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(I'm supposed to be packing; we leave early tomorrow morning.) Now, should I pack swimsuits or snowsuits?

Just don't be packin' any heat, honey.

Ah, talking about one room school houses reminds me of this poem.

In School-Days


Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry-vines are creeping.

Within, the master's desk is seen,
Deep-scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial;

The charcoal frescoes on its wall;
Its door's worn sill, betraying
The feet that, creeping slow to school,
Went storming out to playing!

Long years ago a winter sun
Shone over it at setting;
Lit up its western window-panes,
And low eaves' icy fretting.

It touched the tangled golden curls,
And brown eyes full of grieving,
Of one who still her steps delayed
When all the school were leaving.

For near it stood the little boy
Her childish favor singled;
His cap pulled low upon a face
Where pride and shame were mingled.

Pushing with restless feet the snow
To right and left, he lingered;---
As restlessly her tiny hands
The blue-checked apron fingered.

He saw her lift her eyes; he felt
The soft hand's light caressing,
And heard the tremble of her voice,
As if a fault confessing.

"I'm sorry that I spelt the word:
I hate to go above you,
Because,"---the brown eyes lower fell,---
"Because, you see, I love you!"

Still memory to a gray-haired man
That sweet child-face is showing.
Dear girl! the grasses on her grave
Have forty years been growing!

He lives to learn, in life's hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,
Like her, because they love him.

John Greenleaf Whittier


Well, my friends, Guess that should be my goodnight message.

From Letty with love

That was lovely Letty. See you next week.

Good morning, WA2K folks.

We hope that our Tai has a wonderful trip and comes back to our cyber station soon.

Interesting morning song, listeners.

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.


The Munich Mannequins

Pete Seeger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Background information

Born May 3, 1919 (1919-05-03)
Origin Greenwich Village
Genre(s) folk
Occupation(s) Activist, songwriter
Instrument(s) Guitar, banjo
Years active 1940-present
Associated
acts The Weavers

Peter Seeger (born May 3, 1919), almost universally known as Pete Seeger, is a folk singer, political activist, and author. As a member of the Weavers, he had a string of hits, including a 1949 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.[1] He was formerly a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and a major contributor to folk and pioneer of protest music in the 1950s and the 1960s.

He is perhaps best known today as the author or co-author of the songs "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", "If I Had a Hammer", and "Turn, Turn, Turn", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn" in the mid-1960s.





Family and personal life

Seeger was born in Patterson, NY. His father Charles Seeger was a musicologist and an early investigator of non-Western music. His stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was one of the most significant women composers of the 20th Century. His siblings Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger also had notable musical careers. Half-brother Mike Seeger went on to form the New Lost City Ramblers, who influenced Bob Dylan. His uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted poet, was killed during the First World War. In 1936 he heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina,[2] and his life was changed forever. Pete Seeger attended the Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut and then Harvard University until he left in 1938 during his sophomore year. In both cases, he was a scholarship student.[3] In 1943 he married Toshi-Aline Ohta, whom he credits with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. Pete and Toshi have three children, Danny, Mika and Tinya, and grandchildren Tao, Cassie, Kitama, Moraya, Penny, and Issablle. Tao is a folk musician in his own right, singing and playing guitar, banjo and harmonica with The Mammals.

Seeger lives in the hamlet of Dutchess Junction in the Town of Fishkill, NY and remains very politically active in the Hudson Valley Region of New York, especially in the near-by City of Beacon, NY. He and Toshi purchased their land in 1949, and lived there first in a trailer, then in a log cabin they built themselves, and eventually in a larger house.[4]


Early work

"Arlo, folk songs are serious."
?-Pete Seeger to Arlo Guthrie
In late 1930s and early 1940s?-after Seeger dropped out of Harvard in 1939,[5] where he had been studying journalism?-he took a job in Washington, D.C. at the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress. In that capacity, he met and was influenced by many important musicians such as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. He met Woody at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant workers concert on March 3, 1940 and the two thereafter began a musical collaboration.


In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument. He went on to invent the Long Neck or Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, and slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 Frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo.

As a self-described "split tenor" (between an alto and a tenor),[6] he was a founding member of the folk groups the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie and the Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. The Weavers had major hits in the early 1950s, before being blacklisted in the McCarthy Era.

On August 18, 1955, Pete was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) where he refused to name personal and political associations stating it would violate his First Amendment rights... "I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this." [7] Seeger's refusal to testify led to a March 26, 1957 indictment for contempt of Congress; for some years, he had to keep the federal government apprised of where he was going any time he left the Southern District of New York. He was convicted in a jury trial in March 1961, and sentenced to a year in jail, but in May 1962 an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction. [8]

Seeger started a solo career in 1958, and is known for songs such as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," "If I Had a Hammer" (co-written with Lee Hays), "Turn, Turn, Turn," adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and "We Shall Overcome" (based on a spiritual and later became the unofficial anthem for the civil rights movement). Seeger became influential in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village. He helped found Broadside Magazine and Sing Out!. He was strongly associated with Moses Asch and Folkways Records. To describe the new crop of folk singers, many of whom were politically minded in their songs, he coined the phrase "Woody's children", alluding to his former bandmate Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. He has often sung and is associated with the song "Joe Hill".

In the mid-sixties he hosted a regional folk music TV show called Rainbow Quest which featured folk musicians playing traditional folk music. Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Mississippi John Hurt, The Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Richard Fariña and Mimi Fariña, and many others. Thirty-eight hourlong programs were recorded at new UHF station WNJU's Newark studios in 1965 and 1966, produced by Seeger and his wife with Sholom Rubinstein.

An early advocate of Bob Dylan, Seeger was supposedly incensed over the distorted electric sound Dylan brought into the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, especially with the inability to clearly hear the lyrics. There are many conflicting versions of exactly what ensued, some claiming that he actually tried to disconnect the equipment. He is often cited as one of the main opponents to Dylan at Newport 1965, but claimed in 2005:

" There are reports of me being anti-him going electric at the '65 Newport Folk festival, but that's wrong. I was the MC that night. He was singing 'Maggie's Farm' and you couldn't understand a word because the mic was distorting his voice. I ran to the mixing desk and said, 'Fix the sound, it's terrible!' The guy said 'No, that's how they want it.' And I did say that if I had an axe I'd cut the cable! But I wanted to hear the words. I didn't mind him going electric.Seeger's own version is that when the sound man refused to try to reduce the distortion to make the words more audible, he exclaimed "Goddamn it, if I had an ax, I'd cut the cable."



Later work

Seeger achieved some notoriety in 1967 and 1968 for his song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy", about a captain?-a "big fool"?-who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in Louisiana during World War II. Seeger performed the song on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour after some arguments with CBS about whether the song's lyrics were objectionable. Although the song was cut from the Smothers Brothers show in September 1967, Seeger returned in January 1968 and sang the entire song. It was clearly an allegory about the U.S. under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson which was in over its head in the Vietnam War. The song is included in Seeger's Greatest Hits collection CD, published in 2002.

Another slight against Lyndon Johnson can be heard in his singing of Len Chandler's seemingly juvenile song, "Beans in My Ears" from his album Dangerous Songs!? in which he accuses "Mrs. Jay's little son Alby" (Alby Jay is meant to sound like LBJ) of having beans in his ears, or of not listening to the people.

Pete Seeger still performs occasionally in public, and for a number of years has appeared at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough Tennessee to tell stories, these days mostly children's stories such as Abiyoyo. He performed at MerleFest April 27-30, 2006 in Wilkesboro, NC.

On March 16, 2007, the 87-year old Pete Seeger performed with his siblings Mike and Peggy and other Seeger family members at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he had been employed as a folk song archivist 67 years earlier.

In April 2006, Bruce Springsteen released a collection of songs associated with Seeger or in Seeger's folk tradition, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Springsteen performed a series of concerts based on those sessions, to sellout crowds. (Springsteen had previously recorded one Seeger favorite, "We Shall Overcome", on a 1998 tribute to the folk singer.)


Leftist politics

Seeger is known for his ardent political beliefs and his involvement with leftist political organizations, including the Communist Party. Political opponents called him "Stalin's Songbird". His supporters called him "America's Tuning Fork" and "A Living Saint".[9] Seeger's anti-war record Songs for John Doe, released in 1941, took the Communist Party's official Moscow-dictated non-interventionist line (Hitler and Stalin having signed a non-aggression pact in 1939). At that time Seeger was also strongly anti-Franklin D. Roosevelt, owing to what he considered the President's weak support of workers' rights. After Germany's breaking of the pact and its attack on the Soviet Union, the pacifism of Songs for John Doe was no longer in keeping with Moscow's wishes and were an embarrassment to the new "patriotic" line of the Communist Party and copies were quickly removed from sale. The remaining inventory was reportedly destroyed. Only a few copies exist to this day. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Seeger and the Communist Party became strong proponents of military action against Germany; he was drafted into the Army, where he served in the Pacific. He did not serve in a combat unit, his job was to entertain the American troops with music. (Originally the Army had trained him as an airplane mechanic.) When people later asked him what he did in the war, he always answered 'I strummed my banjo'. Seeger left the Communist Party in 1950, five years before Nikita Khrushchev's Secret speech revealed Stalin's crimes and led to a mass exodus from the Party. "I realized I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization."[10] He became an anti-Stalinist but remained a Socialist.



