think of a more pessimistic sentiment. It lays everyone to waste. But then, come to think of it, so does Death. Doesn’t Death turn almost everyone into orphans eventually? And don’t most of us wind up orphaning children of our own, in turn?

Remember: the Carters sing it with an irresistible jauntiness.

It’s amazingly common for the old folk/blues records of the 1920s to have some kind of startling friction between their “sound” and their meaning. So often, the performances seem to have a kind of public face at odds with an interior life, revealed only when you take the time to really think about them. That is, the things you notice on first listening (the arrangement, the key, the affect of the singers, etc.) begin to seem alien to their own song once you’ve paused to “get” the lyrics.

I’d like more of this in contemporary music, please. I’ll write more about it on another day.

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

John Johanna’s Telescope

There’s nothing explicitly about science in the songs on The Anthology of American Folk Music, even though I’ve named this science/music blog after an illustration on The Anthology’s cover.

The closest thing to an exception I can recall is Kelly Harrell’s “My Name is John Johanna,” a song about what a rotten place Arkansas is ( … alleged to be). After listing the horrors he witnessed there, the singer vows that if he ever sees Arkansas again, it’ll be through a telescope.

It’s a funny line to me, I suppose partly because I’m used to thinking of telescopes as a way of overcoming distance, not of enforcing it.

For lyrics, see Page 1 and Page 2.

Dreaming of the Hillbilly Blues

In the early stages of my … condition, I had a CD changer that held six CDs. I’d put the entire Anthology of American Folk Music on repeat, place a speaker next to my pillow (since the original 78s were in mono, one speaker would suffice), and just let The Anthology seep all the way deep down into my skull while I slept, soaking the reptilian core of my brainstem, all night long, every night, for months. After a while, I expected Amnesty International to break down my door.

The next CD I bought after The Anthology was Dock Boggs’ 1960’s recordings. I brought it home, put it on the stereo, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I burst into tears, just sobbed openly for a while … until I suddenly thought, “My musical tastes have CHANGED.” Maybe it was like admitting to yourself for the first time that you’re gay — realizing you’re someone other than who you thought you were. I mean, what should I tell the wife? The judge will surely side with HER! You should really be careful what music you mainline directly into your subconscious.

Years later, I hit the bunk in the army barracks at American Banjo Camp, at 2 in the morning, a little whiskey in me, after five hours of jamming and listening in on jams … fiddles, guitars, accordions, two doghouse basses, three dozen banjos. I slept like the dead, so deep and contented, drifting off with the sound-memory of old-time music so bright and benevolent and everlasting inside my head … Brilliancy Medley, June Apple, Sally in the Garden, Ducks on the Millpond, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Soldier’s Joy, Sail Away Ladies, Liberty, Devil’s Dream …