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on the men at the front, gave the folks back home vivid pictures of their lives that supplemented, or sometimes superseded, the heavily-censored letters that sometimes, sometimes not, made it home from the front.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.

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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.

In folk music there has always been a tradition of memorializing sensational events such as mining disasters, murders, and train wrecks in song, and the April 14-15, 1912 wreck of SS TITANIC was no exception. Within a few years of the tragedy, songwriters were making up and singing lyrics about it.

According to Newman I. White's 1928 publication AMERICAN NEGRO FOLKSONGS, the earliest lyrics about TITANIC were sung as early as 1915 or 1916 by black singers living in the Hackleburg, Alabama area. A later writer, Jeff Place, would comment in notes he contributed to THE AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY OF FOLK MUSIC that African Americans found it "noteworthy and ironic" that company policies of the White Star Line, the owners of TITANIC, kept people of color from sailing aboard her, and some attributed her sinking to divine retribution in consequence. This may account for these lyrics, some variant of which may be found in most versions: "But the Lord's almighty hand said this ship would never land/Oh it was sad when the great ship went down!"

The great North Carolina folklorist Frank C. Brown collected a variant in the mountains around 1920. However, the next fairly well-known version of the song was written, according to his Wikipedia biography, by Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman (1893-1968) in 1924. Pop Stoneman is better remembered nowadays as the father of fourteen children, some of whom became professional musicians themselves (the most famous being banjo-playing Roni, a member of the cast of HEE HAW for many years), but he was in his day quite a well-known singer and songwriter and arranger. Pop recorded his original version of "The Sinking of the TITANIC" for Edison Recordings in 1928. In the Wikipedia article, this song is said to be country music's first million selling record--a matter of some dispute, since the same is said of 1924's "The Prisoner's Song", recorded by light opera singer Marion Try Slaughter under the pseudonym Vernon Dalhart. Dalhart himself recorded a version of one TITANIC variant in the 1920s, under the title "The TITANIC (It Was Sad When that Great Ship Went Down)".

That line "it was sad when that great ship went down" appears in nearly all variants of the ballad. It's certainly a feature of the one recorded in the 1950s by Roy Claxton Acuff (1903-1992), the "King of Country Music." Roy Acuff had begun his career as a country singer in the 1930s, when a sunstroke followed by a nervous breakdown put paid to his dreams of a career in professional baseball. It was the sudden realization of the approaching anniversary of the sinking that reminded me of Mr. Roy's version of the song, sung in that mournful, full-out, often clueless as to key, but nonetheless beloved and distinctive voice of his. It's been playing on the soundtrack in my head for days now.

Mr. Roy's version is, at three verses and choruses, considerably shorter than others on the same theme, but it hits the high points about Monday morning ("about one o'clock") when the ship sank, about the retribution of God, and about the rich refusing to get into the lifeboats with the poor--although there is some reason to think this last may have had less to do with class distinctions than with fears that people trying to heave themselves out of the icy Atlantic waters into the lifeboats would capsize them. And, of course, there is this sentiment: "it was sad when that great ship went down."

It's a bit of a relief to turn to a somewhat lighter treatment of the sinking of TITANIC. The great North Carolina singer and guitarist Arthel "Doc" Watson recorded a song called "Travelin' Man" on his 1967 album BALLADS FROM DEEP GAP that tells a story of a hobo and gambler named Joe who, among other feats, just misses disaster on TITANIC, escaping her fate through superhuman powers:

Joe hoboed the great TITANIC, thought he'd try out the ocean blue,
When he seen that ol' iceberg comin', right off of that boat he flew!
All of them passengers hollered and laughed and said look at what a great big fool,
But while that ol' boat was sinkin' Joe was shootin' craps in Liverpool.

For more information about these songs and singers, check out their Wikipedia sites. The keywords "it was sad when that great ship went down" brings up nearly all of the song variants, while the names of the singers/songwriters bring up their biographies.

And yes, it IS still sad that that great ship went down. It has, however, become less of a tragedy that actually happened, I think, than a metaphor for any doomed enterprise that has the word "hubris" attached to it. Some have even applied it to the current Bush presidency; I'll leave it up to historians whether that's a premature designation or not.

And until next time, fair thee well.