Spanish Civil War songs

Seeger has long been interested in the music that came out of the Spanish Civil War. In 1944, he was invited by Moses Ash (later of Folkways Records) to record a collection of Spanish Civil War songs. These included "Valley of Jarama" and Peat Bog Soldiers. In 2006, he sang eight songs for the CD "Canciones de Las Brigadas Internacionales". These are:

Valley of Jarama (El Valle del Jarama) (2:47)
Cookhouse (El Hornillo) (0:50)
Young Man from Alcala (El Joven de Alcalá) (1:50)
Quartermaster's Song (La Canción del Intendente) (2:04)
Viva la Quince Brigada (2:47)
El Quinto Regimiento (2:19)
Si Me Quieres Escribir (Spanish Marching Song) (2:38)
Si Me Quieres Escribir (3:00)
Venga Jaleo (2:09)

As comedic/political songwriter Tom Lehrer sang in his 1965 "Folk Song Army" ( Reprise Records): "Remember the war against Franco? / That's the kind where each of us belongs. / Though he may have won all the battles, / We had all the good songs." [11]


Environmental activism

Seeger is involved in the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which he founded in 1966. This organization has worked since then to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and worked to clean it. As part of that effort, the sloop Clearwater was launched in 1969 and regularly sails the river with volunteer and professional crew members, primarily conducting environmental education programs for school groups. The Great Hudson River Revival (aka Clearwater Festival) is an annual two-day music festival held on the banks of the Hudson at Croton Point Park. This festival grew out of early fundraising concerts arranged by Seeger and friends to raise money to pay for Clearwater's construction.

Quotes


Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Pete Seeger"I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other."
"My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologize [in his recent book] for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader."
"I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."
"Plagiarism is the basis of all culture." Seeger quoting his father.
"Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple."
"Some may find them [songs] merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I."
"Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first" [12]

Other quotes

United States v. Seeger

Jim Musselman, longtime friend and record producer for Pete Seeger:

"He was one of the few people who invoked the First Amendment in front of the McCarthy Committee. Everyone else had said the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination, and then they were dismissed. What Pete did, and what some other very powerful people who had the guts and the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the committee and say, "I'm gonna invoke the First Amendment, the right of freedom of association...." "
"...I was actually in law school when I read the case of Seeger v. United States, and it really changed my life, because I saw the courage of what he had done and what some other people had done by invoking the First Amendment, saying, "We're all Americans. We can associate with whoever we want to, and it doesn't matter who we associate with." That's what the founding fathers set up democracy to be. So I just really feel it's an important part of history that people need to remember."[13]

Dave Dudley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia






Background information

Birth name David Darwin Pedruska
Born May 3, 1928
Origin Spencer, Wisconsin
Died December 22, 2003
Genre(s) Country Music
Occupation(s) singer
Years active 1961-2003
Label(s) Golden Wing Records, Mercury Records
Associated
acts Dick Curless, Del Reeves, Tom T. Hall

Dave Dudley (May 3, 1928 - December 22, 2003) was a country Music singer. Born David Darwin Pedriska, he is best known for his truck-driving Country song anthems of the 1960s and '70s.





Early life and rise to fame

Dave Dudley is best-known for his trucker songs including "Six Days on the Road" and "Truck Drivin' Son-of-a-Gun". His duet with Tom T. Hall called "Day Drinking" demonstrated that he was not limited to trucking songs. He is one of the best-known singers of the truck-driving era in country music and was one of the icons in this category.

Dave was born in 1928 in Spencer, Wisconsin. He had a short career as a semi-professional baseball player. After he suffered an arm injury he was no longer able to play baseball. He then decided to pursue a career in country music. He was one of the earliest artists to record for National Recording Corporation on the NRC label.

Dudley was injured once again in 1960, this time in a car accident in 1960, setting back his career in music. He appeared first on the Country charts in 1961 with the song "Maybe I Do", released by Vee Records. He later moved to Golden Wing Records. Two years later, in 1963, the label released the single "Six Days on the Road".


Height of his career

"Six Days on the Road" immediately became a hit for Dudley. The song was written by Earl Green and Peanut Montgomery. In 1963, Dudley moved on to Mercury records. By the end of 1963 he released his first single from the label called "Last Day in the Mines". Dave Dudley scored more big hits in the 1960s, including "Truck Drivin' Son-Of-a-Gun", "Trucker's Prayer" and "Anything Leaving Town Today". His signature song "Six Days on the Road" has remained a trucker's classic as well as a Country classic. At the end of the 60s, Dave was also recording more conservative songs as well, however, not really changing his image in anyway.

Dave Dudley.continued to have success into the 1970s. He continued to record for Mercury Records. He had some Country Top Tens in the 70s, including the songs "Comin' Down" and "Fly Away Again" which both made the charts in the early 70s. His iconic status in the truck-driving world continued to grow. By the late 70s, his success on the charts was beginning to fade.

Overall, in the 60s and 70s, Dave scored thirty-three Top 40 Country hits.


Decline and death

In the 1980s, Dave Dudley continued to record, but not as much as he once did. He remained popular in concert. During this time, he was elected to the Nashville Teamsters Truck Drivers Union. He received a solid gold membership card from the union. He also found out during this time, he had a big fan base in Europe and decided to try to appeal more to this market.

In total, Dudley recorded more than 70 albums. However, he did not manage to reclaim his past success, and neither his single "Where's that Truck?", recorded with DJ Charlie Douglas, nor the track "Dave Dudley, American Trucker", recorded in 2002 in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, helped revive his career. Few of his hits have made it onto CDs and albums, creating a market for his vintage vinyl recordings.

Dudley died on December 22, 2003 after suffering a heart attack at his home in Wisconsin.

James Brown
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Background information

Birth name James Joseph Brown, Jr.[1]
Also known as The Godfather of Soul, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business
Born May 3, 1933
Barnwell, South Carolina, USA[1]
Origin Augusta, Georgia, USA
Died December 25, 2006 (age 73)
Atlanta, Georgia, USA[2]
Genre(s) R&B, soul, funk
Occupation(s) Singer, songwriter, dancer, bandleader, record producer
Instrument(s) Vocal percussion, guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and other percussion instruments
Years active 1953 - 2006
Label(s) Federal, King, Try Me, Smash, People, Polydor, Scotti Bros.
Associated
acts The Famous Flames, The J.B.'s, The Soul Generals
Website www.godfatherofsoul.com

James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 - December 25, 2006), commonly referred to as "The Godfather of Soul" and "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," was an American entertainer recognized as one of the most influential figures in 20th century popular music. He was renowned for his shouting vocals, feverish dancing and unique rhythmic style.

As a prolific singer, songwriter, bandleader, and record producer, Brown was a pivotal force in the evolution of gospel and rhythm and blues into soul and funk. He left his mark on numerous other musical genres, including rock, jazz, disco, dance and electronic music, reggae and hip hop.[3] Brown's music also left its mark on the rhythms of African popular music, such as afrobeat, jùjú and mbalax,[4] and provided a template for go-go music.[5]

Brown began his professional music career in 1953 and skyrocketed to fame during the late 1950s and early 1960s on the strength of his thrilling live performances and string of smash hits. In spite of various personal problems and setbacks, he continued to score hits in every decade through to the 1980s. In addition to his acclaim in music, Brown was a presence in American political affairs during the 1960s and 1970s, noted especially for his activism on behalf of African Americans and the poor. During the early 1980s, Brown's music helped to shape the rhythms of early hip hop music, with many groups looping or sampling his funk grooves and turning them into what became hip hop "classics" and the foundations of this music genre.

James Brown was recognized by a plethora of (mostly self-bestowed) titles, including Soul Brother Number One, Mr. Dynamite, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Minister of The New New Super Heavy Funk, Mr. Please Please Please, The Boss, and the best-known, the Godfather of Soul.




Early life

James Brown was born as the only child of Joseph ("Joe") and Susie Brown (née Susie Behlings) in the small town of Barnwell, South Carolina in the Jim Crow South during the Depression era. Although Brown was to be named after his father, his name was reversed mistakenly on the birth certificate. Because of this mix-up during the birth registration, Brown's name instead became James Joseph Brown, Jr.[1] As a young child, Brown was known to his family as Junior, and he was also known as Little Junior when he later lived with his aunt and cousin, since his cousin's nickname was also Junior.[1]

Brown and his family lived in extreme poverty.[6] When Brown was 4 years old, his parents separated after his mother decided to leave his father for another man.[7] After his mother left the family, Brown continued to live with his father and a host of live-in girlfriends until he was 6 years old. After that time, Brown and his father moved to Augusta, Georgia, and his father sent him to live with an aunt who ran a house of prostitution.[8] Even though Brown lived with relatives, he spent long stretches of time on his own, hanging out on the streets and hustling to get by.[6] Brown managed to stay in school until he dropped out in the 7th grade.[9]

During his childhood, Brown earned money by picking cotton, racking pool balls, shining shoes, sweeping out stores, washing cars and dishes and singing in talent contests.[6] Brown also performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon during the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge near his aunt's house.[7][8] Between earning money from these adventures, Brown taught himself to play a harmonica given to him by his father,[7] and he learned to play some guitar from Tampa Red (who was dating one of the "girls" from his aunt's house), in addition to learning to play piano and drums from others.[7] Brown was inspired to become an entertainer after watching Louis Jordan, a popular jazz and R&B performer during the 1940s, and His Tympany Five in a short film performing "Caldonia."[10]

