“The Kreutzer Sonata” and The Moonlight, part 1

A group of strangers meet in a Russian railway carriage. It is 1889 and the conversation turns to the decline of marriage. An old man states that this is all because of too much education: people have become too learned and there is no more fear. Women should fear their husbands, then there would be fewer divorces. A woman shakes her head:

“Oh, that, my little father, that is ended.”

“No, madam, that cannot end. As she, Eve, the woman, was taken from man’s ribs, so she will remain unto the end of the world,” said the old man, shaking his head so triumphantly and so severely that the clerk, deciding that the victory was on his side, burst into a loud laugh.

“Yes, you men think so,” replied the lady, without surrendering, and turning toward us. “You have given yourself liberty. As for woman, you wish to keep her in the seraglio. To you, everything is permissible. Is it not so?”

“Oh, man, –that’s another affair.”

Double standard? The old man says, No. He says that men, too, have received the Law, but that it is not so bad for them to break it as it is for women. Double standard, yes.

The old man gets off the train and the others continue chatting about marriage and the status of women, all except one passenger who keeps to himself and avoids eye contact with the others. Finally, he is drawn into the conversation and begins talking wildly about love, which he denounces. One of the other passengers mentions the Posdnicheff case, where a man murdered his wife. “I see that you have recognized me,” says the man who does not believe in love and reveals himself as Posdnicheff.

At the next stop all of the passengers leave the carriage except Posdnicheff and the narrator. “Love, marriage, family, — all lies, lies, lies,” says Posdnicheff and then he tells the narrator the story of how he came to murder his wife.

“The Kreutzer Sonata”, painting by Prinet, 1901, inspired by Tolstoy’s work but illustrating something that never happens in the story — except, perhaps, in one man’s fevered imagination. This painting was used in an advertisement for Tabu perfume and was well-known enough in the 1950s to be parodied in Mad.

Thus begins Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”, a work disliked by pretty much everyone who has read it. But Tolstoy had serious purpose in writing the story and put a lot into it over the years. “The Kreutzer Sonata” incorporated much of his own thinking on sex, marriage, and the relations between the sexes. This is not to say that Posdnicheff is Tolstoy’s double — Tolstoy never murdered anyone — but his words often reflect Tolstoy’s opinions.

Posdnicheff tells the narrator that he comes from a wealthy family and that he did not marry until he was thirty. Before that time he lived, he says, a life of debauchery, having sex with prostitutes. Eventually, though, he is persuaded that he should marry and decides on a young woman from a family fallen on hard times. Before their wedding he shows his bride-to-be his diary, which describes his various sexual adventures, one of which he wants her to know about before she hears of it through gossip.

Now this last bit also happens in Anna Karenin, when Levin shows Kitty his diary. And, in fact, Tolstoy also showed his diary to Sophia before he married her, particularly because he wanted her to know about a liason with a woman that she knew. All three of these women — Sophia, Kitty, and Posdnicheff’s fiancée — were terribly embarrassed by this action, though Tolstoy would have it that they were horrified rather than mortified.

“The Kreutzer Sonata” by Joseph deCamp, about 1913.

Anyway, the Posdnicheff wedding proceeds. The marriage is not a success. The couple quarrel often and then make up and have sex. Then they quarrel again. Posdnicheff is convinced that they quarrel because, once their sexual desire is satisfied, that they are not interested in one another. They hate each other, says Posdnicheff, and their hate grows because neither is able to find a reason for this hatred. Of course, he is ascribing thoughts and feelings to his bride that she is unable to refute and, over the course of the story, the reader may come to see Posdnicheff as a very unreliable narrator. Certainly, by this point, most readers will find him unlikeable, cold and distant, though he believes himself a creature controlled by passion.

The marriage staggers on. There are children — at least five, maybe seven, possibly two died — and Posdnicheff names two of them, the boy that he uses as a weapon against his mother and the girl that she enlists as an ally against him. The couple fight and screw and propagate until a “rascally” doctor explains birth control to Mrs. Posdnicheff. Now she blossoms, becoming plumper and prettier. Of course, Posdnicheff hates this. When his wife becomes interested in performing music with a male violinist, he becomes jealous. They perform Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for Piano and Violin, No.9 in A Major (Opus 47), a work that greatly disturbs Posdnicheff. His jealousy and hatred grows until he tells his wife that he wishes she were dead. She attempts suicide; they reconcile, briefly, then back to the old routine of quarrel/hate/screw; he suggests divorce, but only if she initiates it. Finally, in a fit of jealous rage, Posdnicheff stabs his wife, right through her corset, inflicting a wound that turns out to be fatal. The story ends by quoting Matthew 5:28, “…whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery…” and goes on to say that this includes a husband looking lustfully on his own wife.

A couple of notes are due here: Posdnicheff never actually discovers that his wife is unfaithful — there’s that unreliable narrator trick — and it is only when she is dying that Posdnicheff sees his wife as a human being, that is, a real individual person as opposed to a Wife, a Mother, a Woman; throughout his tale, he never once uses her name. Along the way in this story, we are treated to various rants: against contraception — which is a terrible evil; against pretty dresses and hairdos — traps to catch men; about love — which does not exist; about music — which is so disturbing that it should be controlled by the state; about the fact that all women care about is entrapping a husband; and the fact that women actually run the world by being totally in control of men all the time, even though they exercise this control from a condition of slavery. By now the reader’s brain is shouting the word “misogyny”.

Clandestine copy of “The Kreutzer Sonata” circulated in 1889. [British Library] The Library says that this is a hectograph rather than a mimeograph. That is, a special carbon paper proof was imprinted on a sheet of gelatin, then paper copies were pulled from the jello plate. Maybe fifty good copies could be made before the sheet became unusable. This was a method used up to half a century ago to print ‘zines.

“The Kreutzer Sonata” was circulated in a mimeographed form for a while. Tolstoy rightly thought that the Czarist government would block its publication but perhaps he did not forsee that an enterprising Berlin publisher would release versions in four different languages. After the English version was released, the United States Post Office made it illegal to send it through the mail. The US Attorney-General backed this action and President Roosevelt called Tolstoy a “sexual moral pervert”. Of course, Teddy might have been just getting back at a guy who disapproved of hunting. The case went to the courts after some newspaper vendors excitedly offered “Suppressed!” copies for sale. In the end, Philadelphia’s Justice Thayer struck down the ban. Tolstoy might hold some absurd ideas, he said, but the work was not an “obscene libel”. In the first place, it wasn’t obscene and, after all, the anti-sex ideals expressed in it were a commonplace in Christian thought.

