« July 2020 | Main | September 2020 »
The American Banjo Museum has inducted banjo great Roger Sprung, 90, into the Banjo Hall of Fame.
Sprung now stands among greats like Earl Scruggs, John Mceuen, Bela Fleck, Steve Martin, and Tony Trischka.
The presentation, to air online, will include video tributes from other Hall of Fame members as well as a Zoom interview with Johnny Baier, the president of the museum.
Roger Sprung with Paul Prestopino in the background.
Photo by Frank Beacham
Van Morrison is 75 years old today.
A Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician, Morrison’s live performances at their best are transcendental, while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums, Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album, It's Too Late to Stop Now, are critically acclaimed and appear at the top of many greatest album lists.
Morrison started his professional career when, as a teenager in the late 1950s, he played a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish show-bands covering the popular hits of the day.
He rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Northern Irish R&B band, Them, with whom he recorded the garage band classic, "Gloria.” Morrison’s solo career began under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single, "Brown Eyed Girl," in 1967.
After Berns' death, Warner Bros. Records bought out Morrison’s contract and allowed him three sessions to record, Astral Weeks, in 1968. Even though this album would gradually garner high praise, it was initially poorly received.
However, the next one, Moondance, established Morrison as a major artist, and throughout the 1970s he built on his reputation with a series of critically acclaimed albums and live performances.
Morrison continues to record and tour, producing albums and live performances that sell well and are generally warmly received, sometimes collaborating with other artists, such as Georgie Fame and The Chieftains. In 2008, he performed Astral Weeks live for the first time since 1968.
Much of Morrison's music is structured around the conventions of soul music and R&B, such as the popular singles "Brown Eyed Girl,” "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile),” "Domino" and "Wild Night.”
An equal part of his catalog consists of lengthy, loosely connected, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz and stream-of-consciousness narrative, such as Astral Weeks and lesser-known works such as Veedon Fleece and Common One.
The two strains together are sometimes referred to as "Celtic Soul.”
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's “The Threepenny Opera” premiered in Berlin on this day in 1928 — 92 years ago today.
"I think I've written a good piece and that several numbers in it, at least musically, have the best prospects for becoming popular very quickly."
This was the assessment offered by the German composer Kurt Weill in a letter to his publisher 10 days before the premiere of the work. Created in partnership with the revolutionary dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera would, in fact, prove to be the most significant and successful of Weill's career and one of the most important works in the history of musical theater.
In addition to running for 400-plus performances in its original German production, Brecht and Weill's masterpiece would go on to be translated into 18 languages and receive more than 10,000 performances internationally.
The premiere of The Threepenny Opera came almost exactly 200 years after the premiere of the work on which it was based: John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.
In Gay's satirical original, the thieves, pickpockets and prostitutes of London's Newgate Prison competed for power and position in the accents and manners of the English upper classes.
It was Bertolt Brecht's idea to adapt The Beggar's Opera into a new work that would serve as a sharp political critique of capitalism and as a showcase for his avant-garde approach to theater.
Much of The Threepenny Opera's historical reputation rests on Brecht's experimental dramaturgical techniques — such as breaking "the fourth wall" between audience and performers — but the music of Kurt Weill was just as important in turning it into a triumph.
The drama critic for The New York Times said of Weill in 1941: "He is not a song writer but a composer of organic music that can bind the separate elements of a production and turn the underlying motive into song."
While this comment was intended as praise of Weill, who had by then fled his native Germany for the United States, it nevertheless sold Weill's songwriting somewhat short.
By 1959, Weill's opening song from The Threepenny Opera, "The Ballad of Mackie Messer" would be one of the biggest pop hits of all time for Bobby Darin in a jazzy variation inspired by Louis Armstrong and renamed, "Mack The Knife."
Thanks History.com
On this day in 1897 — 123 years ago — Thomas Edison received a patent for his movie camera, the Kinetograph.
