Listen to the wind, wonder what he's sayin'
See that willow bend, everything is swayin'
Seems to be a sadness in the sighin' of the wind. . .

Last night I was in the kitchen, doing danged if I remember what (as an insomniac, I'm often cleaning at hours when normal people sleep) and found myself singing a song from an old "singing cowboy" film. It was originally performed by the legendary western group The Sons of the Pioneers; it was written by their baritone singer and principal songwriter, the incomparable Bob Nolan.

I would, if pressed, say that Hank Williams Sr. is my very favorite songwriter, but Bob Nolan would run him a very close second. Bob Nolan is a fascinating character in his own right. Born Clarence Robert Nobles on April 13th, 1908, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he apparently lost his mother at an early age. He and his father, Harry, moved to Tucson, Arizona when Bob was thirteen, by which time Harry had changed their last name from Nobles to Nolan. He began his singing career in the Chautaqua tent show movement. In 1933, he joined two other young singers named Leonard Slye and Tim Spencer to form The Pioneer Trio. Later, augmented by brothers Hugh and Karl Farr, they changed the group's name to The Sons of the Pioneers. Leonard Slye would go on to even greater fame as "singing cowboy" star Roy Rogers; Tim Spencer would gain fame as the writer of such hits as "Roomful of Roses" and "Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women," but Nolan was the author of most of their greatest original songs.

Wonder where he goes, darlin' can you hear me
Something that he knows seems to bring you near me
Thought I heard you whisper in the sighin' of the wind. . .

Nolan and the other band members (who of course changed over the years; for a short time Ken Curtis, most famous for his role as Festus on the TV series GUNSMOKE, was a member) appeared in a number of B movies with both Roy Rogers and his rival, Gene Autry. In 1934, Nolan provided vocals for the cowboy star Ken Maynard in a film called IN OLD SANTA FE; Maynard was no singer. Nolan himself had the most distinctive voice of any of the Sons. It's a hard voice to explain: a resonant baritone with a tonality that was not quite nasal. The closest any other singer I ever heard come to Nolan's vocals would undoubtedly be his fellow Canadian, Hank Snow, whose voice was of a slightly higher range.

Among the hits Nolan wrote for the Sons were "Cool Water," possibly the most often covered of all their songs; "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" which began life as a poem called "Tumbling Leaves", written as Nolan watched autumn leaves fall past the window of his apartment and then rewritten for a film of the same name; and the one I've been quoting (and singing for hours now), called simply "Wind."

Sets my weary heart a-longin', yearnin', dreamin'
Starlight lost its meanin' since you went away. . .

Nolan retired from The Sons of the Pioneers in 1949 and lived out the remaining three decades of his life as a semi-recluse. In the last year of his life he made a final solo recording, an album called THE SOUND OF A PIONEER. A Chattanooga radio station whose call letters I've forgotten used to play classic country, folk, bluegrass and western music on Sunday afternoons; a favorite around that time was this last record of Nolan's. His voice was noticeably weaker than it was in the old days, but his writing was still poetic, full of picturesque imagery, as evidenced by the best-known song from those sessions, "He Walks with the Wild and Lonely." He died on June 16th (my birthday, incidentally) in 1980.

Now he's turnin' cold, wonder if he's lonely
Winter in my soul, longin' for you only
Can't you hear me callin' in the sighin' of the wind. . .

The Sons of the Pioneers probably recorded "Wind" more than once in their career, but my favorite version is from a reissue with full orchestration called COOL WATER AND SEVENTEEN TIMELESS FAVORITES. They used their voices and dynamics to stunning effect to reproduce the ebb and swell of the wind.

It would take a full page to list all the Halls of Fame of which Bob Nolan is a member: the Country Music Hall of Fame, various songwriters' halls of fame, western music halls of fame. His influence and that of The Sons of the Pioneers can still be heard in the singing of groups like The Sons of the San Joaquin and, most notably, Riders in the Sky.

And until next time (and maybe another Bob Nolan tune), fair thee well.