G.K.Chesterton, who held a jaundiced view of Tolstoy’s “simplicity”, said:

The emotion to which Tolstoy has again and again given a really fine expression is an emotion of pity for the plain affairs of men. He pities the masses of men for the things they really endure — the tedium and the trivial cruelty. But it is just here, unfortunately, that his great mistake comes in; the mistake that renders practically useless the philosophy of Tolstoy… Tolstoy is not content with pitying humanity for its pains: such as poverty and prisons. He also pities humanity for its pleasures, such as music and patriotism. He weeps at the thought of hatred; but in “The Kreutzer Sonata” he weeps almost as much at the thought of love.

Isabel Hapgood, who had translated and championed Tolstoy’s work for Americans, refused to translate “The Kreutzer Sonata”. She said:

The whole book is a violent and roughly worded attack upon the evils of animal passion. In that sense, it is moral. Translation, even with copious excisions, is impossible, in my opinion, and also inadvisable. The men against whom it is directed will not mend their ways from the reading of it, even if they fully grasp the idea that unhappiness and mad jealousy and crime are the outcome of their ways, as Pozdnisheff is made to say in terms as plain as the language will admit of, and in terms much plainer than are usually employed in polite society.
On the other hand, the book can, I am sure, do no good to the people at whom it is not launched. It is decidedly a case where ignorance is bliss…

This bit of peck-sniffery makes me almost sympathize with Tolstoy. (I say, fuck “polite society”! And “Stay ignorant, blissful fools,” is elitist bullshit. [rant rant rave rave]) But there is an interesting bit in Hapgood’s essay:

Count Tolstoi one day praised the Shakers in this manner [i.e., for the same reason that Posdnicheff praised them, because they were committed to non-reproduction] before a table full of people. I was afraid to ask him his meaning, lest he should explain in detail, so I questioned his wife in private as to whether this new departure was not somewhat inconsistent with his previously advocated views on woman’s vocation.
She replied: “Probably it is inconsistent; but my husband changes his opinions every two years, you know.”

I like that she didn’t ask what he meant, “lest he should explain in detail” which says quite a bit about Count Tolstoy and his imperious verbosity. I also like the interchange with Sophia Tolstoy that confirms many men’s suspicions that all women are in league and constantly plotting together against the master sex.

Sophia and Leo. Photos from around the time of their wedding in 1862.

That brings up the question of the Tolstoy marriage. In brief: it was troubled. Leo was thirty-four, a little older than Posdnicheff when he married. Sophia was nineteen, about the same age (so far as I can tell) as Posdnicheff’s bride. The Tolstoys had thirteen children; nine survived infancy. They began arguing early on but Sophia was not shy with her opinions. She acted as Tolstoy’s editor and transcribed his manuscripts over all the years of their marriage. When she didn’t like a work — and she hated “The Kreutzer Sonata” — she let him know. When Leo leapt into appealing new systems of thought, she tried to restrain him. They certainly fought. Sometimes, like many battling couples, their fights were ridiculous to outsiders. But Leo’s lofty foolishness could be forgiven as idealism gone off the rails; Sophia’s actions appeared neurotic and mad.

Sophia spied on her own house through binoculars, sizing up the situation. She hated cats and banned them from the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana; then, to counter the vermin problem, brought in snakes. The symbolism here, of Eve investing a would-be Paradise with swarms of serpents, cannot have been lost on either Tolstoy. And Sophia was a temptress, always trying to turn Leo away from a multitude of notions. Their daughter Aleksandra cited a letter:

“You are harassing and killing yourself,” [Sophia] wrote him on April 19, 1889, to Yasnaya Polyana. “I…have been thinking: he does not eat meat, nor smoke, he works beyond his strength, his brain is not nourished, hence the drowsiness and weakness. How stupid vegetarianism is….Kill life in yourself, kill all impulses of the flesh, all its needs — why not kill yourself altogether? After all you are committing yourself to *slow* death, what’s the difference?”

Yeah, dude, why not just kill yourself? Which is what Posdnicheff says to his wife and which she promptly attempts to do. And it was Sophia who actually attempted suicide, several times, so often that it seems to have become a ritual. Sophia’s diary also castigates Leo for his coldness which he interrupts only in fits of sexual desire. So the real life drama is close to the story. Well, except for one thing: it wasn’t sex that the Tolstoys fought about, mostly it was money.

Sophia and Leo, around 1905.

Tolstoy, in a bout of spiritual fervor, decided to leave his entire estate to some noble purpose or other. Sophia wanted the money to go to their children. This was the cause of the great combat between them at the end of their lives. Tolstoy was assisted by a number of fervent Tolstoyians. Some he employed as secretaries. One of these, Vladimir Chertkov, helped Leo determine how to distribute his fortune in his will and it was Chertkov that Sophia was most worried about; this was the guy she was looking for with binoculars. She had heard that there was a secret will signed by Tolstoy in 1909 and was determined to fight it. In 1910, Leo and Sophia quarrelled and he stalked out of the house, attended by an acolyte. He was persuaded not to try to walk to wherever it was he had chosen as a destination and instead took up refuge in a series of railway stations, headed somewhere else. Tolstoy succumbed to pneumonia in one of these stations and died at the age of 83. Sophia was not allowed to see him; she hovered nearby, in a railway car, talking about hiring a private detective to follow Leo and find the secret will. A decade later, everything became moot as the Bolshevik Revolution wiped out the Tolstoy property values.

Sophia, trying to get entry to the place where Leo is dying, 1910.

But there is still the question of how much Posdnicheff’s views reflect those of Leo Tolstoy. Well, Posdnicheff’s views on sexy clothing had already been stated by Tolstoy both in other works and in rants to his listeners. He was horrified by the sight of a naked shoulder. Or perhaps he was filled with lust, which is much the same thing, right? And, this was the fault of the shoulder-barer — at least to a egocentric like Tolstoy. Then there is the stuff about music: Posdnicheff says, “…a terrible thing is music in general. What is it? Why does it do what it does? They say that music stirs the soul. Stupidity! A lie! It acts, it acts frightfully.” Tolstoy once told Rachmaninoff that he could not stand Beethoven, “Is such music needed by anyone? I must tell you how I dislike it all. Beethoven is nonsense.” Stefan Zweig said that Tolstoy distrusted both women and music because they unleashed his passions. But let’s go directly to Tolstoy’s own defense of “The Kreutzer Sonata” in which he explains his thinking:

…it is necessary for the view in regard to carnal love to change. Men and women ought to be educated in their homes and by public opinion to look, before and after marriage, on infatuation and the carnal love connected with it, not as upon a poetical and exalted condition, such as it is now considered to be, but as upon an animal condition, degrading to man…

It is not good to use means preventive of childbirth, in the first place, because people are thus relieved of cares and labours in regard to children, who serve as a redemption of carnal love, and, in the second, because it comes very near to the act which is most repulsive to a human conscience, to murder. Nor is non- continence during pregnancy and nursing good, because it is destructive of the physical, and still more of the mental, powers of woman.

