Frank Beacham's Journal

Night Fishing at Antibes, 1939

Painting by Pablo Picasso

Night Fishing at Antibes is a night scene of two men fishing in a boat.

There's a figure crouching with a spear, wearing a blue striped shirt, an article of clothing that's often identified with Picasso himself. It’s a code for the artist's persona.

His companion, to the left, is looking, peering deep into the water over the side of the boat, and has this hairy mane and patch of hair on top of his head that suggests the mythological character of the minotaur. This recurs in Picasso’s early work through the late 1930s.

In the upper left corner of the painting are purplish rocks, which also suggest architecture. The twinkling stars in the sky that flow clockwise to the other side of the bay lead to two women who are watching the men fish.

One of them is the artist Dora Maar, Picasso's then-companion. The other is eating an ice cream cone, a two-scoop ice cream cone, and holding her bike, while the other seems to be waving for their attention.

Night Fishing at Antibes is an important painting in Picasso's career, if only for the fact that it's the first major painting that he made after his great Spanish Civil War protest, "Guernica."

In the painting, two men in the evening are plumbing the depths of a different world, of a different realm, the underworld, in fact.

The painting suggests that there are really important themes that he's dealing with that have to do perhaps with the Spanish Civil War about mortality, about his own mortality cycles of life and death.

From Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Alan Lomax was born 108 years ago today

Alan Lomax was born 108 years ago today.

Lomax was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian and filmmaker.

Lomax produced recordings, concerts and radio shows in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s.

During the New Deal, with his father — famed folklorist and collector, John A. Lomax — and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.

After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy and Spain, as well as the United States.

He always used the latest recording technology available, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture.

With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward.

He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, The Global Jukebox).

Cantometrics, or “song measurements,” is a method developed by Lomax for relating elements of the world's traditional folk songs to features of human social organization.

In the 1970s and 80s, Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991.

In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation and forced labor in the American South.

In January, 2012, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that they would release Lomax's vast archive in digital form.

Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project called the Global Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes and 5,000 photographs.

By February, 2012, 17,000 music tracks from his archived collection were made available for free streaming, and later some of that music was for sale as CDs or digital downloads.

Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online. This is material from Alan Lomax’s independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by the Association for Cultural Equity.

This is distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress.

This earlier collection — which includes Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax’s prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center at the library of Congress.

On August 24, 1997, at a concert at Wolf Trap, in Vienna, Virginia, Bob Dylan had this to say about Lomax, who had helped introduce him to folk music and whom he had known as a young man in Greenwich Village :

“There is a distinguished gentlemen here who came … I want to introduce him — named Alan Lomax. I don’t know if many of you have heard of him [ Audience applause. ] Yes, he’s here, he’s made a trip out to see me. I used to know him years ago. I learned a lot there and Alan … Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we’ve got anybody to thank, it’s Alan. Thanks, Alan.”

Here, Lomax is interviewed by the late Charles Kuralt in 1991

Alan Lomax and crew filming Dink and Julia Roberts, Haw River, N.C., 1983

Photo by CeCe Conway

Lomax recording with Mohawk Midget Recorder

Alan Lomax: A Personal Remembrance

By age 17, Alan Lomax began traveling with his father, John Lomax, throughout the American south and the Caribbean for the Library of Congress to make what are considered some of the most important early recordings of American culture.

According to Don Fleming with the Association for Cultural Equity, Lomax primarily traveled with a Ampex 601-2 audio tape recorder and two RCA 77-D microphones.

He also carried a camera, taking photographs that matched his field recordings in places like the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Scotland, England, Ireland and all over the Caribbean, Italy and Spain.

Lomax used a variety of gear over the years, always upgrading to the latest, smallest and best equipment. When he began, he used a disk cutter in his vehicle and powered it using batteries in the trunk.

In the early 1950s, he tried a Mohawk Midget Recorder, the first all-transistor audio recorder weighing only three pounds. It used a proprietary one-hour tape cartridge since there were no standardized tape cartridges on those days.

In about 1994, I was sent a review sample of a new Sony digital recorder called the NT-1, or the “Scoopman.” It weighed almost nothing and used a digital tape the size of a postage stamp.