Edison had developed the camera and its viewer in the early 1890s and staged several demonstrations. The camera was based on photographic principles discovered by still-photograph pioneers Joseph Nicephone Niepce and Louis Daguerre of France.
In 1877, inventor Edward Muybridge developed a primitive form of motion pictures when Leland Stanford, the governor of California, invited him to develop photo studies of animals in motion. Muybridge developed an ingenious system for photographing sequential motion, setting up 24 cameras attached to trip wires stretched across a racetrack.
As the horse tripped each wire, the shutters snapped. The resulting series of photos could be projected as something resembling a motion picture. This breakthrough in the early 1870s inspired another student of animal motion, Etienne Jules Marey of France, to develop in 1882 a rotating camera rather like a rifle, where different pictures were taken in a rapid sequence by a rotating cartridge.
Unlike these earlier cameras, Edison's Kinetoscope and Kinetograph used celluloid film, invented by George Eastman in 1889.
In February, 1893, Edison built a small movie studio that could be rotated to capture the best available sunlight. He showed the first demonstration of his films in May, 1893. It featured three of his workers pretending to be blacksmiths.
The invention inspired French inventors Louis and August Lumiere to develop a movie camera and projector, the Cinematographe, that allowed a large audience to view a film. Several other cameras and projectors were also developed in the late 1800s.
In 1898, Edison sued American Mutoscope and Biograph Pictures, claiming that the studio had infringed on his patent for the Kinetograph. He had entrusted the development of the machine to his assistant, W.L.K. Dickson, who left Edison's company in 1895 and helped found Biograph.
However, in 1902, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that although Thomas Edison had patented the Kinetograph, he only owned rights to the sprocket system that moved perforated film through the camera, not the entire concept of the movie camera.
In 1909, Edison and Biograph joined forces with other filmmakers to create the Motion Pictures Patents Company, an organization devoted to protecting patents and keeping other players from entering the film industry.
In 1917, the Supreme Court dissolved the trust, and the Edison Company left the film industry the same year.
Thanks History.com
Here, Thomas Edison demonstrates his motion picture technology.
James Coburn was born 92 years ago today.
A film and television actor, Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.
A capable, rough-hewn leading man, his toothy grin and lanky body made him a perfect tough-guy in numerous leading and supporting roles in Westerns and action films, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is for Heroes, The Great Escape, Major Dundee, Our Man Flint, Duck, You Sucker, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Cross of Iron.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he would cultivate an image synonymous with "cool,” and along with such contemporaries as Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson, became one of the prominent "tough-guy" actors of his day.
British Film critic David Thomson called Coburn “a modern rarity: an actor who projects lazy, humorous sexuality. It is the lack of neurosis, an impression of an amiable monkey, that makes him seem rather dated: a more perceptive Gable, perhaps, or even a loping Midwest Grant.
He has made a variety of flawed, pleasurable films, the merits of which invariably depend on his laconic presence. Increasingly, he was the best thing in his movies, smiling privately, seeming to suggest that he was in contact with some profound source of amusement.”
I spent a wonderful afternoon talking with Coburn at a friend’s wedding in the 1980s. He was a joyous, funny and charming man who could make a perfect stranger feel completely comfortable. I became a lifelong fan after that memorable day.
Coburn died of a heart attack on November 18, 2002, while listening to music in his Beverly Hills home. He was 74.
In the heat of summer, it’s easy to grab some ice cubes from the fridge and pour yourself a cold drink. But in earlier times, ice in the summer was a luxury for only the rich, and it was nonexistent in tropical climates.
One man from Boston changed that — and made a fortune in the process.
Frederic Tudor began in 1806 by harvesting ice from New England’s winter ponds (Walden Pond was one), packing it in sawdust and hay, and sending it south. His first shipment — about 130 tons that took a three-week journey to the Caribbean island of Martinique — melted fast when it got there.
Instead of giving up, Tudor decided to build insulated storage centers at the ports of his destinations. He primed the market by giving bartenders free ice. Once customers took a liking to it, he started to charge and a luxury product for southern climates was born.
