The Athenaeum

Appalachian Spring- Aaron Copland

 

 

Hoping that all who read, comment, & post on TA/SST have a joyous spring weekend!

 

-Maureen Lang

Two For St. Patrick's Day From The Dubliners: "When The Boys Come Rolling Home" & "Carrickfergus"

 

 

 

 

Hoping All Athenaeum & Sic Semper readers, commenters, & posters have a Happy St. Patrick's Day filled with great music, wonderful food, & the good company of family & friends.

 

 

-Maureen Lang

Cajun Mardi Gras

Tee Mamou Mardi Gras- print from a colored pencil sketch by Floyd Sonnier

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbIAi0j5kqs

(The youtube is a musical tribute by Gus Gravot to rural Mardis Gras in French Louisiana.  The photos are of the communities of LeJeune Cove, T-Mamou, Iota, Egan, Church Point, Big Mamou, Eunice, Pointe Noire, and Marais Bouleur.)

Traditional Cajun Mardi Gras Costumes

La Vieille Chanson de Mardi Gras- Les Mardi Gras vient de tout partout, tout le tour du moyeu. Vient une fois par an pour demander la charité. Une vieille patate, une patate et des gratons. Les Mardi Gras vient de tout partout, tout le tour du moyeu. Vient une par an pour demander la charité. Une vieille patate, une patate et des gratons. Capitaine, capitaine voyage ton flag, tout le tour du moyeu. Une fois par an pour demander la charité. Et des patates, des patates et des gratons. Les Mardi Gras vient de l’Angleterre, tout le tour du moyeu. Vient une fois par an pour demander la charité. Une vieille patate, une patate et des gratons.   Shirley Poirier Bolton's Unity Gumbo is pictured below.  Recipe available upon request... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2B1DlaE1AU   Have a lovely time on Fat Tuesday, everyone!   -Maureen Lang

"Happy Thanksgiving" From The Heartland, AKA Mason's Hot Rods

(originally published here on 11/26/08)

As I mentioned in the comments to a TA post several months ago, my husband is now the proud owner of a restored 1940 Ford pick up truck. The Mason family, specifically dad Jerry, son Allen, and assorted relatives & friends, have been working quite a while now to transform the rusty wreckage of a Georgia farm truck into the sleek black & chrome splendor in the accompanying photo.

It’s the other photos down there at the bottom I want to write about on this Thanksgiving holiday, though. The folks who own Mason’s Hot Rods (Rods, Parts, & Restoration) are South Carolinians from the Spartanburg (pop. 39,407) area. All bets out on the table right now might be for the Mason family/friends’ profile to somehow fit one of Hollywood’s favorite stock characters, the clichéd small town Southerner: narrow-minded (& of course rednecked) men who value their trucks & hunting rifles over their wives & sweethearts, those long-suffering ladies always silent in the kitchen, emerging only to hand their hubbies another cold one. In other words, “some” might think these Southern folks a compendium of the tattered images the U.S. has been fed over time about the inhabitants of the rural South via television, movies, & mainstream media.

“Some” would be every kind of wrong.

Southern Clichés, meet The Masons. “I didn’t vote for no Bush!!” paterfamilias Jerry bellowed across a production trailer to my husband once (we met the Mason clan & friends due to their remarkable expertise as mechanics- they’re much in demand working on car-oriented movies such as the “Fast & Furious” series). Right after the election of Barack Obama another local who is a close friend of the Mason family emailed me to say, “Just think, Maureen, if we lived a little further up the road we could have been part of that landslide!” Spartanburg is about a half hour’s drive south of the North Carolina border. And say, did you know Junior Johnson publicly endorsed Obama for President?

Which brings us to more background info- Jerry Mason is a friend of Junior Johnson. Any NASCAR fans reading this may have already pricked up their ears. You might call Johnson the original “Duke of Hazzard,” that is, before he started on the racing circuit. Two painted portrayals of him engaged in his family’s former trade hang in the parts store/office of Mason’s Hot Rods, located on the periphery of the city of Spartanburg. I’ve stared at those paintings quite a bit- a youthful Junior behind the wheel of his moonshine-running car on a backwoods road, plumes of dust obscuring his wake, Junior & friends loading cases of white lightning into the trunk of another souped-up vehicle. Why was I in Mason’s Hot Rods at all?