Sony NT-1 Scoopman Recorder

Confronted with reviewing it and looking for an unusual angle, I called Alan Lomax on the phone and asked if I could show it to him. (I always wanted to meet him anyway and this was the opportunity!) As I expected, he was curious and couldn’t say no. Like a little kid, he invited me over to his office — “right now.”

I drove to his office at Hunter College in New York City and showed him this recording marvel. He was astounded and mused if he had only had one a few years earlier.

Lomax was a very friendly man and took me on a tour, showing me his old recording gear and his meticulous records — both audio and photographic. I marveled at how thorough his photographic notes were. Every detail was perfectly documented.

Then, he showed me his Global Jukebox project, which he was doing with the help of Apple. Unfortunately, what he wanted to do would have to wait on the further development of the Internet — something that really emerged after his death in 2002.

After that first meeting, Lomax and I stayed in touch. He even tried to hire me to work on his Global Jukebox project. I had to turn him down, something I still regret to this day.

Lomax documented all his work on 35mm film

Charlie Musselwhite is 79 years old today

Charlie Musslewhite, New York City, Dec. 3, 2017

Photo by Frank Beacham

Charlie Musselwhite is 79 years old today.

An electric blues harmonica player and bandleader, Musselwhite is one of the non-black bluesmen who came to prominence in the early 1960s, along with Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield.

Though he has often been identified as a "white bluesman,” he claims Native American heritage. Musselwhite was reportedly the inspiration for Dan Aykroyd's character in the Blues Brothers.

Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. In a 2005 interview, he said his mother told him he was Cherokee. His family considered it normal to play music, with his father playing guitar and harmonica, his mother playing piano and a relative who was a one-man band.

At the age of three, Musselwhite moved to Memphis. When he was a teenager, Memphis experienced the period when rockabilly, western swing, and electric blues and other forms of African American music were combining to give birth to rock and roll.

The period featured Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, as well as lesser known musicians such as Gus Cannon, Furry Lewis, Will Shade and Johnny Burnette.

Musselwhite supported himself by digging ditches, laying concrete and running moonshine in a 1950 Lincoln automobile. This environment was Musselwhite's school for music as well as life, and he acquired the nickname, "Memphis Charlie."

In true bluesman fashion, Musselwhite then took off in search of the rumored "big-paying factory jobs" up the "Hillbilly Highway," the Highway 51 to Chicago, where he continued his education on the South Side.

There he made the acquaintance of even more legends including Lew Soloff, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter and Big Walter Horton.

Musselwhite immersed himself completely in the musical life, living in the basement of, and occasionally working at Jazz Record Mart (the record store operated by Delmark Records founder, Bob Koester) with Big Joe Williams.

Musselwhite also worked as a driver for an exterminator, which allowed him to observe what was happening around the city's clubs and bars. He spent his time hanging out at the Jazz Record Mart at the corner of State and Grand and the nearby bar, Mr. Joe's, with the city's blues musicians, and sitting in with Big Joe Williams and others in the clubs, playing for tips.

There he forged a lifelong friendship with John Lee Hooker. Though Hooker lived in Detroit, the two often visited each other. Hooker served as best man at Musselwhite's third marriage. Gradually, Musselwhite became well known around town.

In time, Musselwhite led his own blues band, and, after Elektra Records' success with Paul Butterfield, he released the legendary Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite's Southside Band album in 1966 on Vanguard Records (as "Charley Musselwhite"), to immediate and great success.

He took advantage of the clout this album gave him to move to San Francisco, where, instead of being one of many competing blues acts, he held court as the king of the blues in the exploding countercultural music scene, an exotic and gritty figure to the flower children.

Musselwhite even convinced Hooker to move out to California.

Since then, Musselwhite has released over 20 albums, as well as guesting on albums by many other musicians, such as Bonnie Raitt's, Longing in Their Hearts, and The Blind Boys of Alabama's, Spirit of the Century. He also appeared on Tom Waits' Mule Variations and INXS' Suicide Blonde.

Musselwhite was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2010.

Here, Musselwhite performs “Gone Too Long” in 2006

Franz Schubert, Austrian composer, was born 226 years ago today

Franz Schubert, Austrian composer, was born 226 years ago today.

Schubert died at 31, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music.

Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death.

Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works.

Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late classical era and early romantic era and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.