…the attainment of the aim of being united in wedlock or of being outside of wedlock with the object of love, however much extolled by poetry it may be, is unworthy of man, just as the aim of obtaining sweet and superabundant food, which presents itself to many as the highest good, is unworthy of man.

And so on. Tolstoy proceeds from principles which he says everyone agrees with — the value of chastity, for instance — and he cites the New Testament as a basis for his thinking — hence the quotation that ends “The Kreutzer Sonata”. Tolstoy thinks it is best not to have sex – procreation is not an issue for him, better not to breed — but he recognizes that complete celibacy is difficult if not impossible. So, try for the chaste ideal but if continence is the best you can manage, so be it. There are echoes here of Paul’s notion that it is better to marry than to burn. Marriage is an accomodation with sin. Although Tolstoy claims to believe in the equality of the sexes, his argument is based on unstated premises of female subservience. The old man in “The Kreutzer Sonata” who proclaims that obedience is a wife’s duty is saying something that Tolstoy accepts as obvious.

Still from a 2008 movie version of “The Kreutzer Sonata” that has the action in current times. That sound you hear is Leo Tolstoy doing cartwheels in his coffin.

Sophia Tolstoy took over responsibility for publishing her husband’s work in 1886 and performed this duty very well. She disliked the crowds that called at Yasnaya Polanya, thinking that many of the Tolstoy-worshippers were “lunatics” and the women “hysterics”. But mostly she regretted the loss of her husband as he took on the role of living saint. From Sophia’s journal, 1903:

I went to [my husband's] room this evening as he was getting ready for bed, and realised I never hear a single word of comfort or kindness from him nowadays.

What I predicted indeed has come true: my passionate husband has died, and since he was never a friend to me, how could he be one to me now? This life is not for me. There is nowhere for me to put my energy and passion for life; no contact with people, no art, no work – nothing but total loneliness all day.

That, I think, is the authentic voice of Posdnicheff’s wife. Posdnicheff himself says that he murdered his wife, not when he stuck a knife in her, but when he married her. Perhaps that’s what Tolstoy thought about Sophia. One last thing: as Tolstoy’s publisher, it was Sophia who demanded that the czar lift the ban on Russian publication of “The Kreutzer Sonata” in 1891. She was successful.

[Part 2 will discuss a riposte to Tolstoy also titled from a Beethoven sonata, Joyce Cary's The Moonlight.]

Notes:

The full text of “The Kreutzer Sonata” is here and in other places on the Net. I have kept Posdnicheff’s name as the anonymous translator has it, though you can find it spelled at least three other ways in the various pages I have linked.
Tolstoy’s Epilogue, his explanation of “The Kreutzer Sonata”, was published in English in 1904.

Besides her anti-Kreutzer essay linked above, Isabel Hapgood wrote a long account of visiting the Tolstoys in 1890. There she gives another version of the Shaker/celibacy business mentioned above.

This is a marvelous account of visiting Yasnaya Polnaya by Elif Batumen which has quite a bit to say about “The Kreutzer Sonata” and the Tolstoy marriage.

Many adaptations have been made of “The Kreutzer Sonata” for stage, screen, and television. None (that I have seen) are particularly good since they all follow the action of the narrative, so you get a drama about a neurotic, jealous wife-murderer with none of the surrounding rationale. You can see the same thing on many TV crime shows. But there is one movie of interest: The Last Station starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Giametti as the scummy Chertkov, which looks at the final days of the Tolstoy marriage.

Celebrity Plonk

Looking for a hobby? Got a few millions to spend? Why not buy a vineyard and bottle your own wine. You might make a profit, even better, you might turn out something good. Now I’m not talking about just licensing your name to somebody so they can put your image on a jug of swill and triple the price. I’m talking celebrities who actually like wine and have a bit of taste and, maybe, some business acumen.

The worst kind of celebrity plonk. Malcolm Young doesn’t drink any more and Angus never did. Bon Scott of course… Still, I might try that Highway to Hell Cabernet someday.

Surprisingly few celebrity chefs dabble in wine production. Mario Batali works with his business partner, Joe Bastianich (son of celebrity chef Lidia), who is a recognized authority on Italian wines, but that’s about it. Perhaps the chefs are concerned that a poor vintage might cause people to doubt their culinary skills or the restaurants they own. Or maybe it’s because these chefs already have sweetheart deals with wineries. Possibly I should mention Martha Stewart here who has partnered with Gallo to lend her name to wines sold through K-Mart. Or possibly not. Oh, and maybe there’s Guy Fieri, if he survives the awful reviews of his restaurant.

One of the few wines in this post that I’ve actually tasted. It was very good. Thanks, Jason Priestly. [more on Black Hills]

There are plenty of actors who have taken up vinting — Lorraine Bracco, Kyle McLachlan, Jason Priestly, Emilio Estevez , Sam Neill, Gérard Depardieu, all own some or all of a vineyard and and a label. Raymond Burr bought a vineyard but died before its first vintages were ready — the label is still run by his partner, Robert Benevides. Fess Parker started the winery and resort that bears his name, which was featured in Sideways.

Sideways wine-tasting at Fess Parker’s place.

Some actors are concerned that their personae may affect the reception of their wine:

Originally the winery was called Smothers Brothers, but I changed the name to Remick Ridge because when people heard Smothers Brothers wine, they thought something like Milton Berle Fine Wine or Larry, Curly and Mo Vineyards,” Tom explains.

On the other hand, Francis Ford Coppola has turned his estate into a movie museum where you can suck down some Black Label Claret while you look at Godfather mementoes.

Drew Barrymore’s Pinot Grigio which is supposed to be pretty good.