We had traveled there for an annual charity car show financed completely by the Mason family, all proceeds of which go directly to aid the local poor & needy families of Spartanburg. A car (last time it was a 60s Mustang) fully restored by the Masons is auctioned off for charity during the show. Several hundred car enthusiasts brought their antique trucks & cars, hot rods, & trailers this year on November 8th for display, as well as to engage in swapping info, visiting, telling stories. The entire Mason family along with their friends worked the show as usual without pay, save for the free annual group dinner at a local Cracker Barrel that evening. Allen Mason’s wife Gina does her human dynamo act during the day of the show- simultaneously selling t-shirts for charity, collecting toys, directing the flow of work & the cooking, riding herd over it all with a wide smile, while Allen, Jerry, & the crew chat up the crowd, park cars, greet friends old & new. The price of admission? An unwrapped new toy for the local Toys for Tots program, cash donations for local charity organizations also accepted. A bountiful home cooked lunch is provided, all coming out of the Mason family & friends’ largesse toward their needy Spartanburg neighbors. Right now there are plenty of those.

The last time I was in Spartanburg I rode with my husband to a local BBQ place for supper. Allen Mason, the owner of Mason’s Hot Rods, was at the wheel. We listened as Allen described in detail the “family histories” of several cars he had bought to restore & sell. He wove the stories he’d teased out from each owner into the fabric of the South Carolina countryside rolling by us- it was each vehicle’s history, the tales of the various people who had owned it that really made for his fascination with these old cars. Allen Mason, native of the rural South- a business owner, a mechanic, a craftsman like his father & friends who are also deeply imbued with a love of oral history via their chosen profession. It seems to go hand in glove with the love of making an old vehicle purr under the hood again, shine, run like new, even race like new. They’d all throw back their heads laughing to hear themselves described this way, I’m pretty sure. After all, they’re just folks.

Folks who make up the warp & woof of our nation.

I couldn’t attend the Mason’s annual charity car show this year due to health issues, but my husband did. From sunup to sundown the Mason family and their friends (including my husband & his good friend from Phoenix AZ) toiled as usual without pay to hold their biggest car rally yet (see photo of Allen Mason & our friend Mike Price grinning in front of two station wagons that are filling up with donated toys).

In these difficult financial times, rural areas & small businesses are being hit hard. I hope Mason’s Hot Rods weathers the economic storm. Allen Mason confided to my husband that he's not sure he can continue having the November charity car show & auction in 2009, as the cost is starting to be too much in this tough economy.

It wouldn’t be fair to end this post without some links to car music, the kind always playing over the loudspeakers at Mason’s Annual Cruise In. Plus, it’s great toe-tapping music. Happy Thanksgiving to all:

Charlie Ryan & The Timberline Riders-Hot Rod Lincoln

Robert Mitchum (yes, that one)- Ballad of Thunder Road

Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble- Tightrope (not a car song, but somehow appropriate)

Willie Nelson- On The Road Again

And of course...

Waylon Jennings- Dukes of Hazzard Theme

-Maureen Lang

A Bit of Halloween History, Poetry, Music, & Ephemera

(Originally published here on 10/17/09)

Halloween is commonly thought to have pagan origins, even though its etymology is Christian.  Halloween is, quite literally, the popular derivative of All Hallow Even, or the eve of All Saints’ Day (1 November).  Taken together with All Souls’ Day, which falls on 2 November, it is a time

       

assigned in the Christian calendar for honoring the saints and the newly departed.  In past centuries, it was also the occasion for praying for souls in purgatory.  Yet because Halloween is popularly associated with the supernatural, it is often believed to have strong pagan roots that were never eliminated by the holiday’s subsequent Christianization. 

Some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia.  More typically, it has been linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain or Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in) meaning summer’s end.  

(excerpt from Halloween- From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers)

 

      

 

All Souls by Edith Wharton (published in Scribner’s Magazine 1909)

A thin moon faints in the sky o'erhead,
And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead.
Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways,
Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays,
But forth of the gate and down the road,
Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode.
For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night,
When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

Fear not that sound like wind in the trees:
It is only their call that comes on the breeze;
Fear not the shudder that seems to pass:
It is only the tread of their feet on the grass;
Fear not the drip of the bough as you stoop:
It is only the touch of their hands that grope--
For the year's on the turn and it's All Souls' night,
When the dead can yearn and the dead can smite.