Marcus Mumford is 36 years old today

Marcus Mumford, Cardiff, Wales, Dec. 14, 2012

Photo by Mike Lewis

Marcus Mumford is 36 years old today.

Mumford is an English-American singer, songwriter, musician and producer who is lead singer of Mumford & Sons. He also plays a number of instruments with the group, including guitar, drums and mandolin.

Born in Orange, California to English parents, he has held both British and U.S. citizenship from birth. Mumford's family moved back to their native England when Marcus was six months old. He grew up in Wimbledon Chase, southwest London, and attended King's College School in Wimbledon.

There he met future fellow band member, Ben Lovett. He returned to London to focus on his music career after his first year of study at the University of Edinburgh. It was in Edinburgh that he penned most of Mumford & Sons' debut album, Sigh No More.

He began his musical career playing drums for Laura Marling on tour, along with the other current members of Mumford & Sons. It was through touring with Marling and gaining experience playing gigs, as well as experimenting with his early writing that they decided to form the band in 2007.

Mumford and Sons third album, Wilder Mind, was released in May, 2015.

Here, Mumford and Sons perform “Little Lion Man”

Marvin Junior, founding member of the Dells, was born 86 years ago today

Marvin Junior, 2002

Photo by John Watkins

Marvin Junior, founding member of the Dells, was born 86 years ago today.

Junior sang baritone for the Dells for a half a century. The Chicago-based doo-wop and rhythm-and-blues group was formed when he and most of its other members were in high school in the early 1950s.

“Iron Throat” is what David Ruffin, the former lead singer of the Temptations, once called Junior. “Two tons of fun” is what he called himself. He grew up hoping to be the next Ray Charles and eventually inspired other singers, including Teddy Pendergrass.

Junior’s voice was huge and versatile — it often reached into tenor territory — and it held up through more than two dozen albums and 57 years of performing. Unlike some other acts of their era, the Dells had no angry breakups and few personnel changes.

“They grew up together and they never let the industry separate them,” Junior’s son said of the group. “They didn’t let anybody separate them.”

Junior wrote the Dells’ first hit, “Oh What a Nite,” with the group’s Johnny Funches. Originally released in 1956, it was rerecorded with a new arrangement in 1969 and released as “Oh, What a Night.”

Many more hits would follow, including “Stay in My Corner,” which was originally released in 1965 and also rerecorded and released again in 1969. The reworked versions of both songs went to #1 on the Billboard R&B chart and reached the Top 10 on the pop chart.

The Dells consisted of five members: a trio of harmony singers (Verne Allison, Mickey McGill and Chuck Barksdale for a vast majority of the group’s existence) and the baritone-falsetto counterpoint of Junior and Johnny Carter, a former member of the Flamingos, who replaced Funches in 1960.

Junior died of kidney and heart problems on May 29, 2013.

Here, the Dells perform the 1969 classic, “Oh What a Night”

Norman Mailer was born 100 years ago today

Norman Mailer (late summer, 2007, four months before his death)

Photo by Frank Beacham

Norman Mailer was born 100 years ago today.

A novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate, Mailer’s first novel was The Naked and the Dead published in 1948.

His best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer's book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.

Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction — a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism.

In 1955, Mailer and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. He wrote a column there from January to April, 1956.

Mailer's famous essay, The White Negro (1957), "analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider and hipster." It is one of the most anthologized, and controversial, essays of the postwar period. Mailer republished it in 1959 in a collection of essays entitled Advertisements for Myself.

Mailer's contributions to the New Journalism include major books such as The Armies of the Night (1968), awarded a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize; Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968); Of a Fire on the Moon (1971) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971).

Hallmarks of these works are a highly subjective style and a great application of techniques from fiction. This was not common at the time in journalism.

Mailer died of acute renal failure on November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 84.

Here, Mailer and Gore Vidal feud on the Dick Cavett Show

Philip Glass, composer, is 86 years old today

Philip Glass, composer, is 86 years old today.

Glass is considered one of the most influential music makers of the late 20th century. His work is also often controversially described as minimal music. He has distanced himself from the "minimalist" label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures."

Though his early mature music shares much with what is normally called "minimalist," he has since evolved stylistically.