I've spent the past few days frantically watching cable news (where they tend to cover odder stuff than the regular networks) and searching the Web for stories about Madame Sadie. I know from watching THE COLBERT REPORT that she never made it to Philadelphia, where he taped his show last week; there was never a little old wonky lady in the audience, waving a sign covered with obscene suggestions at him.

Imagine my horror when I learned THIS: those Maryland state troopers went back to the site of the abandoned Bud Light truck outside Sharpsburg, only to find IT WAS GONE!

OMG, MADAME'S JOYRIDING IN A SEMI FULL OF BUD LIGHT!!!!

I have no idea which way she'll head next. I thought she'd just hold her seance at Antietam with such ghosts as didn't run for cover and then finagle her way home--possibly with another trucker, possibly with another guy on a Harley.

I have a feeling she may turn up once she manages to drink up her stock. Until then--

IF YOU SEE THIS WOMAN, RUN!!!!!!!



If I hear a semi rumbling down the creek and up the holler in the next couple of nights, I'll know for sure--

but until then, fair thee well!!

May I bore you more than usual for a few minutes today?

I'm always fascinated by the thought processes that lead to the posting of a blog. This one started last night, with Keith Olbermann trying to do an impression of Dick Cheney cracking wise at some sort of press dinner the other night. At a messageboard where I occasionally post hillbilly political commentary but more often just BS, one member commented that Olbermann's impression was more like Burgess Meredith on the old BATMAN series than Cheney. Another member recalled that Meredith had played the legendary WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle in a movie. In turn, that reminded me that today is the anniversary of Pyle's death.

In these days of electronic media, when our troops serving overseas can in the blink of an eye post some of the details of their lives in combat zones on Myspace or put video up on YouTube or make calls by cell phones, we have lost what Ernie Pyle meant to the boys at the front in WWII, let alone to mothers, fathers, sweethearts and wives on the home front. There were other great correspondents: Edward R. Murrow, Quentin Reynolds, Don Whitehead, Cornelius Ryan--but Ernie Pyle was different. Other correspondents tended to travel with the staffs of generals (if I remember right, Don Whitehead parachuted in with the airborne while assigned to General James "Jumpin' Jim" Gavin's HQ). Ernie Pyle was "embedded" with troops, as some correspondents are yet, but there were no TV cameras with Ernie; just his old battered manual typewriter and his gift for making friends and his gift for words. He lived in tents and bunkers with the men, shared their food, bathed when he could, slept when he could. And he wrote.

Ernie Pyle, by concentrating on the men at the front, gave the folks back home vivid pictures of their lives that supplemented, or sometimes superseded, the heavily-censored letters that sometimes, sometimes not, made it home from the front. One of his most moving columns was written in 1943, from the deserts of North Africa. He was describing a column of men crossing the sands:

"The men were walking. They were fifty feet apart for dispersal. They were dead weary. . .They didn't slouch. It was the terrible deliberation of each step that spelled out their appalling tiredness. Their faces were black and unshaved. They were young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion made them look middleaged. In their eyes as they passed was no expression of hatred, no excitement, no despair, no tonic of their victory, there was just the simple expression of being there--as if they had been there doing that forever and ever--and nothing else."

With the war in Europe winding down in the spring of 1945, Ernie Pyle came home to the US, but soon went back to reporting, this time from the Pacific, where the war would rage on until August. On April 18, while embedded with the 77th Infantry Division on a godforsaken hunk of rock called Ie Shima, Ernie was killed by a Japanese sniper. He was forty-four, but looked older.

Pyle was originally buried on Okinawa, but was eventually returned to American soil and reinterred in a military cemetery in Honolulu. The men of the 77th Infantry, though, put a monument to him up after the war, on Ie Shima. It reads, in its entirety: ON THIS SPOT, THE 77TH INFANTRY DIVISION LOST A BUDDY ERNIE PYLE APRIL 18th, 1945.

Until next time, fair thee well.