Dan Aykroyd isn’t afraid to market his own products and put his name on the label. “They asked me if I’d like to have my own wines…how good is that?” Aykroyd got heavilly involved in the selling of Crystal Head vodka (distilled in Newfoundland) and was dismayed when the Liquor Control Board of Ontario refused to carry it because the bottle was too pretty or something. Aykroyd finally won that fight and his vodka is on sale beside the Pátron tequila that he imports into Canada and his own line of Niagara wines. Aykroyd also has a surprising factoid about wine and celebrities:

Every hockey player I know has an excellent nose and an excellent tongue. Kirk Muller, for instance, has excellent taste. Dave Ellett – he called his dog Caymus [after the famous Napa Valley cabernet] Dougie Gilmour loves to have the big, full red wines. Wendel Clark and John Erskine, too. I’ve had some good wine parties with those guys.

Wow! Wait’ll Don Cherry hears about hockey wine snobs! And I really, really want to try some Wendel Clark In-Your-Face red — but it has to be made from Saskatchewan grapes. Or saskatoons or something. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll sample some of The Great Ones’ No.99 wines, especially since it’s now legal to transport wine across the border into B.C.

Cellar of Valeri Bure’s family winery. Note the hockey stick in the eagle’s talons. Bure says he learned about wine in Montreal.

There are a whole lot of athletes that have gone into the wine business — Tom Seaver, Mike Weir, Mario Andretti, Charles Woodson (who is not allowed to promote his product so long as he is active in the NFL) — just to name check four major sports besides hockey. Peggy Fleming had a winery but it seems to have closed.  And let’s not forget David Beckham who gave his wife a vinyard for her birthday. (I so hope they produce a wine called Posh Spice.) Hmm, no basketball wine. Well, Larry Bird has put his name on a few bottles (“surprisingly good for a white”) but he’s not really involved so far as I can see.

But aside from a few rockers like Vince Neil, the best celebrity wines are produced by actors. Richard Gere has teamed with a major Italian producer to put out what I hear are outstanding wines. And, of course, there’s Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt who are the latest celebrities to buy Miraval, a French château that has seen more than its share of celebrities. Sting (yes, he makes wine, too) recorded there as did Pink Floyd, who recorded much of The Wall at a studio constructed in the basement by jazz pianist Jacques Loussier. In fact, a reportedly excellent rosé from Miraval was named Pink Floyd by Pitt. Pitt and Jolie are to be married at Miraval and then will market their co-produced wines as Jolie-Pitt. They should be very very good.

12 X 12 = A Gross of Days of Christmas

Click to play (and use your back button to return — if you want to see another.)

Whoever drew that last one doesn’t know what back bacon looks like. Merry Christmas!

Sinéad O’Connor Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago today, during a Saturday Night Live performance, Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II. There was an immediate outcry from critics, journalists, and, a week later, SNL host and noted theologian, Joe Pesci. O’Connor’s career never recovered. When she attempted to perform Bob Marley’s “War” at a Bob Dylan concert, she was booed off the stage. Now, twenty years on, Michael Agresta takes a fresh look at the event.

[click to see performance via YouTube]

Agresta listened to what O’Connor had to say: she added some fresh lyrics to “War” about child abuse as one of the Catholic Church’s sins. This isn’t news today, but it was then. In fact, most people (including me, I have to admit) missed the allusion altogether and thought O’Connor was protesting abortion/contraception policies or something. But O’Connor, when anyone bothered to ask, was quite clear about what angered her:

In Ireland we see our people are manifesting the highest incidence in Europe of child abuse. This is a direct result of the fact that they’re not in contact with their history as Irish people and the fact that in the schools, the priests have been beating the shit out of the children for years and sexually abusing them. This is the example that’s been set for the people of Ireland. They have been controlled by the church, the very people who authorized what was done to them, who gave permission for what was done to them.

The Time magazine interviewer didn’t really grasp what O’Connor was saying, so she tried to explain by giving some personal history. She said she had been subjected to every kind of abuse:

Sexual and physical. Psychological. Spiritual. Emotional. Verbal. I went to school every day covered in bruises, boils, sties and face welts, you name it. Nobody ever said a bloody word or did a thing. Naturally I was very angered by the whole thing… [Time interview, November 9, 1992, behind a pay wall, unfortunately.]

Her mother, said O’Connor, was a Valium addict, a product of Catholic schools. Later, when O’Connor went to an Adult Children of Alcoholics-type group, she got a handle on her situation. The photo of the Pope that she tore up? That had belonged to her mother: “The photo itself had been on my mother’s bedroom wall since the day the fucker was enthroned in 1978.”

Young Sinéad, striped shirt.

O’Connor herself was incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry, an Irish institution for wayward girls, at the age of 15. The Magdalenes have been criticized by the UN Committee Against Torture and one Magdalene being sold by nuns trying to make up stock market losses turned out to have twenty-two unregistered anonymous corpses buried out back.

After Pope Benedict apologized in 2010 for the Irish abuse cover-up, O’Connor criticized him for calling the cover-up “well-intentioned” and called for a boycott of the Church. She told Rachel Maddow that she is a believer who wants to free the Church from those who have brought it into disrepute. And in the Los Angeles Times:

I’m a Catholic, and I love God. . . . That’s why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into. . . .

I’m passionately in love and always have been with what I call the Holy Spirit, which I believe the Catholic Church have held hostage and still do hold hostage. I think God needs to be rescued from them. They are not representing Christian values and Christian attitudes. If they were truly Christian, they would’ve confessed ages ago, and we wouldn’t be having to batter the door down and try to get blood from a stone.

Sometimes angry people are dismissed when they do or say things other people find disturbing. Often these angry people are absolved over time. Sinéad O’Connor paid a price for expressing her anger and for telling truths that people weren’t ready to hear. She is a brave woman who has finally been awarded some of the respect that she has earned.

Spasticus Autisticus Opening for London Paralympics

I’m not a big Olympics fan and usually don’t watch opening ceremonies, but the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics has become one of my favorite Olympic moments.

First, Stephen Hawking did a reading over a light show. Hawking’s words were about human beings discovering the universe and centered on the recent discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle. I know nothing about that stuff but I’m ready to accept whatever the man says on the subject. So, while lights sparkled and the stadium took on the form of a hadron collider, at center stage was the now-familiar appearance of Hawking, slumped and motionless in his wheelchair while his electronic voice described the wonders of the universe. The point was made: physical disability does not mean a crippled mind or a diseased spirit.

But then the band, Orbital, launched into an amazing performance of “Spasticus Autisticus” led by singer John Kelly. Ian Dury, crippled by polio, wrote “Spasticus Autisticus” for the UN Year of Disabled Persons in 1981. The UN was horrified and rejected the song and it was banned from British airplay.