As an adult, Brown legally changed his name to remove the "Jr." designation.[11] In his spare time, Brown variously spent time practicing his skills in Augusta-area halls and committing petty crimes. When Brown was 16 years old, he was convicted of burglarizing cars and armed robbery, and he was sentenced by the court in 1948 to serve 8-to-18 years in a juvenile detention center upstate in Toccoa.[12] Brown, who was nicknamed "Music Box" while he was in prison, formed a gospel quartet that performed for the local prison crowd and other prisons around that area.[6] Brown and his quartet made their own instruments for prisons shows, including a paper-and-comb "harmonica," a "drum set" made of lard tins and a "bass" made of a broomstick and washtub.[7]

During one of those performances, Bobby Byrd, who watched the show from outside of the prison gates, admired Brown's adept ability to sing and perform.[7] Brown became acquainted with Byrd when the prison baseball team played the local team, with Brown playing on the prison team as pitcher and Byrd playing on the local team as shortstop.[8] Byrd promised to help Brown get out of prison by offering to provide him with a place to live.[8] Byrd's family helped Brown secure an early release after serving about three years of his sentence, under the condition that he would try to get a job[6] and not return to Augusta or Richmond County. After brief stints as a semi-professional boxer[13] and a pitcher in semi-professional baseball (a career move ended by a leg injury), Brown turned his energy toward music.[14]


Music career

James Brown's career spanned over five decades, and his sound and beat profoundly influenced the development of many different musical genres.[15] Brown's music and vocal style changed over the course of his career, evolving from a style tinged with blues and gospel to an uptempo "Africanized" musical style.[12] Brown performed in concerts, first making his rounds across the "chitlin' circuit," and then across the country and later around the world, along with appearing in shows on television and in movies. Although he contributed much to the music world through his hitmaking, Brown held the record as the artist who charted the most singles on the Billboard Hot 100 without ever hitting number one on that chart.[6][16] fytlreyrehfyufcyugfcilhydi ytubbtit8ihu9


Beginnings of The Famous Flames

In 1955, Brown and Bobby Byrd's sister Sarah performed in a group called "The Gospel Starlighters." Eventually, Brown joined Bobby Byrd's vocal group, the Avons, and Byrd turned the group's sound towards secular rhythm and blues. After the group's name was changed to The Flames, Brown and Byrd's group toured the Southern "chitlin' circuit," and the group eventually signed a deal with the Cincinnati, Ohio-based King Records, a subsidiary of Federal was headed by Syd Nathan.

The group's first recording was the single "Please, Please, Please" (1956). The single was a #5 R&B hit, selling over a million copies. Nine subsequent singles released by The Flames failed to live up to the success of their debut, and group was in danger of being dropped by King Records until the group returned to the charts in 1958 with the #1 R&B hit "Try Me". This hit record was the best-selling R&B single of the year, becoming the first of 17 chart-topping R&B singles by Brown over the next two decades.[17] By the time "Try Me" was released on record, the group's billing was changed to James Brown and The Famous Flames.


Brown's early recordings were fairly straightforward gospel-inspired R&B compositions, heavily influenced by the work of contemporary musicians such as Ray Charles and Little Richard. Richard's relations with Brown were particularly significant in Brown's development as a musician and showman. Brown once called Richard his idol, and credited Richard's saxophone-studded mid-1950s road band, The Upsetters, with being the first group to put the funk in the rock and roll beat.[18] When Richard bolted from pop music in 1957 to become a preacher, Brown filled out Richard's remaining tour dates in his place. Several former members of Little Richard's backup band joined Brown's group as a consequence of Richard's exit from the pop music scene.

Brown had recurring conflicts with King Records president Syd Nathan over repertoire and other matters. One release that Brown and his backup band did not record for King was the single "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes." Brown wanted to record the song with his band, but Nathan refused to let him. Brown enlisted the help of Henry Stone, a record producer and owner of the Dade Records label who had previously assisted with Brown's recording of "Please, Please, Please."[19][20] Stone arranged for Brown to record the song, and Brown recorded his vocals on the record, shouting "Mashed Potatoes" throughout the song. Although Brown recorded vocals for the song, Stone told him that he could not release it in that form because Brown's voice was too recognizable. Stone also told Brown that, for contractual reasons, both of them would get in trouble with Nathan over the record.[19] "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" was released in 1960 as an instrumental by Dade Records under the pseudonym Nat Kendrick & The Swans (Kendrick was Brown's drummer at the time), with only faint hints of Brown's voice audible under the music.[19][21] The single became a hit, reaching #8 on the R&B Top Ten and #84 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.[19] This episode strengthened Brown's hand in later negotiations with his label.


Early and mid-1960s

Brown scored on the charts in the early 1960s with recordings such as his 1962 cover of "Night Train." While Brown's early singles were major hits across the southern United States and then regular R&B Top Ten hits, he and the Famous Flames were not successful nationally until his self-financed live show was captured on the 1963 LP Live at the Apollo. Brown financed the recording of the album himself, and it was released on King Records over the objections of label owner Syd Nathan, who saw no commercial potential in a live album containing no new songs. Defying Nathan's expectations, the album stayed on the pop charts for fourteen months, peaking at #2.[22] In addition, Brown recorded a hit version of the ballad "Prisoner of Love" in 1963 and founded (under King auspices) the fledgling Try Me Records, Brown's first attempt at running a record label.

Brown followed the success of Live at the Apollo with a string of singles that, along with the work of Allen Toussaint in New Orleans, essentially defined the foundation of funk music. Driven by the success of Live at the Apollo and the failure of King Records to expand record promotion beyond the "black" market, James Brown and Bobby Byrd formed a production company, Fair Deal, to promote sales of Brown's record releases to white audiences. In this arrangement, Smash Records, a subsidiary of Mercury Records, was used as a vehicle to distribute Brown's music. Smash released his 1964 hit "Out of Sight," which reached #24 on the pop charts and pointed the way to his later funk hits.[23] Its release also triggered a legal battle between Smash and King that resulted in a one year ban on the release of Brown's vocal recordings.[24]

During the mid-1960s, two of Brown's signature tunes "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)," both from 1965, were his first Top 10 pop hits, as well as major #1 R&B hits, with each remaining the top-selling singles in black venues for over a month. In 1966, Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" won the Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording (an award last given in 1968). Brown's national profile was boosted further that year by appearances in the movie Ski Party and the concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, in which he upstaged The Rolling Stones. In his concert repertoire and on record, Brown mingled his innovative rhythmic essays with Broadway show tunes and ballads, such as his hit "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" (1965).



The late 1960s

As the 1960s came to a close, Brown continued to refine the new funk idiom. Brown's 1967 #1 R&B hit, "Cold Sweat," sometimes cited as the first true funk song, was the first of his recordings to contain a drum break and the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord change.[25][26] The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" and "Licking Stick-Licking Stick" (both recorded in 1968) and "Funky Drummer" (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown's mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs. Changes in Brown's style that started with "Cold Sweat" also established the musical foundation for Brown's later hits, such as "I Got The Feelin'" (1968) and "Mother Popcorn" (1969). By this time Brown's vocals frequently took the form of a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music in the coming decades.

Brown's recordings influenced musicians across the industry, most notably Sly and his Family Stone, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Booker T. & the M.G.'s and soul shouters like Edwin Starr, Temptations David Ruffin, and Dennis Edwards. A then-prepubescent Michael Jackson took Brown's shouts and dancing into the pop mainstream as the lead singer of Motown's The Jackson 5. Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the world's most sampled recording artist, with "Funky Drummer" itself becoming the most sampled individual piece of music.[27]

Brown's band in this period employed musicians and arrangers who had come up through the jazz tradition. He was noted for his ability as a bandleader and songwriter to blend the simplicity and drive of R&B with the rhythmic complexity and precision of jazz. Trumpeter Lewis Hamlin and saxophonist/keyboardist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (the successor to previous bandleader Nat Jones) led the band. Guitarist Jimmy Nolen provided percussive, deceptively simple riffs for each song, and Maceo Parker's prominent saxophone solos provided a focal point for many performances. Other members of Brown's band included stalwart singer and sideman Bobby Byrd, drummers John "Jabo" Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker (Maceo's brother), saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney, trombonist Fred Wesley, guitarist Alphonso "Country" Kellum and bassist Bernard Odum.


During this period, Brown's music empire also expanded along with his influence on the music scene. As Brown's music empire grew, his desire for financial and artistic independence grew as well. Brown bought radio stations during the late 1960s, including radio station WRDW in Augusta, Georgia where he shined shoes as a boy. Brown also branched out to make several recordings with musicians outside his own band. He recorded Gettin' Down To It (1969) and Soul on Top (1970), two albums consisting mostly of romantic ballads and jazz standards, with the Dee Felice Trio and the Louie Bellson Orchestra respectively. He recorded a number of tracks with the Dapps, a white Cincinnati bar band, including the hit "I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)." He also released three albums of Christmas music with his own band.

Emergence of The J.B.'s during the 1970s

By 1970, most members of James Brown's classic 1960s band quit his act for other opportunities. Brown and Bobby Byrd employed a new band that included future funk greats, such as bassist Bootsy Collins, Collins' guitarist brother Phelps "Catfish" Collins and trombonist and musical director Fred Wesley. This new backing band was dubbed "The J.B.'s," and the band made its debut on Brown's 1970 single "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine." Although The J.B.'s went through several lineup changes, with the first change occurring in 1971, the band remained Brown's most familiar backing band.

In 1971, Brown began recording for Polydor Records. Many of his sidemen and supporting players, such as Fred Wesley & The J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Myra Barnes and Hank Ballard, released records on the People label, an imprint founded by Brown that was purchased by Polydor as part of Brown's new contract. The recordings on the People label, almost all of which were produced by Brown himself, exemplified his "house style". Songs such as Bobby Byrd's "I Know You Got Soul" and Lyn Collins' "Think (About It)" are considered as much a part of Brown's recorded legacy as the recordings released under his own name.