And where should a man bring his sweet to woo
But here, where such hundreds were lovers too?
Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss,
The empty hands that their fellows miss,
Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green,
Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between?
For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night,
When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

And now they rise and walk in the cold,
Let us warm their blood and give youth to the old.
Let them see us and hear us, and say: "Ah, thus
In the prime of the year it went with us!"
Till their lips drawn close, and so long unkist,
Forget they are mist that mingles with mist!
For the year's on the turn, and it's All Souls' night,
When the dead can burn and the dead can smite.

Till they say, as they hear us--poor dead, poor dead!--
"Just an hour of this, and our age-long bed--
Just a thrill of the old remembered pains
To kindle a flame in our frozen veins,
A touch, and a sight, and a floating apart,
As the chill of dawn strikes each phantom heart--
For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night,
When the dead can hear and the dead have sight."

And where should the living feel alive
But here in this wan white humming hive,
As the moon wastes down, and the dawn turns cold,
And one by one they creep back to the fold?
And where should a man hold his mate and say:
"One more, one more, ere we go their way"?
For the year's on the turn, and it's All Souls' night,
When the living can learn by the churchyard light.

And how should we break faith who have seen
Those dead lips plight with the mist between,
And how forget, who have seen how soon
They lie thus chambered and cold to the moon?
How scorn, how hate, how strive, we too,
Who must do so soon as those others do?
For it's All Souls' night, and break of the day,
And behold, with the light the dead are away. . .

       

           

Classics From The Crypt- A Halloween Play List:

Night on Bald Mountain- Mussorgsky (superb 1940 Disney animated version)

Danse Macabre- Saint-Saens

Mephisto Waltz- Liszt

The Sorcerer's Apprentice- Dukas (also from Disney's Fantasia)

Funeral March of a Marionette- Gounod (interesting stop-motion playlet)

The Witches' Ride from Hansel & Gretel- Humperdinck

Have a Happy Halloween, everyone!

-Maureen Lang

 

Labor Day 2012

A little send off music for the Labor Day weekend:

Fanfare For The Common Man- Aaron Copland

 

 

 

If you've never read Studs Terkel's Working, maybe this is the weekend to pick it up.  If you have already read it, perhaps a good weekend for some re-reading...

Wishing all TA/SST posters, readers, & commenters a pleasant Labor Day holiday spent with family & friends.

-Maureen Lang

"Ashokan Farewell"- Jay Ungar & Molly Mason Family Band

Ashokan Farewell was composed by Jay Ungar in 1982.  It is a waltz written in the style of a Scottish lament.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZASM8OX7s

 

-Maureen Lang

Doc Watson, 1923-2012

We lost one of the best yesterday.

Over the years I've had the privilege of hearing Doc Watson play live many times- with his son Merle, & after Merle's passing with a very fine side man from Monroe NC, Jack Lawrence. The last time was in the small performance room at the back of McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica CA.  That evening my daughter clapped so hard a large ring she was wearing broke in half & went loudly skidding across the wood floor to everyone's amusement, including Doc & Jack's.  Jack explained to Doc what the noise was & he leaned out over the tiny stage to tell her, "It certainly is nice to be that appreciated, young lady."

Doc Watson was not only a virtuoso guitar, banjo, & mandolin picker, but had a stage manner so relaxed & genuine you felt you were sitting on a back porch somewhere listening to him play:

 Black Mountain Rag (with Jack Lawrence)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdUrg2Cqxdw 

Southbound (with Merle Watson)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STpiAfxy0-s

 

-Maureen Lang

 

 

Mardi Gras Music from Beau Soleil & Queen Ida

 

Beau Soleil- Zydeco Gris Gris

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvXGJ8eP1B0

 

Queen Ida & the Bon Temps Zydeco Band- Rosa Majeure

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gHIscVQB84

 

Happy Mardi Gras, everyone!

 

 

-Maureen Lang

Etta James 1938-2012

"At Last" from Etta James' album At Last! recorded at Chess Recording Studio in 1960

At last, my love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song.
Oh, yeah, at last
The skies above are blue
My heart was wrapped up in clover
The night I looked at you.
I found a dream that I could speak to
A dream that I can call my own
I found a thrill to rest my cheek to
A thrill that I have never known.
Oh, yeah when you smiled, you smiled
Oh, and then the spell was cast.
And here we are in heaven
For you are mine, at last.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1uunRdQ61M

 

Etta James discography (courtesy of discogs.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Maureen Lang