(Click to Play)

Dury knew there might be problems, that his song might be found offensive by some but he wrote it anyway. He said that he was inspired by Spartacus, when the Roman soldiers were looking for Kirk Douglas and asked where Spartacus was, each of the men stepped forward and said, “I am Spartacus!” So, “I’m Spasticus! I’m Spasticus! I’m Spasticus Autisticus!” It’s a shout of anger at the cruelty visited by fortune on some people’s bodies and a shout of defiance of that cruelty, and it’s an exclamation of self: “Here I am and I’m going to be, like it or not.”

Hello to you out there in Normal Land
You may not comprehend my tale or understand
As I crawl past your window give me lucky looks
You can be my body but you’ll never read my books…

The enthusiasm of the crowd shouting out the lyrics was really something and I felt an Olympic glow for the first time in, well, ever.

John Kelly belts it out. (Click to Play, same video as above)

The ceremony went on with an unveiling of a giant version of the statue by Marc Quinn depicting a very pregnant Alison Lapper. This is defiance, too, since disabled people are not supposed to breed. Here’s a picture of Alison with her child, Parys:

[via Metafilter]

First Photo on the World Wide Web

[via vice.com]

In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee was looking for a picture to demonstrate the image-handling ability of his baby, the brand-new World Wide Web. Well, actually the Web had been around for a little while but only as a network for scientists involved with CERN. In 1991, though, it was opened to the public. This is the image that Berners-Lee chose as the first to go public:

So what is that?¹ The Cernettes were a group formed from workers and scientists’ wives and girl friends at CERN. They sang take-offs on girl-group songs with lyrics aimed at particle physicists: “Liquid Nitrogen”, “Collider”, and so on. They were quite a big deal, at least in Geneva, and Berners-Lee was a fan. The group was managed by an IT developer named Silvano de Gennaro. He needed a photo for a CD cover so asked the group to pose backstage at a gig:

Berners-Lee asked de Gennaro for a digitized photo that could be uploaded to the WWW as a test. De Gennaro happened to have on hand a GIF file of the photo that he intended as a CD cover. Berners-Lee insisted that he add words — “It has to be fun!” — so de Gennaro got to work with PhotoShop 1 (that’s “one”, folks) and arched the lettering over top. The resulting image was part of an article about CERN music.

No one much noticed. Probably more people saw a Cernettes poster than the WWW image. But this bit of retro humor was the first. The next big steps in Web history — on-line commerce, for instance — followed with the development of internet porn as people discovered that they could sell digital images.

The Cernettes are calling it quits after twenty years and giving a final performance this month. The original GIF file vanished when the Mac that held it in memory died in 1998.

There is much more on this topic including video of Cernettes’ performances and Tim Berners-Lee’s cross-dressing here.

 ¹ I think it looks like an album cover for a side-project connected with a Francophone Slim Cessna. Something like the Lee Lewis Harlots, for instance.

Amir Khadir and Mise en Demeure

Quebec Premier Charest has announced that the group Mise en Demeure will not play at the official Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebration on the Plains of Abraham. Charest says the festival is not political.  [double-take] What? You’re having a St. Jean celebration on the Plains of goddam Abraham that isn’t political? In fact, a Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebration anywhere has been pretty political for, oh, as long as I can remember. Back in 2008, a couple of bands were barred because they sang in English. (After a public outcry they returned to the bill.)

St.-Jean-Baptiste arrests in 1968. Trudeau used the occasion to begin his rise.

The group (whose name means “Official Notice”, a legal designation, en Anglais) has released correspondence with the Quebec government showing that the province threatened to cut off funding to other groups if Mise en Demeure was allowed to play. So, Mise en Demeure withdrew so as not to offend government sensibilities.

Is the group political? Sure. It’s right up there with, say, Chumbawamba as an anarchist threat. Why ban them? Why add more fuel to the fire in Quebec? Well, that’s because of Amir Khadir.

Khadir’s house.

Amir Khadir was born in Teheran and immigrated to Canada when he was five. He is currently the only member of Québec Solidaire to hold a seat in the provincial legislature. Solidaire is a leftist, sovereignist party. Khadir has shown his support for the recent Montreal protests but he is hardly the only member of the provincial government to do that. Khadir has three daughters.

One daughter, Yalda, has been charged in connection with the protests. Yalda is a real live wire. At a court hearing she attacked a press photographer saying that she deserved her privacy. Well, no, Yalda, you’re in court now and this is part of being a public protestor. Hold your chin up and face the camera. Current charges against Yalda include vandalizing the office of a political opponent of her dad’s. I don’t know if she’s guilty or not but the Quebec press has already pronounced that she is. Currently, the girl is out on bail.

The Mise en Demeure poster.

But what has this to do with Mise en Demeure? Well, when the cops went to arrest Yalda, they searched the rest of the house and discovered a poster for Mise en Demeure under a glass tabletop. The poster is a take on Delacroix’s painting of Paris revolutionaries storming the barricades. Instead of the bare-breasted figure of Marianne/Liberty (which probably would have had the group accused of pornography) there stands Bananarchiste, member of Mise en Demeure. The stripped dead soldier on the ground has been given the features of Jean Charest. A Montreal cop kneels before Bananarchiste. It’s a very straight-forward takeoff substituting current figures for those of Delacroix. The face of the guy in the top hat with the musket is now that of Amir Khadir.

The Delacroix original.

I can see Khadir and his daughters thinking that this was great fun, but proper Quebec is scandalized. It’s violent, they say, sucking in their collective lower lip like Max Pointy. “Charest Dead  at the Feet of Khadir” screams le Journal de Montréal.  Everything in the picture is removed from context, every syllable in Mise en Demeure’s lyrics is examined for propriety. Quebec used to think of itself as cool, now it sounds like a Florida court  trying a hip-hop artist.

But worse than this is the way that the media accepts that no proper politician would ever own such a seditious poster, at least not where a cop can find it, and if he does he’s guilty of something. Khadir hasn’t been charged with anything yet but the press is ready to defend Authority when it cracks down. Here’s a sample: this guy in the Gazette wants us to know he’s cool, he’s a metal-head who’s been to tons of concerts and he’s not offended by bad-taste album covers (he prints a Cannibal Corpse cover depicting one rotting corpse fellating another to demonstrate just how much he can tolerate) but this, this!, is too much, he says. Oh, my. Your poor bruised metallic feelings. But anyone who still looks to newspapers for unbiased news is doomed to disppointment. All of Quebec’s press is now and has always been opposed to the protests. Bring on the Law, they cry, and await Judge Dredd to sort things out.

Mise en Demeure remembers the good times. Quebec premiers’ heads on the wall.