In 1973 Brown provided the score for the blaxploitation film Black Caesar. In 1974 he toured Africa and performed in Zaire as part of the buildup to the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Admirers of Brown's music, including Miles Davis and other jazz musicians, began to cite Brown as a major influence on their own styles. However, Brown, like others who were influenced by his music, also "borrowed" from other musicians. His 1976 single "Hot" (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" (R&B #31) borrowed the main riff from David Bowie's "Fame," not the other way around as was often believed. The riff was provided to "Fame" co-writers John Lennon and Bowie by guitarist Carlos Alomar.[28]


The 1973 LP The PaybackBrown's Polydor recordings during the 1970s exemplified his innovations from the previous twenty years. Compositions such as "The Payback" (1973), "Papa Don't Take No Mess" and "Stoned to the Bone" (1974), "Funky President (People It's Bad)" (1975) and "Get Up Offa That Thing" (1976) were among his best recordings during this time.

Brown's music during the late 1970s and 1980s

By the mid-1970s Brown's star-status was on the wane, and key musicians in his band such as Fred Wesley left for other opportunities. The onslaught of the disco movement caught Brown off guard as it superseded his raw style of funk music on the dance floor. His 1976 albums Get Up Offa That Thing and Bodyheat were Brown's first flirtations with disco rhythms and production techniques. While the albums Mutha's Nature (1977) and Jam 1980s (1978) did not generate chart hits, Brown's 1979 LP The Original Disco Man was a notable late addition to his oeuvre. This album featured the song "It's Too Funky in Here," which was his last top R&B hit of the decade. Like the rest of songs on the The Original Disco Man LP, "It's Too Funky in Here" was not produced by Brown himself, but produced instead by Brad Shapiro.

Brown's contract with Polydor expired in 1981, and his recording and touring schedule was somewhat reduced. Despite these events, Brown experienced something of a resurgence during the 1980s, effectively crossing over to a broader, more mainstream audience. He appeared in the feature films The Blues Brothers, Doctor Detroit and Rocky IV, as well as guest starring in the Miami Vice episode "Missing Hours" (1988). He also recorded Gravity, a modestly popular crossover album released on his new host label Scotti Bros., and the hit 1985 single "Living in America," which was featured prominently in the Rocky IV film and soundtrack. In 1987, Brown won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for "Living in America." Acknowledging his influence on modern hip-hop and R&B music, Brown collaborated with hip-hop artist Afrika Bambaataa on the single "Unity".

In 1988, Brown worked with the production team Full Force on the hip-hop influenced album I'm Real, which spawned a #5 R&B hit single, "Static." Meanwhile, the drum break from the second version of the original 1969 hit "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" (the recording included on the compilation album In the Jungle Groove) became so popular at hip hop dance parties (especially for breakdance) during the late 1970s and early 1980s that hip hop founding father Kurtis Blow called the song "the national anthem of hip hop."[29]


Music during later years

After a stint in prison during the late 1980s, Brown released the album Love Overdue, with the new single "Move On." Brown also released the 1991 four-CD box set Star Time, which included music spanning his four-decade career at that time. Nearly all of his earlier LPs were re-released on CD, often with additional tracks and commentary by experts on Brown's music. In 1993, James Brown released the album Universal James, which spawned the singles "Can't Get Any Harder," "How Long" and "Georgia-Lina." In 1995, the live album Live At The Apollo 1995 was released, featuring the new studio track "Respect Me," which was released as a single that same year. Brown followed up this single with the megamix "Hooked on Brown" that was released as a single in 1996. Brown's later LP releases during this time included the 1998 studio album I'm Back that featured the single "Funk On Ah Roll," and the 2002 album The Next Step that featured the single "Killing is Out, School is In." In 2003, Brown participated in the PBS American Masters television documentary James Brown: Soul Survivor, which was directed by Jeremy Marre.

Although Brown had various run-ins with the law, he continued to perform and record regularly, and he also made appearances in television shows and films, such as Blues Brothers 2000, and sporting events, such as his 2000 appearance at the World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view event SuperBrawl X. In Brown's appearance at the SuperBrawl X event, he danced alongside wrestler Ernest "The Cat" Miller, whose character was based on Brown.[30] Brown was featured in Tony Scott's 2001 short film, Beat the Devil, alongside Clive Owen, Gary Oldman, Danny Trejo and Marilyn Manson.[31] Brown also made a cameo appearance in the 2002 Jackie Chan film The Tuxedo, in which Chan was required to finish Brown's act after Brown was accidentally knocked out by Chan.[32]

On the concert scene, Brown appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 - The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag." He also performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, a week earlier on the United Kingdom chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Before his death, Brown was scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song "Vengeance" for her new album Venus, scheduled for release in early 2007. In 2006, Brown continued his "Seven Decades Of Funk World Tour," his last concert tour where he performed all over the world. His last shows were greeted with positive reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006 was performed for a record crowd of 80,000 people.


The James Brown Revue

For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist.[33] The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during ballads.[34] Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters.[35][36]


Concert introduction

Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963 Live at the Apollo album, is a representative example:

So now ladies and gentlemen it is star time, are you ready for star time? Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, national and international[ly] known as the hardest working man in show business, the man who sang "I'll Go Crazy" ... "Try Me" ... "You've Got the Power" ... "Think" ... "If You Want Me" ... "I Don't Mind" ... "Bewildered" ... million dollar seller, "Lost Someone" ... the very latest release, "Night Train" ... let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" ... Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames![37]

Brown's most famous MC was Danny Ray, who appeared on stage with him for over 30 years.


James Brown in concert

James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and length. His own stated goal was to "give people more than what they came for ?- make them tired, 'cause that's what they came for.'"[38] Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. In addition, his horn players and backup singers typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo completed the visual impression.

A James Brown concert typically included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show. Although Brown released many live albums, the deluxe edition of the 1968 Live at the Apollo, Vol. II double album, released by Polydor in 2001, was one of only a few audio recordings that captured a performance of the James Brown Revue from beginning to end.



Cape routine

One recurring and trademark feature of Brown's stage shows involved the MC draping a cape over Brown's shoulders as the MC tried to escort Brown off the stage after he worked himself to exhaustion during his performance. However, Brown would shake off the cape and stagger back to the microphone to perform an encore, often singing the hit "Please, Please, Please." This act was often repeated several times in succession. Brown's cape routine was inspired by a similar routine used by the professional wrestler Gorgeous George.[37][39]


Brown as bandleader

Brown was a taskmaster when it came to band practices and performances. He demanded extreme discipline, perfection and precision from his musicians and dancers ?- right down to when performers in his Revue showed up for rehearsals all the way to whether those members wore the right "uniform" or "costume" for concert performances.[40] During an interview conducted by Terri Gross during the NPR segment "Fresh Air" with Maceo Parker, a former saxophonist in Brown's band for most of the 1960s and part of the 1970s and 1980s, Parker offered his experience with the discipline that Brown demanded of the band:

You gotta be on time. You gotta have your uniform. Your stuff's got to be intact. You gotta have the bow tie. You got to have it. You can't come up without the bow tie. You cannot come up without a cummerbund ... [The] patent leather shoes we were wearing at the time gotta be greased. You just gotta have this stuff. This is what [Brown expects] ... [Brown] bought the costumes. He bought the shoes. And if for some reason [the band member decided] to leave the group, [Brown told the person to] please leave my uniforms ....[41]


Brown also had a practice of directing, correcting and assessing fines on members of his band who broke his rules, such as wearing unshined shoes, dancing out of sync or showing up late on stage.[14] During some of his concert performances, Brown danced in front of his band with his back to the audience as he slid across the floor, flashing hand signals and splaying his pulsating fingers to the beat of the music. Although audiences thought Brown's dance routine was part of his act, this practice was actually his way of pointing to the offending member of his troupe who played or sang the wrong note or committed some other infraction. Brown used his splayed fingers and hand signals to alert the offending person of the fine that person must pay to him for breaking his rules.[42]


Musicianship

Technical ability in music

Brown played several instruments proficiently, including drums, guitar, organ and piano. Despite his prowess as a performer, Brown, like many popular musicians, never learned to read music.[43] He developed his repertoire in close association with the members of his band, who were predominantly jazz-trained musicians with a working knowledge of music theory. As his former bandleader Fred Wesley recalled,

t would have been impossible for James Brown to put his show together without the assistance of someone like Pee Wee [Ellis], who understood chord changes, time signatures, scales, notes, and basic music theory. Simple things like knowing the key would be a big problem for James ... The whole James Brown Show depended on having someone with musical knowledge remember the show, the individual parts, and the individual songs, then relay these verbally or in print to the other musicians. Brown could not do it himself. He spoke in grunts, groans, and la-di-das, and he needed musicians to translate that language into music and actual songs in order to create an actual show.[44]

Despite these technical limitations, Brown's unique musical vision was the driving force behind the music that he created with his bands.


