ART NOTES - a collection of different works by the street artist Shepard Fairey - best known for his red-toned "Obama" image - will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts through August 16th.
BUSINESS NOTES - you're probably familiar with long term bonds but March 1st, a series will mature after .....135 years.
THE DEADLY PLANE CRASH recently in Buffalo highlighted how regional jets/turboprops have become ubiquitous in smaller-market airports this decade.
TUESDAY's CHILD #1 might be called Cooper the Camera Cat - a kitty whose random photos are shown at Seattle's Urban Light Studios (and which you can see at the link).
MUSIC NOTES - with Britain's Royal Opera planning to stage an opera around the life of Anna Nicole Smith - it isn't surprising that the libretto will be written by the co-creator of "Jerry Springer: The Opera".
IN a PROFILE of the film star Glenn Close - her journey to being a Democrat (who attended the inauguration) was interesting, considering her father was part of the right-wing Moral Rearmament group when she was a teenager.
SEPARATED at BIRTH #1 - French techno/dance keyboardist Gaspard Augé and Weird Al Yankovic.
 
ROMANCE NOTES - after reading accounts of how French President Sarkozy met Carla Bruni - an essayist imagines how some other famous power couples met.
IN COMMENTING ON the minimum wage in Britain, The Guardian notes that conservative pleas (how ending it would be best for all) inevitably spring up in difficult economic times. "When hard times arrive it's never long until somebody suggests that the return of prosperity requires sacrifices at the bottom of the heap".
ART NOTES #2 - a collection entitled Becoming Edvard Munch is at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois through April 26th.
BETTER LATE than NEVER - the goverment of Switzerland is to return $6 million from bank accounts held by Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier to Haiti; nearly twenty-three years after that dictator fled into exile.
TUESDAY's CHILD #2 is a Houston grey-tiger kitten rescued from a Houston, Texas freeway overpass some 80 feet above the ground. The video concludes, as the Law of Clichés demands it must ... with the cat meowing.
BOOK NOTES - a new memoir by the 92 year-old UK singer Vera Lynn - who sang "We'll Meet Again" and "The White Cliffs of Dover" - says she was so eager to help the cause that she wrote personal messages on thousands of portrait photographs for soldiers in battle. Many of the wives and girlfriends of soldiers who later received them couldn't believe she would have been so kind to a stranger, so she was regularly accused of having affairs with men she had not actually met.
SEPARATED at BIRTH #2 - two European ministers: Iceland's new PM Johanna Sigurdardottir and Mary Hanafin: Ireland's Minister for Social and Family Affairs.
 
......and for a song of the day ....................................... it might be worth looking at the careers of John Lomax and his son Alan - two musicologists who worked for the Library of Congress (bearing one of their tape recorders) during the 1930's-1940's and were responsible for bringing the music of Leadbelly and many other musicians from the rural South to prominence (and in his later years Alan did so for non-American music as well). Few figures deserve greater credit for the preservation of America's folk music traditions.
Mississippi native John Lomax (photo left) grew up in Texas before 1900 and while a dutiful student loved transcribing cowboy songs. His professors at the University of Texas dissuaded him from that, and he became the school's registrar after graduation. He went for his master's at Harvard in 1906 and - this time - received encouragement from the faculty.
He returned to UT to teach English and in 1910 published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads with a foreword from .... President Theodore Roosevelt. But Lomax lost his job in 1917 as a result of a feud between state and university politics, and he relocated to Chicago, spending years in banking.
It wasn't until 1933 (after the death of his wife) that his sons convinced him to resume his musicology interest, and he (along with Alan) began an association with the Library of Congress (based on John's sterling academic credentials). They met up with Huddie 'Leadbelly' Ledbetter in Louisiana's notorious Angola Prison but - on the acclaim to the recordings they made - helped convince the governor to commute Leadbelly's sentence. One reason why John Lomax sought prisoners was his belief that those isolated from recent musical trends would be more likely to have preserved pure folk songs. John Lomax also oversaw recordings by Spanish speakers along the Rio Grande and French-speaking Acadians in Louisiana.
John Lomax published several books and received many honors before his death in January, 1948 at age 79. Leadbelly performed at the University of Texas as a tribute.
His son Alan Lomax (photo right) was born in Austin, Texas in 1915 and worked with his father for seven years. When John curtailed his workload after passing age 70 in 1940, Alan continued and expanded their fieldwork. He also recorded known performers in jazz (Jelly Roll Morton) and after WW-II he sat down with Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Big Bill Broonzy and recorded their recollections. After hosting several radio programs, he relocated to England in 1950.
Alan Lomax documented traditional British folksongs for much of the decade (as well as recordings in Spain and Italy). Upon his return Stateside he befriended musicians from bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell to Woodie Guthrie before turning to the West Indies, with English, Spanish and French recordings as a result. As technologies increased in the 1970's, he began videotaping performers and turned more to lecturing, writing and helping to collect their old recordings for preservation digitally.
Alan Lomax continued his work (Rounder Records issued a 100-CD series showcasing Lomax's most legendary field recordings) until his death just this decade (July, 2002) at the age of 87. In 2000 he was named as a Library of Congress Living Legend recipient.
And Brian Eno - in liner notes to the 1997 Alan Lomax Collection Sampler on Rounder - believes that Alan Lomax help paved the way for the acceptance of "world music".
 
As a thirteen year-old, I recall listening to a friend's copy of the second album by Grand Funk Railroad and was intrigued (even at that age) by the writer's credits for a song about prison life. It was the only song not written by the band, and Inside Looking Out listed four names as co-writers. I recognized "E. Burdon" as Eric Burdon (then in "War") and some years later I learned that "B. Chandler" was Bryan (Chas) Chandler - his bandmate in The Animals from a few years earlier. It turned out that the Grand Funk version was a cover of a 1966 Animals tune (though it was done in a much heavier, slower tone).
It was not until years later that I learned that The Animals performed a traditional prison song Rosie - which is how the Animals referred to it live - until they wrote new lyrics for their 1966 studio recording (at which point they changed the title to "Inside Looking Out").
I can't find a YouTube of the far more polished, renamed single - but if you want to see a 1965 "Shindig" show, at this link is their primitive version of "Rosie": yet you can hear that trademark blues riff that Grand Funk made famous three years later. The lyrics below are from the Animal's studio version, which Grand Funk altered somewhat on their 1969 version.
Oh, and the other two writer's credits? Since it was unclear who originally wrote "Rosie" (and would have been in the public domain by then, anyway) - possibly as a tribute: The Animals first listed "J(ohn) Lomax" and "A(lan) Lomax" as co-writers.
Sitting here lonely like a
broken man
Spend my time doing the
best I can
Walls and bars, they
surround me
But I don't want your
sympathy
I just need your tender loving
To keep me sane in this burning oven
When my time is up, be my reason
Like Adam's work on God's green earth
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