So, another day, another stupid move by Charest. Meanwhile, you can listen to Mise en Demeure here. In fact, you can download a complete album for free! Don’t worry, Grand-dad, it won’t hurt your ears — it’s 99% acoustic and the lyrics are fairly clear; Chumbawamba is not an off-the-wall comparison.

The Rolling Stones Riot, Vancouver, 1972

There was a lot of excitement in Vancouver when the Rolling Stones announced that they would begin their 1972 North American tour in that city. Vancouver was still a small city, not yet “World Class”, and this was a major event. The mayor was Tom Campbell who favored a harsh law and order regime. The baby boom was twenty-five years old and there were lots of kids in the eighteen to twenty-four bracket which, at any given moment, is most given to criminal acts.

There were two large youth groups that accounted for a fair amount of crime; one consisted of young working class people who had grown up in the Lower Mainland, the other was composed of drop-outs, hippies, street people, rabble-rousers, and beatniks, as Campbell called them once or twice. Both youth segments were excitable and given to sporadic outbursts of anti-authoritarian behavior. From 1970 to ’72 Vancouver had many altercations that might be termed riots. There was the Sea Fest Riot of 1970 (the riots of 1978 and ’79 ended Sea Festival), the Hudson’s Bay demonstrations organized by the Vancouver Liberation Front, the cross-border raid by the Northern Lunatic Fringe of the Youth International Party, the All Seasons Park occupation, and a bunch of others. The mayor meant to bring these kids to heel. The police were supplied with three-foot long riot sticks and had a pretty good idea of how Campbell wanted them used.

In 1971, the police began Operation Dustpan intending to sweep the trash from the streets by aggessive enforcement of drug laws in Vancouver’s newest business district, Gastown, where hippydom flourished. This operation involved a great deal of harassment of people who looked like they might have a joint on them and a great deal of ill-will resulted. The young merchants of Gastown wanted to be friends and not alienate customers so they did not raise a fuss when activists for marijuana legalization decided to hold a smoke-in. So a bunch of kids gather to flout the law in front of cops wielding clubs. What could go wrong?

The Gastown Riot (Vancouver Sun)

Of course heads were clubbed and the good people of Vancouver were appalled. A city council member who had voted for the riot sticks was horrified:

“I’m shocked to see the use the police are making of the sticks… what they
are doing here is not at all like the demonstration we were given in
council when we approved the sticks.”

Opposition councillor Harry Rankin was disgusted: “Of course they hit people! Why else did you give them those sticks?” There were reports of mounted police charging up on the sidewalk and clobbering people who were trying to get away; a man whose leg was broken being ordered to get up and walk — he was beaten when he didn’t; the police swung their sticks with abandon (see video). Pretty much everybody thought that the police had caused most of the problems that night.

Rand Holmes in the Georgia Straight

Riots in the U.S. — from the urban affairs rooted in racism to the Chicago Democratic Convention — had created a public appreciation of how police, failing to quell a disorder, might contribute to it and make things worse. In Gastown, shopowners — middle-class businessmen — were attacked by police as they stood in the doorways of their own establishments. That was upsetting and the serious citizenry shook its collective head at seeing the police use force to accomplish whatever it was they were ordered to do. Mayor Campbell commended the police but he had few allies.

Part of the mural by Stan Douglas, "Abbott and Cordova, 1971". Grasstown becomes art. It is instructive to compare this with the two previous illustrations in this post.

So, in 1972, the police were alert to the fact that they might be judged harshly if they were caught beating the brains out of young people. Now enter the Rolling Stones.

Since this was a show aimed at young people and since youth was such a noticeable phenomenon and the topic of many many thoughtful opinion pieces, the concert organizers decided to pander to that demographic: They announced a Youthfest (I don’t recall what the thing was actually called) where young folks could show off the cool youth things they were doing and people with something to sell could make a few bucks. That’s how I came to witness the Rolling Stones Riot of 1972.

I was working as a Company of Young Canadians volunteer (actually we were paid, a little). My partner, who I will call A. since I don’t know if he wants to be a part of this memoir, and I were trying to work with debt-ridden folks, especially the low-income variety. Our Staff at the CYC wanted us to organize debtors into a huge payment strike against finance companies. A. and I thought that was lunacy and went for something a little less showy. We did debt counselling and wrote a book. We had an organization called the Consumer Action League. And, as representatives of the CAL we decided to have a table at Youthfest.

I do remember the name of the outfit that putting on Youthfest but I won’t use it because other, legitimate, people have called a later company by the same name. Anyway, A. and I went to the Outfit’s office to see if we could get a Youthfest table and, mirabile dictu!, they gave us a table AND two tickets to the Stones concert. So that was cool.

The concert was in the Pacific Coliseum on the PNE grounds. The Coliseum was where the Canucks played at the time. Boards were laid over the ice and a stage erected at one end — this was nothing like so slick as the way they do it now. There was room for 17000 people. It was really empty in the period before the concert when smaller groups were supposed to play there.

Outside the stage area, a wide concourse ran around the entire building. This is where, during hockey games, they sold T-shirts and hot dogs. That is where Youthfest set up its tables. We had a table covered with gestetnered material (including a comic that had been scratched into a gestetner stencil by hand) and were available to answer questions, if any one had one, which they mostly didn’t. In fact Youthfest didn’t draw much of a crowd. The people who stopped at our table were taking time off from manning their own tables. Over to our right and across was Hare Krishna — they used to hand you a book and when you said, “Thanks,” and started to walk away, they would demand you pay for it. Big bucks, too! I think eight dollars. Tickets to see the Stones were six. To our left and across was a vendor table operated by the Georgia Straight‘s comics division. The Straight was in league with Rip-Off Press and other underground comix distributors — this was part of that famous conspiracy to corrupt youth and bring down western civilization that Republicans are still trying to stop. I got a lot of great comics there including the brand-new tabloid size Harold Hedd which included Rand Holmes’ comics about the Gastown riot.

Youthfest ran for a couple of days before it culminated with the Stones concert. Other groups were supposed to play during this time. I recall a program listing Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen one afternoon. I went by the stage, but no Commander Cody. Perhaps the Commander had worked out that he was unlikely to get paid for this gig. I did see Humphrey and the Dump Trucks, a Saskatchewan group, but only part of their performance. Or maybe it was all they were willing to do for free.