Evolution of musical style

When James Brown began his professional music career during the mid-1950s, his repertoire consisted of ballads with a gospel flavor, such as "Please, Please, Please" (1956), "Try Me" (1959) and "Bewildered" (1961), that were delivered in "a raw supplicating manner" characteristic of soul music.[12] Brown's music changed during the mid-1960s to feature compositions, such as "Night Train" (1962), "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965) and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" (1965), "based on a modification of the twelve-bar blues form with gospel vocal styles and increasingly tight and moderately complex horn arrangements used in a responsorial fashion."[12]


Brown's innovations pushed the funk music style further to the forefront with releases such as "Cold Sweat" (1967), "Mother Popcorn" (1969) and "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" (1970), discarding even the twelve bar blues featured in his earlier music. Instead, Brown's music was overlaid with "catchy, anthemic vocals" based on "extensive vamps" in which he also used his voice as "a percussive instrument with frequent rhythmic grunts and with rhythm-section patterns ... [resembling] West African polyrhythms."[12] Throughout his career, Brown's frenzied vocals, frequently punctuated with screams and grunts, channeled the "ecstatic ambiance of the black church" in a secular context.[12] Although "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "Cold Sweat" were widely credited as the prototype songs that launched the funk genre, "Out of Sight" was the breakthrough hit that signaled the shift in Brown's sound to establish funk as a distinct genre.[46]

In a 1990 interview, Brown offered his reason for switching the rhythm of his music: "I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat ... Simple as that, really."[4] According to Maceo Parker, Brown's former saxophonist, playing on the downbeat was at first hard for him and took some getting used to. Reflecting back to his early days with Brown's band, Parker reported that he had difficulty playing "on the one" during solo performances, since he was used to hearing and playing with the accent on the second beat.[41]


Personal life outside of performances

At the end of his life, James Brown lived in a riverfront home in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Brown was once diagnosed with prostate cancer, which was successfully treated with surgery.[47] Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the "hardest working man in show business" by keeping up with his grueling performance schedule. However, James Brown led as colorful a life on stage with his performances, as he had off stage with his troubles with the law and his last marriage in particular.


Marriages and children

Brown was married four times ?- Velma Warren (1953-1969, divorced), Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins (1970-1981, divorced), Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (1984-1996, wife's death) and Tomi Rae Hynie (2001-2006, his death). From these and other relationships, James Brown had five sons ?- Teddy Brown, Terry Brown, Larry Brown, Daryl Brown (a member of Brown's backing band) and James Joseph Brown II, in addition to three daughters ?- Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown.[48][49] Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.[48][49] Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash in 1973.[50]

Brown-Hynie marriage controversy

Much controversy surrounds Hynie's December 2001 "marriage" to James Brown, which was officiated by Rev. Larry Fryer.[51] Brown's longtime attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, reported that the marriage between Brown and Hynie was not valid because Hynie was married at that time to Javed Ahmed, a Pakistani whom Hynie claimed married her for a "green card" in an immigration fraud. Although Hynie stated that her marriage to Javed Ahmed was later annulled, the annulment for Hynie's 1997 marriage to Ahmed did not occur until April 2004.[51][52] In an interview on CNN with Larry King, Hynie produced a 2001 marriage certificate as proof of her marriage to James Brown, but she did not provide King with court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to him or to Ahmed.[53] According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie concealed her prior marriage from him, and that Brown moved to file for annulment from Hynie.[54] Dallas added that, although Hynie's marriage to Javed Ahmed was annulled after she married James Brown, the Brown-Hynie marriage was not valid under South Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the annulment.[53][55] In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in Variety Magazine featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways.[56][57]


Paternity of James Brown II

In a separate CNN interview, Debra Opri, another Brown family attorney, revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown II ?- not for Brown's sake, but for the sake of the other family members.[58] In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wants appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown II, in the paternity proceedings.[59]


Brushes with the police

Brown's personal life was marred by several brushes with the law. At the age of 16, was arrested for theft and served 3 years in prison. In 1988, Brown was arrested following a high-speed car chase on Interstate 20 along the Georgia-South Carolina state border. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer, along with various drug-related and driving offenses. Although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was eventually released in 1991 after serving only three years of his sentence. On July 3, 2000, the police were summoned to Brown's residence after he was accused of charging an electric company repairman with a steak knife when the repairman visited Brown's house to investigate a complaint about having no lights at the residence.[60] In 2003, Brown was pardoned for past crimes that he was convicted of committing in South Carolina.[61]

During the 1990s and 2000s, Brown was repeatedly arrested for drug possession and domestic violence. Adrienne Rodriguez, his third wife, had him arrested four times between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s on charges of assault. In January 2004, Brown was arrested in South Carolina on a domestic violence charge after Tomi Rae Hynie accused him of pushing her to the floor during an argument at their home, where she suffered scratches and bruises to her right arm and hip. Later that year in June 2004, Brown pleaded no contest to the domestic violence incident, but served no jail time. Instead, Brown was required to forfeit a US$1,087 bond as punishment.[62]


Brown's death and the aftermath

Death

On December 23, 2006, Brown, in ill health, showed up at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia several hours later than his appointment for dental implant work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that Brown looked "very bad ... weak and dazed." Instead of performing the dental work, the dentist advised Brown to see a doctor right away about his medical condition.[8]

Brown checked in at the Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia on December 24, 2006 for a medical evaluation of his condition, and he was admitted to the hospital for observation and treatment.[63] According to Charles Bobbit, Brown's longtime personal manager and friend, Brown had been sick and suffering with a noisy cough since he returned from a November trip to Europe.[8] Bobbit also added that it was characteristic of Brown to never tell or complain to anyone that he was sick, and that Brown frequently performed during illness.[8] Although Brown had to cancel upcoming shows in Waterbury, Connecticut and Englewood, New Jersey, Brown was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the hospital in time to perform the New Year's Eve shows. For the New Year's celebrations, Brown was scheduled to perform at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and at the B.B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson Cooper New Year's Eve special.[63] Instead, Brown remained hospitalized, and his medical condition worsened throughout that day.

On December 25, 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 a.m. (06:45 UTC) from congestive heart failure resulting from complications of pneumonia, with his agent Frank Copsidas and his friend Charles Bobbit at his bedside.[64] According to Bobbit, Brown uttered "I'm going away tonight," and then Brown took three, long quiet breaths and closed his eyes.[64]



Memorial services

After Brown's death on Christmas day, Brown's relatives and friends, a host of celebrities and thousands of fans attended public memorial services at the Apollo Theater in New York on December 28, 2006 and at the James Brown Arena on December 30, 2006 in Augusta, Georgia. A separate, private memorial service was also held in North Augusta, South Carolina on December 29, 2006, which was attended by Brown's family and close friends. Celebrities who attended Brown's public and/or private memorial services included Joe Frazier, Dick Gregory, MC Hammer, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson, Don King and Paul McCartney, among others.[65][66][67][68] All of the public and private memorial services were officiated by Rev. Al Sharpton.[69][70]

Brown's public and private memorial ceremonies were elaborate, complete with costume changes for Brown and videos featuring him in concert performances. Brown's body, which was placed in a gold casket, was driven through the streets of New York to the Apollo Theater in a white, glass-encased horse-drawn carriage.[71][72] In Augusta, Georgia, the procession for Brown's public memorial visited Brown's statue as the procession made its way to the James Brown Arena. During the public memorial at the James Brown Arena, nachos and pretzels were served to mourners, as a video showed Brown's last performance in Augusta, Georgia and the Ray Charles version of "Georgia On My Mind" played soulfully in the background.[73][74][75] Brown's last backup band, The Soul Generals, also played the music of Brown's hits during the memorial service at the James Brown Arena. The group was joined by Bootsy Collins on bass, with MC Hammer performing a dance in James Brown style.[76]



Last will and testament and the irrevocable trust

James Brown signed his last will and testament on August 1, 2000 before Strom Thurmond, Jr., an attorney for Brown's estate.[77] The irrevocable trust, separate and apart from Brown's will, was created on Brown's behalf in 2000 by his attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, who was named as one of three personal representatives of Brown's estate. Brown's will covered the disposition of his personal assets, such as clothing, cars and jewelry, while Brown's irrevocable trust covered the disposition of music rights, business assets of James Brown Enterprises and Brown's Beech Island estate in South Carolina.[78]

During the reading of Brown's will on January 11, 2007, Thurmond revealed that Brown's six adult living children (Terry Brown, Larry Brown, Daryl Brown, Yamma Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown) were named in the will. Hynie and James II were not mentioned in the will as parties who could inherit Brown's property.[77][79] Brown's will was signed ten months before James II was born and more than a year before Brown's "marriage" to Tomi Rae Hynie. Like Brown's will, his irrevocable trust also did not mention Hynie and James II as recipients of Brown's property.[80]

On January 24, 2007, Brown's children filed a lawsuit against the personal representatives of Brown's estate. In their petition, Brown's children asked the court to remove the personal representatives of Brown's estate (including Brown's attorney and estate trustee, Dallas) and appoint a special administrator because of perceived impropriety and alleged mismanagement of Brown's assets.[81][82] To challenge the validity of the will and irrevocable trust, Hynie also filed a lawsuit against Brown's estate on January 31, 2007. In her lawsuit against Brown's estate, Hynie asked the court to recognize her as Brown's widow, and she also asked the court to appoint a special administrator for the estate.[83]


Burial at temporary site

After the public and private memorial services in late December 2006, James Brown's body remained in his casket for a time in a temperature-controlled room at his estate. Brown's casket was later moved to an undisclosed location, while his children and Tomi Rae Hynie became embroiled in disputes about Brown's final resting place and matters related to probating his will.[84] After more than ten weeks since Brown's death and the public and private memorial services, Brown's children and Hynie decided on a temporary burial site for James Brown. Brown was buried on March 10, 2007 in a crypt at the home of Deanna Brown Thomas, one of Brown's daughters who also held a private ceremony for the temporary burial.[85] The private ceremony for the temporary burial, officiated by Al Sharpton, was attended by Brown's family and a host of friends. According to Brown's family, Brown's body will remain buried at the temporary site while a public mausoleum is built for him and a decision has been made for Brown's final resting place.[85][86] To turn Brown's estate into a visitor attraction, Brown's family plans to consult with the family of Elvis Presley for guidance about converting the estate into an attraction similar to Graceland.[85][87]