Currently, he describes himself as a "classicist," pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.

Glass is a prolific composer. He has written works for the musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (with which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, ten symphonies, eleven concertos, solo works, chamber music including string quartets and instrumental sonatas and film scores.

Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.

Here, Patti Smith and Glass perform a work by Allen Ginsberg

Tallulah Bankhead was born 121 years ago today

Tallulah Bankhead was born 121 years ago today.

Bankhead was an actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host and bonne vivante. She was also known for her deep voice, flamboyant personality and support of liberal causes, which broke with the tendency of Southern Democrats at the time to support a more conservative agenda.

She came from the powerful Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party in the South, in general, and Alabama, in particular.

Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead.

In her autobiography, Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain.

"I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher," Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright."

At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and persuaded her family to let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a nonspeaking role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and was known as a hard-partying girl-about-town.

During this time, she began to use cocaine and marijuana, going as far as saying, "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." However, she did not consume alcohol to any great degree. She also became known for her outspokenness.

Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest made a comment about rape, and Bankhead reportedly replied, "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel."

She professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw," she said.

Once, at a party, one of her friends brought along a young man who boldly told Bankhead that he wanted to make love to her that night. She did not bat an eye and said, "And so you shall, you wonderful, old-fashioned boy."

Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Hattie McDaniel and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta and singer Billie Holiday.

Actress Patsy Kelly claimed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant.

John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate. She insisted that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated), but Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."

Bankhead never publicly described herself as being bisexual. She did, however, describe herself as "ambisextrous.”

On December 12, 1968, Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan at 66. The cause of death was pleural pneumonia, complicated by emphysema, malnutrition and possibly a strain of the Hong Kong flu which was running worldwide at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were, "Codeine ... bourbon."

Here, Bankhead, in an episode of “I Love Lucy,” explains to Lucy that she's allergic to strawberries in this lost scene from "The Celebrity Next Door" from 1957

Zane Grey, author of Riders of the Purple Sage, was born 151 years ago today

Zane Grey, author of Riders of the Purple Sage, was born 151 years ago today.

The son of a successful dentist in Zanesville, Ohio, Grey enjoyed a happy and solid upper middle class childhood, marred only by occasional fistfights with boys who teased him about his unusual first name, Pearl. (Grey later replaced it with his mother's maiden name, Zane.)

A talented baseball player as a teen, Grey caught the eye of a scout for the University of Pennsylvania college team, who convinced him to study there. In 1886, he graduated with a degree in dentistry and moved to New York to begin his practice.

Grey's interest in dentistry was half-hearted at best, and he did not relish the idea of replicating his father's safe but unexciting career path. Searching for an alternative, Grey decided to try his hand at writing. His first attempt was an uninspiring historical novel about a family ancestress.

At that point, Grey might well have been doomed to a life of dentistry, had he not met Colonel C. J. "Buffalo" Jones in 1908, who convinced Grey to write Jones' biography. More importantly, Jones took him out West to gather material for the book, and Grey became deeply fascinated with the people and landscape of the region.

Grey's biography of Jones debuted in 1908 as The Last of the Plainsmen. It got little attention, but Grey was inspired to concentrate his efforts on writing historical romances of the West. In 1912, he published the novel that earned him lasting fame, Riders of the Purple Sage.

Like the equally popular Owen Wister novel, The Virginian (1902), the basic theme of Riders revolves around the transformation of a weak and effeminate easterner into a man of character and strength through his exposure to the culture and land of the American West.

Grey's protagonist, the Ohio-born Bern Venters, spends several weeks being tested by the rugged canyon country of southern Utah before finding his way back to civilization. Venters, Grey writes, "had gone away a boy — he had returned a man."

Though Riders of the Purple Sage was Grey's most popular novel, he wrote 78 other books during his prolific career, most of them Westerns. He died in 1939, but Grey's work continued to be extraordinarily popular for decades to come, and by 1955, his books had sold more than 31 millions copies around the world.

With the possible exception of Riders, today Grey's books are little read, and most modern readers find them insufferably pompous, moralizing and sentimental.

Nonetheless, Grey played a pivotal role in creating the Western genre that, in the hands of more recent authors like Louis L'Amour, continues to charm many dedicated fans.

Thanks History.com