The Virtual Stoa

He’s got a tapedeck in his tractor
And he listens to the local news
He finds out where the bass are bitin’
While he’s plowin’ to the country blues.
He was a cowboy and he knew I loved him well,
A cowboy’s secrets you never tell -
No, there’s nothin’ like the loving
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man.

He’s got a tapedeck in his tractor
While he’s plowing up his daddy’s land;
He’s got more horse sense
Than I ever seen in any man.
He was a cowboy and he knew I loved him well,
A cowboy’s secrets you never tell,
No, there’s nothin’ like the lovin’
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man

On Saturday nights we go dancin’ in town,
And all the boys’ll order up another round;
In the summertime,
We look forward to the rodeo.
On Saturday nights we go to town,
And all the boys’ll order up another round;
When he rides saddle bronc
I wait to hear that whistle blow.

He’s got a tapedeck in his tractor,
I can hear him when he’s comin’ home.
Then he holds me in the rocking chair
And sings me the love song.
He was a cowboy and he knew I loved him well
A cowboy’s secrets you never tell
No, there’s nothin’ like the lovin’
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man

No, there’s nothin’ like the muscles
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man.

The UK number one single on the day I was born was “Long Haired Lover From Liverpool” by Jimmy Osmond. I think I knew that, but it’s good to be reminded. [here, via]

I’m wondering whether this would be a permissible entry for Norm’s Musicals Poll?

1. Oklahoma! [5pts] (where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…)

2. Oklahoma! [4pts] (and the waving wheat can sure smell sweet / When the wind comes right behind the rain…)

3. Oklahoma! [3pts] (every night my honey lamb and I / Every night we sit alone and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky / We know we belong to the land [yo ho!] / And the land we belong to is grand / And when we say, Yeeow! A-yip-i-o-ee-ay! / We’re only saying, You’re doing fine…)

4. Oklahoma! [2pts]

5. Oklahoma! [1pt]

OK?

(Entries to Norm by 5 November.)

Stephen Marks points me to this one-stop shop for all your Russian / Soviet anthem needs.

There’s an astonishing collection of recordings of the song formerly known as the Hymn of the Soviet Union here — Paul Robeson, obviously [and there's more on Robeson today here]; but also the broadcast from the Victory Parade in Moscow in June 1945; a wartime version for the BBC conducted by Sir Adrian Boult; sung in Moscow before a rugby international against Wales; various pop and rock versions; and what may be my brother’s favourite recording of anything ever, the Leningrad Cowboys and the Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble performing Gimme All Your Lovin’ / The Hymn of the Soviet Union as part of their epic 1993 Helsinki concert, the Total Balalaika Show; and so on, and so on, and so on.

And there’s more…

There’s the only recording of the Internationale made by a Nazi band, at the time of the 1936 Olympics (though in the end the USSR team didn’t show up). There are three pre-Revolutionary recordings of Bozhe, tsarya khrani, better known as the main theme from the 1812 Overture (and another recording by the Pipes and Drums and Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards). There are lots of recordings of related songs, parody versions, historical curiosities.

It’s a fabulous, fabulous collection (and these are terrific songs, too). Why haven’t I stumbled across it before?

The NY Times tells me that Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was “Storming” Norman Schwarzkopf’s aunt. I had no idea.

A quick scan of my shelves suggests that I don’t own nearly enough Schwarzkopf recordings, incidentally, so recommendations in the comments are more than more than welcome.

According to NME.com it’s something called “Definitely Maybe”. And there was I thinking it was the Peter Pears / Benjamin Britten recording of Winterreise. [via]

It’s all very nice waking up and finding out that there’s another European country out there. But was the referendum result affected by the proximity of the vote to the Eurovision Song Contest (which I thought this year was excellent)? There seem to be both push factors and pull factors at work here: on the one hand, here and here; on the other hand - and more ominously for the rest of us - I’m afraid it does look as if Montenegrin independence will contribute towards an unbreakable Balkans / Former Yugoslav lock on the contest for the foreseeable future, given the patterns of regional block-voting we’ve seen in recent years.