Albert "Buddy" Dallas, Brown's long time attorney and one of the trustees for Brown's estate, did not attend the private service for the temporary burial. Dallas was disappointed with the temporary burial arrangement, and he responded to this arrangement by saying that "Mr. Brown's not deserving of anyone's backyard." According to Dallas, the trustees for Brown's estate "had made arrangements for Brown to be laid to rest at no cost at a 'very prominent memorial garden in Augusta.'"[88]


Honors, awards and dedications

At one city, fans of James Brown decided to reach out to honor the entertainer. During spring 1993, the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado conducted a poll of its residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River on Shield Drive. The winning name with 7,717 votes was "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge." The bridge was officially dedicated in September 1993, and James Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the event.[89] Although a petition was started by a local group of ranchers to return the name of the bridge to "Stockbridge" for historical reasons, the ranchers backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the popularity of the James Brown name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado on July 4, 2002 for an outdoor music festival, performing with other bands such as the String Cheese Incident.[90]

During his long career, James Brown received several prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983, Brown was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. In addition, Brown was named as one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards.[91] A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997 to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[91]

On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee for the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees who performed at the ceremony.[92] In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003.[91] In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked James Brown as #7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[93]

James Brown was also honored in his hometown Augusta, Georgia for his philanthropy and civic activities. On November 20, 1993, Mayor Charles DeVaney of the city of Augusta, Georgia held a ceremony to dedicate a section of 9th Street between Broad and Twiggs Streets, renamed "James Brown Boulevard," in the entertainer's honor.[91] On May 6, 2005, as a 72nd birthday present for Brown, the City of Augusta unveiled a life-sized bronze statue of the singer on Broad Street.[91] The statue was to have been dedicated a year earlier, but the ceremony was put on hold because of a domestic abuse charge that Brown faced at the time.[94] On August 22, 2006, the Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum Authority voted to rename the city's civic center the James Brown Arena, and James Brown attended a ceremony for the unveiling of the namesake center on October 15, 2006.[91]

On December 30, 2006 during the public memorial service at the James Brown Arena, Dr. Shirley A.R. Lewis, president of Paine College, a historically black college in Augusta, GA, bestowed posthumously upon Brown an honorary doctorate in recognition and honor of his many contributions to the school in times of its need. Brown was scheduled originally to receive the honorary doctorate from Paine College during its May 2007 commencement.[95][96]

During the 49th Annual Grammy Awards presentation held on February 11, 2007, James Brown's famous cape was draped over a microphone at the end of a montage in honor of notable persons in the music industry, including Brown, who died during the previous year. Earlier that evening, Christina Aguilera delivered an impassioned performance of one of Brown's hits, "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," while Chris Brown performed a dance routine in honor of James Brown.[97]

Popular culture

Brown's inspiration was credited frequently in the liner notes of hip hop albums during the late 1980s. His name was also mentioned in several hit rock and R&B songs, including the 1967 release "Sweet Soul Music" by Arthur Conley, the 1982 release "Genius of Love" by the Tom Tom Club, and the 1991 release "Gett Off" by Prince.
One of Eddie Murphy's well-known characters during his tenure on Saturday Night Live was his good natured caricature of Brown during the "James Brown Hot Tub Party" sketch. In this sketch, Murphy as Brown wore a bathrobe in typical James Brown fashion and danced in front of a backing band, singing about his attempt to get into a scalding hot tub of water. Murphy also referred to Brown in his standup comedy film, Delirious, mocking Brown's energy and style of conversing with the band during a song. However, Brown got revenge by including the lyrics "Eddie Murphy, eat your heart out!" in the song "Living in America" - ostensibly in retaliation to Murphy's jokes.
Ironically, Eddie Murphy later played the role of "James 'Thunder' Early" in the 2006 film Dreamgirls, which was adapted from the Broadway musical of the same name. The James "Thunder" Early character was inspired by the personalities of various R&B and soul musicians, particularly the magnetic persona of James Brown during concert performances. For his performance in Dreamgirls, Eddie Murphy won both a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actor Guild Award, as well as a nomination for an Academy Award, as supporting actor in this role.
The 2003 Japanese comedy Get Up! (also known as Geroppa!) featured a subplot that involved a James Brown impersonator (played by Willie Raynor), who was kidnapped accidentally by a fan-obsessed gangster. The James Brown-obsessed gangster, who thought he had kidnapped Brown himself, wanted a private performance from "James Brown" on the day before the gangster was to start a 5-year prison term.
In the 1993 movie Mrs. Doubtfire, Daniel Hillard, played by Robin Williams, joked around in a movie studio with toy dinosaurs, not realizing that he was watched by the studio executive who was impressed with his humor and ingenuity. During one scene, Hillard joked with a brontosaurus character by saying "Let's welcome Mr. James Browntasaurus," and he continued on to sing a parody of "I Got You (I Feel Good)" called "I Eat Wood." Because of this scene, Hillard was offered a position, and the studio executive arranged a meeting with him to discuss the parody.
"James Brown Jr.," portrayed by Aries Spears, was featured as a recurring character on MADtv. The portrayal was an exaggerated parody of Brown's energetic performing style.
"Weird Al" Yankovic parodied Brown's "Living in America" with his song, "Living With a Hernia." The accompanying video featured Yankovic with dark skin and a costume identical to the one worn by Brown in his Rocky IV appearance.
The Simpsons episode DABF17 (the 13th season finale) featured the James Brown-inspired title, "Papa's Got a Brand New Badge."
In 1991, the Techno group L.A. Style released the highly irreverent and controversial single "James Brown Is Dead," which was inspired by an erroneous news report of James Brown's death. Two other songs were quickly released in response to this erroneous death notice: "James Brown Is Still Alive" by Holy Noise and "Who the **** Is James Brown?" by Traumatic Stress.

Frankie Valli
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frankie Valli (born May 3, 1934[1] in the First Ward of Newark, New Jersey as Francis Stephen Castelluccio) is best known as the lead singer of The Four Seasons, a music act of the 1960s, which continued from then to the 1970s disco scene to the present day.

Valli scored over 25 Top-40 hits with The Four Seasons, a handful of Top-40 hits dubbed as a solo act in the late 1960s, one dubbed as "The Wonder Who?" in 1965 and again in the mid to late 1970s. His best known "solo" single is Can't Take My Eyes Off You which reached number 2 on the billboard hot 100 in 1967' 'Are you ready now' became a surprise hit in the UK as part of the Northern Soul scene and hit no11 on the UK pop charts in 1971. Valli scored big again in 1975 when 'My Eyes Adored you' hit no 1 on billboards hot 100. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with The Four Seasons in 1990.

Valli started his singing career in 1952. He cut his first single in 1953 as "Frankie Valley," a name he adopted from Jean Valley, his favorite female singer. In the mid-1950s he split up with the Travellers and joined The Variety Trio, which consisted of Tommy DeVito, twin brother Nick, and Hank Majewski. They redubbed themselves the Variatones, and later, "The Four Lovers" and had a top 40 hit with "Apple of My Eye" in 1956. After a few more name changes, the group was renamed "The Four Seasons" in 1960. About the same time, Valli "re-Italianized" his name to its current form. Nick DeVito and Majewski left the group in 1960 or 1961 and were replaced by Bob Gaudio and Nick Massi. Nick Massi was replaced in 1965 by Charlie Calello, the group's arranger, and then shortly after Charlie was replaced by Joe Long. As the lead singer of the Four Seasons, he had a string of hits beginning with #1 hit "Sherry" in 1962. Valli has been the lead singer from then until the present time, occasionally releasing singles under his own name, notably the theme song from the film version of Grease, (written by Barry Gibb), which was a #1 hit. In 1976, Valli covered the Beatles song "A Day in the Life" for the ephemeral musical documentary All This and World War II.

Valli is best remembered for his falsetto vocals, once prompting comedian Jackie Mason, referring to the hit Walk Like A Man to exclaim, "Sing like a man, Frankie!"

He has made several appearances on the hit series The Sopranos as New York mob captain Rusty Millio. Valli himself was referenced earlier in the series. In the Season Four episode, "Christopher," the owner of a Native American casino offers Tony Soprano his help in getting a local Indian organization to drop its planned anti-Columbus Day demonstration. In exchange, Tony is asked to get Frankie Valli to agree to perform at the casino. He was also a guest star (as himself) in an episode of Full House.

John Lloyd Young won the 2006 Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of Valli in the musical Jersey Boys. After the great success of the musical on Broadway, it has been reported that Valli is excited at the prospect for bringing the show to Las Vegas.


Notes

^ There is a controversy surrounding his birth date. Most sources say he was born on May 3, 1937, which is derived from information included in early-1960s publicity releases for The Four Seasons. However, other sources claim that his date of birth was changed by the record company when the hit single, "Sherry" was released and that he is actually three years older, making his birth date May 3, 1934. This is the official fan club's position; this is the birthdate that appears on his "police mug shot", available through http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/fvallimug1.html, although he has never made a public statement regarding his age.

Certainly clears up all my computer questions!!!!!!!!!!!!!








Why Computers Sometimes Crash! by Dr. Seuss.




If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol, that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall......

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang.



When the copy on your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk, and the macro code instructions is causing unnecessary risk, then you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM, and then quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!