I didn’t want to hang around for the concert. The Six Wives of Henry VIII was going to show the episode about poor Thomas Culpeper and Catherine Howard and I wanted to see my ancestor rogering the Queen. Or as much of that as might be shown on television. Anyway, I was tired of Youthfest and hanging out in the Coliseum; I wanted to go home. I gave my ticket to A. so that he could bring his girlfriend and, when Youthfest shut down and the concert was beginning, I tried to leave. I was told by a Coliseum employee not to go outside, that things were looking hairy. In a little while, he said, the cops would clear the rabble and I could go. So, for the remainder of the concert, I wandered the concourse around the performance area. The area behind the stage was blocked off but the rest of the concourse, everywhere there had been Youthfest, was open.

I watched most of Stevie Wonder’s opening act from the concourse opening directly opposite the stage, looking out across the audience. Behind me was the lobby and the glass doors that were smashed — that happened before I walked up that  way. Our table was back at the very end of the Youthfest area — you couldn’t go any farther because past the Hare Krishnas would take you to the closed backstage area, but I could look up directly at the stage and that is where I watched the Stones perform. Across the way, opposite the Georgia Straight tables was a first-aid station. That’s where they brought the injured cops.

Now, I wasn’t outside but from what I can piece together from newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts, a crowd began building early. Some people had bought tickets that were counterfeit. They were upset and wanted in. Other people were there because it was something happening and they were ready to enjoy it. Others, it was claimed later, were there to disrupt the evening.

Crowd vs. cops outside the Coliseum. From the Georgia Grape via pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com

The police were lined up outside the Coliseum facing a raucous crowd. Somebody threw a bottle and a cop hit it with his stick. Other bottles started flying, the cops batted them away, then a whole shitload of bottles were hurled at the police. Inside the Coliseum, I saw cops bringing in others that were hurt. I recall one that seemed to have a broken ankle. I offered to help. The cops just smiled and thanked me and dragged their buddy back to the aid station. I realized as I watched them that they were enjoying this in a way: this time the cops were going to be the good guys. At no time did the police that I saw, many of them injured, look worried or upset. This was the kind of event that they could handle.

Injured cop being carried away. (Vancouver Sun via pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com)

Things were intense outside. A guy, stoned on something, was brought into the aid station. His head was bleeding. Police truncheon? I don’t know and maybe this guy didn’t either. He got his head bandaged and I saw him dancing around the concourse to the Stones music. Then he danced into the seated area. A little while later he was brought back to the aid station, bandage trailing down his back, blood running down his head. The aid team bound him back up and he went dancing off. The sight of that guy, dancing delirious in his bloody head dressing, stayed with me as an image of the People On Drugs section in my mental scrapbook.

It was getting late and the concert was going to end soon. Aside from bottles, the crowd was also hurling molotov cocktails by this time. The cops pulled the plug and called in the mounted riot police.  These guys ride big horses, not your common cowpony but crosses with big European draught animals. These are big horses and they are quite intimidating. It took the mounted police a not very long time to disperse the crowd.

Meanwhile, as the Stones were finishing their act, a line of crew members, all wearing Stones T-shirts, lined up across the concourse to keep anyone from getting into the back stage area. There was one guy running around organizing this and I heard him yelling about making sure the cops were going to protect the Stones motorcade as it left the Coliseum. [According to Allen Fotheringham, Hugh Pickett pressed for a motorcycle escort for the frightened Stones drivers from about 10:30 on.] Up on stage, Mick Jagger was going through the encore, “Street Fighting Man”, stamping his foot like a trained horse answering a math question.

The lights came up and the audience began to leave. The side doors of the Coliseum were opened and people stumbled out into the evening. I still recall the way the expression on their faces changed as they walked outside, broken glass underfoot, a patch of asphalt still burning from a molotov cocktail, police horses stepping through the litter…

The next day or two I read the theories in the Sun, the Province, and of course, the Georgia Straight (and Georgia Grape, which was new). There were two main lines of thought. First, the riot had been caused by delinquents from Surrey. Now Surrey was often blamed for Vancouver’s problems; it’s very handy to have a nearby locality you can lay all the heavy stuff on. One news report talked about pickup trucks full of beer pulling into the Coliseum parking lot. Obviously those Surrey rednecks — no one in Vancouver drove a pickup truck!

People hurling rocks at the police. This kind of checkered shirt was a uniform for the Clark Park Gang. (Vancouver Sun)

The second theory had to do with the Clark Park Gang and there were two versions of it. Clark Park is one of a number of green spaces that were designed into Vancouver’s city plan. Some parks had swimming pools, tennis courts, a lake area, others were just a chunk of grass where, for instance, people might play boccie on Sunday afternoons, or the Italian Vancouverites meet the Portugese in a soccer match. And they were a place to go if, say, your dad was hammered and looking to try out his new belt or you wanted to hang out and sniff a little glue and meet your friends. Sometimes these groups of friends might get involved in a B&E or other such crime. That was the Gang. Clark Parkers had already been blamed for the Sea Fest Riot of 1970.  After they realized that they frightened people, the guys that hung out in the parks began mugging folks out for a walk. The police started patrolling the park and, shortly before the Stones concert, two cops were beaten in Clark Park. That meant war.

 The Clark Parkers and others like them were idolized by certain bolsheviks who thought revolution was imminent and that these skids would become shock troops. They were proletarian, they were tough, and they were cool. There were stories in the Straight quoting breathless young women saying that they knew a guy who packed a chunk — i.e., was armed. See, that was a big deal then and excited the revolutionary types no end. 

So one theory had it that the Clark Park Gang had instigated the Stones riot, just another example of wayward youth and alcohol. But a second theory had it that the Clark Park Gang was incited to cause a riot by the Youngbloods. The Youngbloods were one of a number of Vancouver’s self-proclaimed revolutionary groups. Supposedly, they were mentoring the Clark Park Gang, going to mold these lumpen kids into a shining revolutionary vanguard. This represented a certain vision held by the police, too, who hated both the commies and the local hoods. Superintendent Ted Oliver said that as many as five different groups were involved in the riot: “They had smoke bombs and they had stink bombs and they had molotov cocktails.” Some of the Clark Parkers were (and are) ready to take credit for the riot.  The Youngbloods, of course, accepted all the credit that they thought they were due which was all of it.

About thirty police officers were hurt, one with a broken sternum. Some say that injury came from a railroad spike launched from an air cannon wielded by a Clark Parker. Others that it was a hurled bottle. More than twenty arrests were made. The addresses of those arrested were from all over the Lower Mainland, not concentrated in Surrey or around Clark Park. Some of those arrested claimed innocence but, as others have pointed out, if a riot is building up, then you get out or you’re part of it.