Ian Samson is great fun on the subject of Johnny Cash in this week’s LRB. And this bit made me laugh:

In his autobiography he recalls an incident backstage when June offered to iron his shirt: �I jerked off the shirt and threw it to her. She ironed it, and I went on stage in a nicely pressed shirt. Thus began her lifelong dedication to cleaning me up, and my lifelong acceptance of that mission.� Never mind Lives of the Saints; the esteem and assurance of heaven should surely go to the wives of the saints: the list of angelic long-suffering wives, if not endless, is certainly extensive, and June Carter had a headstart on most of them as she�d already been married twice, and she played autoharp.

Oh, and there’s also this [via, oddly enough]. I wonder if they’ll be any good.

The post I put up the other evening about how cowboys are frequently, though secretly, fond of each other has just disappeared from the blog. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me before, in almost five years on blogger.) Retrieving it from the google cache, I’ll reprint it below; the original comments box still seems to have survived over here.

***

Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other): There’s a Brokeback Mountain-themed video for the excellent new Willie Nelson song over here.

It’s much better than the original film, not least through being well over two hours shorter.

Three of us enjoyed Walk the Line last night. Lots of problems with the biopic genre, or so it seems to me, but I thought Joaquin Phoenix was astonishingly good in the title role .

(Maybe more later.)

UPDATE [11.2.2006]: I don’t think I’ll add much more, except to point out to people that when Cash first auditioned at Sun records, the song that grabbed Sam Phillips’ attention wasn’t “Folsom Prison Blues” but the rather different, “Hey, Porter”, which was his first single (with “Cry, Cry, Cr” as the B-side, not the A-side, as the film suggests)..

OK, it’s albums, records, concerts time. I’m about as completely out of the loop on the so-called popular so-called music front as it’s possible to be - I think the one 2005 record I’ve heard this year is the new Laura Cantrell album (thanks, Sarah), which really isn’t a lot to be going on when assembling a general survey of the field of contemporary cultural production, so do tell me what I missed. The concert I remember enjoying a lot was probably the Newcastle Bach Choir performing Handel’s Belshezzar, with a bunch of fine soloists including Emma Kirkby. Not sure what else I went to over the course of the year. There was probably something.

The silverdollarcircle.

If you haven’t yet read the handy advice for modern living being offered on the English folksong thread at Making Light, then you probably should.

Simon has just posted this gem:

PHILOSOPHY AND ALT. COUNTRY LYRICS (CONT.)”The meaning of the world lies outside the world”
-Silver Jews on Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics.

BONUS: PHILOSOPHY AND GRIME LYRICS.

“Everybody’s talking but nobody’s listening”
-Dizzee on Heidegger’s concept of ‘idle talk’.

“I’m no longer human- i’ve become an investment”
-Wiley on the Marxian concept of capital fetishism.

Simon doesn’t have comments over at his blog, so if anyone wants to post more examples — and not necessarily onlyfrom grime and alt.country — in the same format in mine, feel free.

I probably should have known this, but I didn’t.

Credit Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the wave of anti-Communist hysteria that he rode to political prominence. McCarthy tainted the word “folk” by associating it with “Communist”. He did this by attacking the Weavers “folk” group as Communist sympathizers and summoning its most prominent member, Pete Seeger, to testify before his Committee on Un-American Activities. Overnight the word “folk” was dropped from contention. In 1953 it was no longer used in the trade press, the fan magazines, or in advertisements for country music.”Folk” was out and the word “country” was simply dropped in its place. Along with many other terms, it had been used in the trade press for some years, but by December 5 1953, the date of a forty-eight-page, advertisement-adorned special Billboard section devoted to the music, the term “country” is used virtually to the exclusion of all others…

Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp.198-9.

Over here. It’s just grim.

It appears that I don’t have a copy of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony on CD. 1, 3 (twice), 5, 8 and 9 (twice), but not the Pastoral Symphony. If any musical people are passing through, please place your recommendations for which version to buy in the comments (and indeed, for recordings of the 7th), bearing in mind that I don’t usually like to pay more than �10 for a CD unless I’ve got good reason ahead of time for thinking that it’ll be very good indeed.

(I’ve put on Mahler’s 1st instead. I like Mahler’s 1st.)