Well, that certainly clears things up for me. How about you?

Thank you, Bill Gates, for bringing all this into our lives

Bob of Boston, I think not only children love that good doctor; We grownup kids do as well. Love that ,hawkman, and while we await our Raggedy, here's a song from pete that makes your Seuss complete.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Words, words, words
In my old Bible
How much of truth remains?
If I only understood them,
While my lips pronounced them,
Would not my life be changed?

Words, words, words
In Tom's old Declaration
How much of truth remains?
If I only understood them,
While my lips pronounced them,
Would not my life be changed?

Words, words, words
In my old songs and stories
How much of truth remains?
If I only understood them,
While my lips pronounced them,
Would not my life be changed?

Words, words, words
On cracked old pages
How much of truth remains?
If my mind could understand them,
And if my life pronounced them,
Would not this world be changed?

Well, Mr. Seeger, Bill Gates is doing his best.

Breaking news:


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thousands await Queen's Virginia visit 1 hour, 20 minutes ago



RICHMOND, Va. -

Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, will arrive in Virginia today ahead of ceremonies to mark the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown colony. The queen is to address Virginia's General Assembly and meet with survivors of last month's massacre at Virginia Tech.

Thousands of people are expected to jam Capitol Square for a glimpse of the royal couple.

Terry O'Neill was just a wee lad from Liverpool the last time he got within a few feet of Queen Elizabeth II. Years later, the burly owner of the Beatles-influenced Penny Lane Pub in Richmond plans to have a second brush with English royalty on Thursday ?- with a little help from his friends.

"I left England to get away from her and what does she do? She follows me over here," O'Neill, 66, joked in the thick Liverpudlian brogue of his youth with Penny Lane's lunch crowd Wednesday.

Well, folks, now we know why they call it the Old Dominion, but in comparison to some places she is just a tyke.

So, Terry, this is for you.

Beatles - Penny Lane Lyrics

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he's had the pleasure to know.
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello.

On the corner is a banker with a motorcar,
The little children laugh at him behind his back.
And the banker never wears a mack
In the pouring rain, very strange.

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back

In penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass
And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen.
He likes to keep his fire engine clean,
It's a clean machine.

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
A four of fish and finger pies
In summer, meanwhile back

Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout
The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
And tho' she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway.

In Penny Lane the barber shaves another customer,
We see the banker sitting waiting for a trim.
And then the fireman rushes in
From the pouring rain, very strange.

Penny lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back.
Penny lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath the blue suburban skies,
Penny Lane.

Aaah. Pete Seeger. Joan Baez sang this one, and brought tears to Pete's eyes, when he was honored at the Kennedy Center Award ceremony. (Don't remember the year.) Made me cry, too.

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?



and Happy Birthday to:

Hey, Raggedy. Thanks for the pictures and the "Flower Song". That still makes me teary eyed, PA.

We're looking at Pete, Dave, James, and Frankie.

I like this one by Frankie, folks.

Oh I can see there ain't no room for me
You're only holding out your heart in sympathy
If there's another man, then girl I understand
Go on and take his hand and don't you worry bout me



I'll be blue and I'll be crying too
But girl you know I only want what's best for you
What good is all my pride if our true love has died
Go on and be his bride and don't you worry bout me

I'll be strong I'll try to carry on
Although you know it won't be easy when you're gone
I'll always think of you, the tender love we knew
But somehow I'll get through so don't you worry bout me

Oooh, baby

Sweetie pie before you say goodbye
Remember if he ever leaves you high and dry
Don't cry alone in pain, don't ever feel ashamed
If you want me again just don't you worry bout me

I love you no matter what you do
I'll spend my whole life waiting if you want me to
And if this is good-bye you know I'd rather die
Than let you see me cry cause then you'd worry bout me

repeat 2X
I'll be strong I'll try to carry on
Although you know it won't be easy when you're gone
I'll always think of you, the tender love we knew
But somehow I'll get through so don't you worry bout me

from The Roanoke Times
>
>January 14, 2001
>
>Song of History, Song of Freedom
>
>Here's a look at the song that served as the anthem of the
>Civil Rights Movement
>
>By Mike Hudson <[email protected]>
>
>The song was born in slavery.
>
>It began as a field song, a work refrain that helped men and
>women in bondage endure from sunup to sundown. They would
>sing: "I'll be all right."
>
>Like many songs that began in slavery, it had no one author
>and no standard version. It spread and changed with the
>seasons and generations and as slaves were sold from one
>place to another in the American South.
>
>In time there was a war, and the slaves won their freedom,
>but only in a legal sense. The song survived in a new time
>of lynching and Jim Crow. In 1901, as laws decreeing
>separation between the races were being erected, a Methodist
>minister named Charles Albert Tindley published a kindred
>version: "I'll Overcome Someday."
>
>It was a song of hope, a hymn for a better tomorrow. It
>spread through black churches in the South and in the North,
>and then through the Southern labor movement.
>
>And in the year that the second World War ended, a faction
>of black women were on strike, picketing the owners of a
>tobacco plant in Charleston, S.C., at a time when mill
>owners controlled almost everything and everyone, white and
>black, and at a time when standing up for your rights could
>mean a one-way trip in the back of a police car.
>
>The strike dragged on and the women grew disheartened, and
>as the rain came down, many dropped off the picket line.
>
>One of the holdouts began to sing the song, vowing to
>overcome the odds. Soon they all were singing. In the spirit
>of union, they sang "we" instead of "I." And they invented a
>new verse:
>
>We will win our rights.
>
>
>And when the strike was over, they had won their rights, or
>at least a contract, and in that time and place that meant
>something.
>
>Two of the women visited a union and civil rights training
>school far from home, in the Tennessee countryside. It was
>at the Highlander Center that they taught the song and its
>new verse to a new generation.
>
>Along the way, the "will" became "shall," an old word, one
>that had the sound of the Bible in it, and people sang:
>
>We shall overcome
>
>We shall overcome
>
>We shall overcome someday.
>
>Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
>
>We shall overcome someday.
>
>
>One night in the winter of 1957, officers of the law burst
>into the school - not policemen really, just angry white men
>who'd been deputized by the local sheriff and given license
>to put a scare into the students of social change. They cut
>the power and forced the students to lie in the dark as they
>smashed furniture and ransacked the place in search of
>"Communist literature."
>
>And there on the floor, the trembling students began to sing
>the song. Softy at first. Then louder.
>
>One of the students was a 13-year-old girl named was Jamalia
>Jones. She knew only one way to control her fear. In the
>darkness, she made up a new verse:
>
>We are not afraid
>
>We are not afraid
>
>We are not afraid today.
>
>
>Maybe it was her imagination, but the singing seemed to
>unnerve the intruders. The story goes that one of them
>trained a flashlight on her and said: "If you have to sing,
>do you have to sing so loud?"
>
>She answered by singing still louder. They sang for two
>hours until the men left that place and left them alone.
>
>Not long after that, a white man named Guy Carawan came to
>the school as music director. He had long hair and a curly
>beard. They called him a California hippie hillbilly. He
>took the song with him on the road, and he sang it for
>audiences of black and white folks around the nation.
>
>Over the years, the tempo had speeded up, as if the
>impatience for change had been pushing at its meter. But
>now, whenever Carawan sang it before a black audience,
>something happened. He felt them tugging at the words,
>tugging at the rhythm, slowing it down, bringing it back to
>its elegant, powerful meter, back to the hymn it had once
>been. He finally put his banjo down and let the people sing.
>
>The song insinuated itself into America's Civil Rights
>Movement. A young black quartet called the Freedom Singers
>and a folk singer named Pete Seeger carried the tune and the
>words with them as they traveled America.
>
>The movement's most eloquent spokesman, the Rev. Martin
>Luther King Jr., heard the song and understood its power. He
>knew that when you are fighting an evil that has the
>strength of myth and tradition behind it, you need your own
>rituals, traditions that will inspire and unite people
>around a common goal. And he knew leaders were nothing
>without the strength and creativity of average folks ready
>to make a change.
>
>So as the song trickled upward through the grass roots, from
>the sharecroppers and cleaning women and mill workers
>marching the marches, taking the blows and doing the work of
>a new American revolution, King understood that the movement
>now had an anthem.
>
>In Greensboro and Nashville, in Atlanta and St. Augustine,
>college kids sang the song in tones of sweetness and
>defiance as they were hauled out of lunch counters and
>thrown into police wagons, their suits and ties and Sunday
>dresses spattered with mustard and ketchup and spit and
>blood.
>
>The song sustained John Lewis, an Alabama farm kid who
>endured threats and jailings and beatings after signing onto
>the movement. His skull was fractured on Bloody Sunday,
>1965, when a phalanx of white-helmeted Alabama state
>troopers advanced on horseback and on foot, firing tear gas
>and clubbing peaceful demonstrators as Sheriff Jim Clark
>yelled, "Get those goddamned niggers!"
>
>For Lewis, singing the song was a sacred ritual that washed
>away the fear and fatigue.
>
>"It gave you a sense of faith, a sense of strength, to
>continue the struggle, to continue to push on," Lewis, now a
>U.S. congressman, would recall. "And you would lose your
>sense of fear. You were prepared to march into Hell's fire."
>
>Mourners sang the song after the bodies of four little girls
>were pulled from the rubble of a dynamite-torn church in
>Birmingham. Viola Liozza, a mother of six who had come from
>Detroit to join the movement, sang it as she drove on a
>lonely road in Alabama. She was silenced by a shotgun blast
>that shattered her window, ripped into her face and took her
>life.
>
>In Mississippi, a handful of civil rights workers sat on a
>front stoop at dusk, watching the sun sink into the flat
>country. First, they saw the cotton harvesters go by. Then
>the sheriff. Then a 6-year-old black girl with a stick and a
>dog, kicking up dust with her bare feet. As she strode by,
>they could hear her humming "We Shall Overcome."
>
>In the nation's capital, hundreds of thousands sang the song
>as they gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and heard
>King describe his dream that justice would someday "ring out
>across this land."
>
>When people sang the song now, they crossed their arms and
>held hands, swaying back and forth, carried away by the
>power of the music they were creating. Along the way, they
>invented new verses for the song:
>
>We will walk together someday.
>
>And:
>
>Black and white together someday.
>
>
>In 1965, a knot of demonstrators sang these words on a
>street corner in Washington, D.C., outside a well-guarded
>seat of power, hoping their words would be heard by the man
>inside.
>
>President Lyndon B. Johnson had pushed through the Civil
>Rights Act of 1964 as television cameras brought the
>movement and its song into the nation's homes. But for
>decades before, this son of Texas had been an
>obstructionist, the voice of filibuster, a friend of
>segregation, and even after he pushed the civil rights bill
>into law, he did little to enforce its letter or its spirit,
>or to protect the protesters who were being beaten and
>murdered in the South.
>
>So when his black limousine pulled through the White House
>gates and past that corner, the demonstrators sang even
>louder. Their message was clear: We will overcome. With or
>without you.
>
>And so, finally, with the song of protest and the current of
>history sweeping him along, Johnson stood before the members
>of Congress, the justices of the Supreme Court and 70
>million Americans tuned in on their television sets. And he
>said these words: "At times history and fate meet at a
>single time in a single place to shape a turning point in
>man's unending search for freedom."
>
>He promised to pass a voting rights law that would sweep
>away the barriers and violence that prevented citizens from
>exercising their rights. And he would do so now, with no
>compromise or backsliding.
>
>Then he paused, and ended with the words that no American
>president had ever said:
>
>"And we shall overcome."
>
>During all his years of struggle, death and defeat, Martin
>Luther King's assistants had never seen him cry. But in this
>moment, as he watched the president's speech on a
>black-and-white television screen in a living room in Selma,
>Ala., King's eyes filled with tears.
>
>Johnson's speech and the passage of the Voting Rights Act
>were not the end of the battle. They were simply significant
>moments on a timeline of struggle that has stretched over
>decades. In the spring of 1968 in Memphis, Martin Luther
>King sang the song in support of striking garbage workers
>who held aloft a sea of signs that said succinctly, "I AM A
>MAN." The next day, as he stood on a hotel balcony, a
>sniper's bullet cut him down.
>
>One voice of the dream had died, but the song survived and
>proliferated. In New York City, demonstrators sang the song
>to protest the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed citizen
>killed by police in a hail of 41 bullets. In Indonesia,
>hundreds of demonstrators risked their lives by marching on
>parliament and demanding the resignation of the president of
>their country's bloody regime: "Down with Suharto, the
>people shall overcome." In Northern Ireland, in South Korea,
>in Lebanon, in India, in China's Tiananmen Square, in South
>Africa's Soweta township, anywhere people were desperate for
>freedom, men and women and children sang the song in a
>multitude of languages.
>
>Tomorrow the song will be sung across America as businesses
>and governments and citizens pause to observe Martin Luther
>King's birthday. In the nation of its birth, in a new
>century, it is less a song of sit-ins and marches, but more
>one of reverence and nostalgia, of anniversaries and
>ceremonies. In America, King's movement has splintered into
>a series of spirited but isolated skirmishes, the momentum
>of the 1960s now stalled by changing times, intramural
>squabbles and a political backlash that portrays "reverse
>racism" as a malignant force upon the land.
>
>But the song remains.
>
>Deep in my heart, I do believe
>
>We shall overcome someday.
>
>And someday, at another time and another place, at another
>moment in history, inertia will give way to movement, and
>people will sing the song again, loudly and defiantly and
>joyfully.
>
>And they will write new verses of their own.
>
>--
>
>Mike Hudson can be reached at 981-3332 or [email protected]
>
>--
>
>'We Shall Overcome'
>
>We shall overcome,
>
>we shall overcome
>
>We shall overcome someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We'll walk hand in hand,
>
>we'll walk hand in hand
>
>We'll walk hand in hand someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart, I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We shall live in peace,
>
>we shall live in peace
>
>We shall live in peace someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We shall brothers be,
>
>we shall brothers be
>
>We shall brothers be someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>The truth shall make us free,
>
>truth shall make us free
>
>The truth shall make us free someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We are not afraid,
>
>we are not afraid
>
>We are not afraid today
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday

I really believe, Bob, that music and the power of it, has done more to change history than any other single factor within a certain context, especially when it is the voice of the populace in concert.

Thank you for the reminder, Boston.

A lot of people think that this is a simpering song, but I love it.

Put A Little Love In Your Heart
(Annie Lennox duet with Al Green)


Think of your fellow man
Lend him a helping hand
Put a little love in your heart

You see it's getting late
Oh please don't hesitate
Put a little love in your heart

And the world will be a better place
And the world will be a better place
For you and me
You just wait and see

Another day goes by
And still the children cry
Put a little love in you heart
If you want the world to know
We won't let hatred grow
Put a little love in your heart

And the world will be a better place
And the world will be a better place
For you and me
You just wait and see
Wait and see

Take a good look around
And if you're lookin' down
Put a little love in your heart

I hope when you decide
Kindness will be your guide
Put a little love in your heart

And the world will be a better place
And the world will be a better place
For you and me
You just wait and see

Put a little love in your heart
Put a little love in your heart
Put a little love in your heart
Put a little love in your heart
Put a little love in -
Put a little love in your heart...

IF I HAD A HAMMER (The Hammer Song)
words and music by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

If I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening
All over this land
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning
I'd ring out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

If I had a song
I'd sing it in the morning
I'd sing it in the evening
All over this land
I'd sing out danger
I'd sing out a warning
I'd sing out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Well I've got a hammer
And I've got a bell
And I've got a song to sing
All over this land
It's the hammer of justice
It's the bell of freedom
It's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Woodstock
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young lyrics

[Written by Joni Mitchell]

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
When I asked him, "where are you going?"
This he told me

I'm going down to Yasgur's farm
Gonna join a rock and roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
And try and get my soul free

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
I feel just like a cog
In something turning

Well maybe it's the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

By the time I got to Woodstock
They were half a million strong
Everywhere there was song and celebration

I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies above our nation

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

for me, james taylor does the definitive version of "woodstock"

there was some mention earlier of the civil rights movement

here's a song i've played a few times, but it's just so damn good i'm gonna play it again

Crazy In Alabama
Kate Campbell

I heard Odessa's mind was sick
That she was crazier than hell
The police caught her turning tricks
Down at the Blue and Gray motel
Odessa was the neighbor's maid
She had ten mouths at home to feed

They bussed her kids to Birmingham
And put her in the county jail
Nobody seemed to give a damn
They say a white man posted bail
My dad said not to breathe a word
I told my brother all I heard

And the train of change
Was coming fast to my hometown
We had the choice to climb on board
Or get run down

It was crazy there were grown men fights
Over segregation and civil rights
Martin Luther King and the KKK
George C. Wallace and LBJ
And when the National Guard came in
I thought the world was gonna end
It was crazy in Alabama

Down at the corner Dairy Dip
They sold soft ice cream for a dime
White people ordered from the front
The side was for the colored line
We all were told they had their place
Because they were a different race

We spent hot summer afternoons
At the public swimming pool
Where the privileged and the few
Played on their island of cool blue
Brown children watched outside the fence
It never made one lick of sense

But the train of change
Was coming fast to my hometown
We had the choice to climb on board
Or get run down

My momma yelled child get inside
Drew the drapes and locked the doors
We watched the marchers passing by
Felt the rumble heard the roar
They all held hands they sang and wept
And freedom rang in every step

Cause the train of change
Was marching through my hometown
We had the choice to climb on board
Or get run down

It was crazy there were grown men fights
Over segregation and civil rights
Martin Luther King and the KKK
George C. Wallace and LBJ
And when the National Guard came in
I thought the world was gonna end
It was crazy in Alabama

You know, edgar. I was thinking about "The Hammer Song". It was also done by Peter, Paul, and Mary." and, Texas, your line from Woodstock, "...the bombers turning into butterflys..." was lovely.

dj, glad to see you back, honey, and I think that most of our listeners know how I love James Taylor, but that one I have never heard.

Here's one from the trio of P. P. and M.

Artist: Peter, Paul & Mary
Song: Bob dylan's dream


While riding on a train goin' west,
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad,
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.

With half damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon,
Where we together weathered many a storm,
Laughin' and singin' 'til the early hours of the morn.

By the old wooden stove where our hats were hung,
Our words were told and our songs were sung;
Where we longed for nothin' and were satisfied
Talkin' and a jokin' about the world outside.

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold,
We never thought we could get very old;
We thought we could sit forever in fun
Though our chances really were a million to one.

As easy as it was to tell black from white,
It wasn't all that easy to tell wrong from right;
Our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the road we traveled would ever shatter and split.

How many a year has passed and gone,
And many a gamble has been lost and won;
And many a road taken by many a first friend,
And each one of them I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
That we could sit simply in that room once again;
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

While riding on a train goin' west,
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad,
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.

Trini Lopez also had a good If I Had A Hammer. He often gets overlooked these days, but I have been very fond of him.