Later, he began selling ice to butchers, dairymen and fishmongers. So a side effect of the ice market was the start of the age of refrigeration.
But Tudor’s biggest triumph may have been the 16,000-mile, 130-day voyage in 1833 that first brought ice to steamy India.
Thanks New York Times!
Alan Jay Lerner, a lyricist and librettist, was born 102 years ago today.
In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, and later, Burton Lane, Lerner created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre for both the stage and on film. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
Born in New York City, he was the son of Edith Adelson Lerner and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian and television game show panelist, Henry Morgan.
At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy. At Choate, they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, Lerner’s career in musical theater began in college. It was his contributions to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals that inspired his start.
During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied music composition at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.
Due to his injury, Lerner could not serve in World War II. Instead he wrote radio scripts, including Your Hit Parade. In 1942, he was introduced to Austrian composer, Frederick Loewe, who needed a partner at the Lamb's Club. While at the Lamb's, he also met, Lorenz Hart, who helped transform Lerner into his protégé.
Lerner and Loewe's first collaboration was a musical adaptation of Barry Conners's farce, The Patsy. It was for a Detroit stock company and called, Life of the Party. The lyrics were mostly written by Earle Crooker, but he had left the project, with the score needing vast improvement.
The show had a nine-week run and encouraged the duo to join forces with Arthur Pierson for, What's Up?, which opened on Broadway in 1943. It ran for 63 performances and was followed two years later by The Day Before Spring.
Their first hit, Brigadoon, came in 1947. It was a romantic fantasy set in a mystical Scottish village, directed by Robert Lewis. It was followed in 1951 by the less successful Gold Rush story, Paint Your Wagon. Lerner worked with Kurt Weill on the stage musical, Love Life (1948), and Burton Lane on the movie musical, Royal Wedding (1951).
In that same year, Lerner wrote the Oscar-winning original screenplay for An American in Paris, produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli. This was the same team who would later join with Lerner and Loewe to create Gigi.
In 1956, Lerner and Loewe unveiled My Fair Lady. Before finishing the musical, Lerner was eager to write while My Fair Lady was taking so long to complete. Burton Lane and Lerner were working on a musical about Li'l Abner. Gabriel Pascal owned the rights to Pygmalion, which had been unsuccessful with other composers who tried to adapt it into a musical.
Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz first tried, and then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II attempted, but gave up and Hammerstein told Lerner "Pygmalion had no subplot."
Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion retained his social commentary and added appropriate songs for the characters of Henry Higgins and Liza Doolittle, played originally by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It set box-office records in New York and London. When brought to the screen in 1964, the movie version would win eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison.
Lerner and Loewe's run of success continued with their next project, a film adaptation of stories from Colette, the Academy Award winning film musical, Gigi, starring Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier. The film won all of its nine Oscar nominations, a record at that point in time, and a special Oscar for co-star, Maurice Chevalier.
The Lerner-Loewe partnership cracked under the stress of producing Camelot in 1960, with Loewe resisting Lerner's desire to direct as well as write when original director Moss Hart suffered a heart attack in the last few months of rehearsals and died shortly after the show's premiere.
Lerner was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers while Loewe continued to have heart troubles. Camelot was a hit nonetheless, and immediately following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his widow told reporter Theodore H. White that JFK's administration reminded her of the "one brief shining moment" of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot.
As of the early 21st century, Camelot was still invoked to describe the idealism, romance, and tragedy of the Kennedy years.
Lerner's personal foibles were the stuff of tabloid legend. For nearly twenty years he battled an amphetamine addiction. During the 1960s, he was a patient of Max Jacobson, known as "Dr. Feelgood," who administered injections of "vitamins with enzymes" that were in fact laced with amphetamines. Lerner's addiction is believed to have been the result of Jacobson's practice.
Lerner died of lung cancer in Manhattan at the age of 67.
In the photo, Lerner and Frederick Loewe working in Oyster Bay, New York, 1960