And the Latvian song was so popular because…?

(I think I preferred Eurovision before the days of telephone voting, when mysterious national “juries” offered their verdicts on the songs of the night. Enough democracy!)

There’s a fine piece in the Guardian by Greil Marcus about Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”, the greatest of his many great songs (and there’s a Normblog poll to prove it), and the problems he ran into in the same year when Dylan Went Electric. And then he came to the UK:

But in the UK the sort of protests that had followed Dylan and the Hawks around the US were organised. The Communist party had long operated a network of Stalinist folk clubs where the songs to be sung, who could sing what, and in what manner, was strictly controlled. The idea was to preserve the image of the folk, whereas pop music symbolised the destruction of that community by capitalist mass society.

Is this true? It’s terribly funny if it is. Where can I learn more?

Old news, I know, but worth repeating today. Le Monde reported last month that the Internationale, Pierre Degeyter and Eug�ne Pottier’s great nineteenth-century anthem of world socialism, is still under copyright, as Degeyter died as recently as 1932, and under the current intellectual property regime, it won’t fall into the public domain until 2014.

And, yes, the copyright holders are continuing to demand royalties from film-makers and broadcasters when snatches of the song are heard.

More here, over at inaudiblecities.com.

My copy of Aidan Nichols, OP, The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger arrived in the post today, and I am pleased.

But my copy of Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity has not yet arrived, despite having been ordered ten days ago. I shall make enquiries on Monday.

Killer Fact: Harry Hutton has an especially good one this weekend:

“In 2004 the works of Snoop Dogg outsold the works of Professor Roger Scruton for the 11th year running.”

Well, a hero of just about everybody who cares to consider the matter.

Bob Marley, 60 today.

I’m told by someone who was told by someone who was there that the first words spoken at the celebrations of Zimbabwean independence after the Union Jack came down were these: “Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Marley and the Wailers…”

Every man gotta right
To decide his own destiny
And in this judgment
There is no partiality
So arm in arms, with arms
We will fight this little struggle
‘Cause that’s the only way
We can overcome our little troubleBrother you’re right, you’re right
You’re right, you’re right, you’re so right
We gonna fight, we’ll have to fight
We gonna fight, fight for our rights

Natty dread it ina Zimbabwe
Set it up ina Zimbabwe
Mash it up ina Zimbabwe
Africans a liberate Zimbabwe

No more internal power struggle
We come together, to overcome
The little trouble
Soon we will find out
Who is the real revolutionary
‘Cause I don’t want my people
To be contrary

Brothers you’re right, you’re right
You’re right, you’re right, you’re so right
We’ll have to fight, we gonna fight
We’ll have to fight, fighting for our rights…

[lyrics over here, more over here, pic from here]

I’m concerned that all four verses are about to disappear from the internetweb. So here they are again. Sing along please, drink in hand. Double points to anyone who knows the verses in Irish.

Why spend your leisure bereft of pleasure,
Amassing treasure, why scrape and save?
Why look so canny at every penny?
You’ll take no money within the grave.
Landlords and gentry with all their plenty
Must still go empty where’er they’re bound.
So to my thinking, we’d best be drinking,
Our glasses clinking in round on round.

King Solomon’s glory, so famed in story,
Was far outshone by the lily’s guise.
But hard winds harden both field and garden;
Pleading for pardon, the lily dies.
Life’s but a bauble of toil and trouble,
The feathered arrow, once shot ne’er found.
So lads and lasses, because time passes,
Come fill your glasses for another round.

The huxter greedy he blinds the needy
Their straits unheeding, shouts, “money down!”
His special vice is his fancy prices,
For a florin’s value he’ll charge a crown.
With hump for trammel, the Scripture’s camel
Missed the needle’s eye and so came to ground.
Why pine for riches while still you’ve stitches
To hold your britches up — another round!

The schooner trading ‘tween Spain and Aden
Returns well laden with oil and corn.
And from Gibraltar her course she’ll alter
And steer for Malta and the Golden Horn.
With easy motion they sail life’s ocean
With ne’er a notion they’ll run aground.
It’s nought but miming, so ends my rhyming
And still we’ve time in for another round!