Today is another grim anniversary, as it happens: the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Variously estimated at between 7.8 and 8.3 (the Richter scale didn't exist then) it devastated San Francisco on a scale that would not be matched by natural disaster until Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans.

The great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, as it happens, was in San Francisco that day, scheduled to perform that night at the Opera House. He and his conductor stumbled out of their damaged hotel into the street, where the singer became so agitated that his conductor ordered him to sing, to try to calm him. So it was that people, staggering in shock, some of them dying, heard that incomparable voice rising above the dust, smoke and rubble. It must have seemed a hallucination: could they truly be hearing what a later historian would call "one astonishing grace note"?

Another person, one who saw the devastation firsthand and was witness to the recovery and rebuilding efforts, would remark of the inevitable changes that came in the wake of such destruction: "It is as if a pretty frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different."

For a firsthand account, go to http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Short/00000015.htm

The quote above was taken from this long piece, written by Will Irwin on April 21, 1906.

And now I really am gonna quit boring you!! Till next time, that is. . .

You remember how Fairweather told you Madame Sadie had this thing for Stephen Colbert. He’s up in Pennsylvania this week covering the big political situation.
Madame Sadie has been frantic trying to get some of us to go on another road trip with her and, fortunately for Colbert, striking out.
However, I have been getting calls since late last night saying that she was sighted over at the local truck stop trying to convince one of the truckers heading north to give her a lift. Now Aunt Ornery and I have told many of those boys and girls not to do it. An easy enough thing since most of the local ones are related to us. But the ones I’m worried about are the guys from out of town who don’t know what she’s like.



(continued later)
OMG! She done convinced one of the out of towners to take her with him on the next leg of his route. Straight toward Colbert. And worst of all—he drives a Bud Light truck.

I hope he keeps that thing locked up or there will be none left when he gets where he’s going.

More as we hear what happens. Keep your ears open folks in case you hear before we do.


UPDATE: An abandoned Bud Light truck has been spotted not far from the old Antietam battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland.

State troopers have linked this to a young truck driver who threw himself in through the front door of their station earlier. He was babbling about "that crazy ol' bat" and Bud Light and ghost hunters.

He has been hospitalized for further observation, a spokesperson for the Maryland state police added.

**********************************************************************

Fairweather here. I KNEW this would happen from the moment Willard told me Madame had managed to hitch north. Lord help us all, I wonder how far out of his way that young driver had to go to get to Sharpsburg.

If I know Sadie, she's gonna go in there and pretend she's communicating with the dead of Antietam. She's always wanted to hold a seance on a Civil War battlefield.

There is a good side to this. She's stalled on the way, which means we needn't worry about Stephen Colbert's safety for one more day, at least.

On the downside, the ghosts at Antietam are gonna move to Gettysburg unless a miracle happens.

I got a sick feeling in my stomach. We should've gone with her.

A few days ago I looked out the front window and saw that Mom's lilac bush is in bloom. It's quite old and no longer blooms luxuriantly as it once did, but it retains its sweet perfume--and it reminded me of a poem that begins

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

This poem was written by the American poet Walt Whitman as an elegy for President Abraham Lincoln, who died on the morning of April 15, 1865, some nine hours after he was shot at Washington D.C.'s Ford's Theater by the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

When word came of Lincoln's death, Whitman was home visiting his mother in Brooklyn, New York. He had spent the war as a nurse in various military hospitals and in several low-paying jobs in government departments in D.C. His immediate reaction to the news of Lincoln's murder is detailed in Geoffrey Ward, Ric Burns and Ken Burns' companion book to the PBS series THE CIVIL WAR: "Mother prepared breakfast--and other meals--as usual, but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper, morning and evening. . .and passed them silently to each other."

And apparently, that April morning, lilacs were blooming outside his mother's door, and their purplish-pinkish blossoms would be the keynote of his poem:

. . .mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you, O death.)

Lilies are the traditional flowers of mourning, but Whitman found no inspiration in them. I will, after rereading his poem, never quite look at lilacs the same way again.