One column I read in the Sun claimed that, as the crowd gathered outside the Coliseum, organizers tried to get the Stones to agree to having a live video feed of their act shown in the Agrodome which was set up for that. The idea was to placate the folks with counterfeit tickets and generally calm things down. The band refused.

The police came through as heroes. They made up for the Gastown incident and showed themselves to be the benevolent face of community order after all. Shortly afterward, the police decided that it was time to destroy the Clark Park Gang. A special unit called the H squad was set up to that end. H stood for Heavy. Usually the H squad worked in groups of three.

The H-Squad typically entered the park at night, with one squad member entering first, followed by another two who trailed behind. “The Clark Parkers would attack them and they’d lose–and I wouldn’t want to have been a criminal at that point,” says [retired constable Vern] Campbell.

The Clark Park Gang, the Riley Park Gang, and the rest all disappeared over the next decade or so. They were destroyed not so much by the police as by changing demographics as Vancouver became a Big(ger) City. The word “gang” has a whole different meaning today.

Later that summer, the Youngbloods had a run-in with another revolutionary group, the Partisans. The Youngbloods ripped off the Partisans’ gestetner machine. They and the Partisans then held a self-criticism session overseen by the staff collective of the Georgia Grape. The Youngbloods admitted to adventurist tactics. The Partisans agreed to share. Not long after, the Youngbloods disintegrated as its members got real lives.

Council was frightened by the entire episode. This was a demonstration by maybe 2000 people at the outside. The police were well able to handle it. Even so, Council shortly afterward refused to allow Led Zeppelin a license to perform.  That was small city Vancouver back then.

The Outfit that organized Youthfest didn’t pay its bills and bankrupted.

Tom Campbell left politics in 1972.

The Rolling Stones continued their tour. They romanced Margaret Trudeau and Keith Richards OD’d in Ontario (according to Margaret’s account). In Montreal there were separatist bomb scares, one of them forcing the frightened Stones to cut short a concert. Street fighting man, my aunt fanny! Bunch of jet set jerkoffs. They couldn’t even handle a tour of the Peaceable Kingdom of Canada. It was a long time before I could listen to a Stones song at all and even now the memory of that guy calling for police protection gets in between me and the music.

Links:

Past Tense has a good post on the Rolling Stones Riot and another on Vancouver gangs of the day.

Mark Donnelly

Today is the first day of the Stanley Cup playoffs. One performer will be on the ice today that, for a while at the end of the season, I thought might be out for health reasons. Mark Donnelly is the Vancouver Canucks’ anthem singer. This is Mark early in the season:

This is Mark performing in game seven of the finals last year.

After Christmas, Mark visibly lost weight. Sometimes there was another singer. Clubs do pull in substitute singers for reasons that escape me — an opera singer in Ottawa had everyone on both benches laughing as she stretched a minute of song into almost five — but coupled with Mark’s weight loss, I was afraid that he might be really sick. Here’s how he looked in March:

I was relieved to discover that Donnelly was not ill, only dieting. He lost 172 pounds and may decide to lose more. Mind you, the way he did it has people talking: he subsisted on a 500 calorie-a-day diet and took shots of HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), also called the pregnancy hormone, to suppress his appetite. This is not a regimen that doctors recommend. Some say that HCG has no effect on appetite; Mark says, “It worked for me.”

Of course, Donnelly’s loss would be a tremendous blow to the Canucks. Back in the day, it was organ players who were thought to provide musical boosts to victory. Hockey anthem singers only began to be recognized as integral parts of the team after Kate Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America” took Philadelphia to a Stanley Cup. There’s only a couple of teams in the NHL that still have organists. Which brings me to my modest proposal: Vancouver should bring back the organ. A good organist plus Mark Donnelly would guarantee us a great season and post-season triumph!

Tom and Hettie

Clarence Ashley, known as Tom to his friends, married Hettie in 1914. He was 17 and she was 14 years old. In the Tennessee mountains where they lived it wasn’t unusual to marry young. Tom was a fine banjo player and made recordings with groups like ”The West Virginia Hotfoots”, “The Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers”, and “The Carolina Tarheels”. Tom also recorded as a solo act. The first known recording of “House of the Rising Sun” features Tom on banjo.

Tom and Hettie with baby Eva about 1919. (I love this picture! Hetti has a great hat and she is so proud of that baby. Tom wishes he had something in his hands -- a banjo, maybe.)

But with the arrival of baby J.D. and then Eva, there was a family to support and you couldn’t make a living from playing banjo. Tom was always working at odd jobs here and there. He got on at a mill in West Virginia but, three days after Hettie joined him, the place closed down. It took eight months for the couple to scrape together enough cash to travel back to Tennessee where Hettie dug up the canned food she had hidden away before travelling to meet Tom. That’s what they lived on until Tom got his next bit of work.

Tom played the medicine shows. He was an entertainer, not a salesman for the patent medicines, playing in between pitches from Doc Whitecloud for Swamproot Tonic. He enjoyed this work: “I always loved show business.”

Every once in a while, Tom would record a tune. “The Coo Coo” is probably his best known:

The coocoo is a pretty bird,
She wobbles as she flies.
She never hollers coocoo
Till the fourth day of July.
      (hear entire song recorded 1929 here)

“My Sweet Farm Girl” is a double-entendre song that probably brought a blush to Hetty’s cheeks:

So early in the morning,
I cut her grass, you bet,
Pull up the hose,
I keep her lawn all wet.
    (hear entire song recorded 1931 here)

Byrd Moore and His Hotshots, 1929. Tom is on the right.

Eventually, the War brought jobs. The mills were hiring and Tom laid down his banjo and went to work. The children grew up. Eva played and sang with her father some and even recorded a few songs of her own.

Hettie, Tom, and grandchildren, late 1940s.

Then, in 1960, Tom was persuaded to play music again. The folk revival was under way and several of Tom’s early recordings appeared on Harry Smith’ s influential Anthology of  American Folk Music. Tom performed at concerts and events and toured England before cancer took him in 1967.

Tom and Eva singing together, circa 1960

J.D. had a house next door to his parents and, after Tom passed away, looked in on his mother every day. Hettie died in 1973. Tom and Hettie’s great-grandson, a computer programmer for IBM, has put up a web page about them.

Without knowing these people, except through their photos and recordings, I like them. They outlasted hard times, raised family, and made music. That’s about all you can ask of anyone.

Discussion of “The House Carpenter” with downloads of a lot of Ashley material.

Tom performing "The CooCoo" from Legends of Old Time Music. Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwlOO8RG-og

Video of Ashley interview and he plays “The Coo Coo” (from Legends of Old Time Music)