Podcasts about african american vernacular english

A new Georgia Tech and Stanford study shows automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, used in voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, may not be as accurate when transcribing English speakers with a minority dialect. However, the study found the transcription of Standard American English (SAE) "significantly outperformed" three dialects: Spanglish, Chicano English and African American Vernacular English. We revisit Rose’s conversation with Camille Harris, PhD candidate in computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology, and lead author of the study. Harris discusses some of the key findings from her study. Plus, Elizabeth J. West, a professor of English and co-director of Georgia State University’s Center for Studies on Africa and Its Diaspora, and her research partners, Dr. Joshua Jackson and John Washington discuss a mapping project that could be used to reveal the locations of where more than 5,000 enslaved persons and their enslavers lived in Harris County before the Civil War.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Donald Trump has signed a wide range of executive orders since taking office on Monday. Some of those orders are already drawing lawsuits and criticism from cities, states and advocacy groups. Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, returns to “Closer Look” to explain Trump’s executive orders, policy proposals and their potential implications. Plus, according to the Migration Policy Institute, roughly 98,000 undocumented students nationwide graduate from high school each year in the U.S. About 3,000 of which are from Georgia. However, data also suggests undocumented students face barriers and challenges when it comes to attending college. In an effort to help, TheDream.U.S. offers scholarships, and students can apply now. Dr. Hyein Lee, the COO of TheDream.US, talks more about the history and mission of her organization and its scholarship opportunities. Lastly, a new Georgia Tech and Stanford study shows automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, used in voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, may not be as accurate when transcribing English speakers with a minority dialect. However, the study found the transcription of Standard American English (SAE) "significantly outperformed" three dialects: Spanglish, Chicano English and African American Vernacular English. Camille Harris, PhD candidate in computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology, and lead author of the study, discusses some of the key findings from her study. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week your BFF's talk Black telekinesis, what makes A.A.V.E. (African American Vernacular English) so special and how we plan to stop being so hard on ourselves in 2025 - because honestly, life is already hard enough. Make the haters mad and rate us 5 stars. We want to connect with you more! Send us an email with your thoughts/comments about the show: BlackFatFemmePod@gmail.com. Also, don't forget to watch and subscribe on YouTube!  Follow the show on social: Instagram | BlueSky | Tik-Tok  Follow DoctorJonPaul:  BlueSky | Instagram | Website | Tik-Tok  Follow Jordan: Instagram | Website | Tik-Tok   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

可以搜索公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】或者添加【luluxjg】咨询课程or加入社群，查看文稿和其他精彩内容哦~ In today's Buzzword Mix, our Buzzword is Woke. Now I have to confess this word has been sitting in my script for some time. I've been having the hardest time trying to decide whether I wanna talk about this word or not. 其实这个词我一直都想讲, 但一直都在犹豫, 主要是因为这个词后面的争议太大, 而且它的倾向性和内涵一直都在变迁。虽然它是美国乃至英语国家, 甚至整个西方都在谈的一个热词, 但是你问10个人10个人都可能给它下不同的定义, 会告诉你不同的看法。But anyhow, I'm gonna take a step at it. First of all, what does it mean literally? Woke is not standard English. 首先它不是标准英语, it is an adjective derived from AAVE, African American Vernacular English. 它是非裔美国人, 也就是美国黑人他们的口语表达里面的一个词。只要你学过小学英语, 你都学过 wake, wake up, wake醒过来, 这个词的过去式是woke, 它的过去分词是woken. But in some varieties of African American English, woke is used in place of woken. 它最早的字面意思就是在African American的英语里面, 他们会用woke来代替woken这个词; 后来这个词就逐渐的从过去分词的一个变体变成了一个adjective, equivalent to awake. 像我们说stay awake就是保持清醒的状态, 现在woke它的字面意思, 你可以把它理解为清醒状态, 但是我们一般把它翻译成 “觉醒/警醒”. The phrase “stay woke” has been present in African American English since the 1930s.In some context, it refers to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans. 这个词在逐渐的演化中, 就从最早的简单的awake, “清醒的觉醒的”词的本意延伸到美国黑人文化里对系统性种族歧视 “ systemic racism”保持清醒和警惕, 这也是为什么我们把它翻译成 “警醒”或者 “觉醒文化”. But that's not all of it. During the 2014 Ferguson protests, the phrase was popularized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. 本来这个词它是没有进入mainstream主流的英语语境, 仅限于在黑人群体中的小范围使用; 但到了2014年, Ferguson protest是因为有一位美国黑人被白人警察射杀, 这个事件掀起了弗格森地区的抗议浪潮, 所以当时在社交媒体上#staywoke, “#保持警醒”话题标签就开始火了起来. 当时主要是为了呼吁人们关注这样的一个系统性种族歧视的现象. Over time, it gained so much popularity, it became increasingly connected to matters beyond race, such as gender and identities perceived as marginalized. 不过随后woke这个含义从简单的 “黑人反抗种族压迫” 进一步扩大, 它的政治和社会意义内涵, 开始从 “种族不平等”延伸到 “性别、跨性别者、环保主义、堕胎、性骚扰”等等社会话题, 在美国逐渐就演变成了一场文化战争, 这也是为什么英语里有wokeism, 可以把它理解为 “觉醒主义”或者 “觉醒运动”. Now the term became popular with millenniums and members of Genz, 特别受千禧一代和Z世代的欢迎, 相当于中国的85后、90后、95后、00后这么几代人。As its use spread internationally, woke was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. Wokeism也逐渐超越了美国的国境, 蔓延到其他英语国家乃至世界上很多其他的国家。所以2017年它也被作为形容词, 收入了牛津字典。So far, this is understandable. But this is when it gets tricky. 但是在woke这个词进入主流英语之后, 它的感情色彩却发生了很微妙的变化。By 2020, many on the political right and some in the center in several Western countries began using the term sarcastically as a pejorative for various leftist and progressive movements and ideologies.Wokeism或者Woke这个概念本来就是比较偏激进派、偏左的这样的一个思潮, 所以到了2020年, 很多偏右甚至偏中间的这些组织或者党派, 他们开始用woke这个词来讽刺一些过于激进或者是这种过度追求政治正确的人。Some argue that this is because the term has been co-opted by mainstream culture and stripped off its original meaning and power. 有的人就说这是因为Woke的内涵, 它迅速的泛化, 进入主流社会, 致使很多人虽然不清楚这个词本来表示什么, 但是他们会把这个词泛泛地用在他们自己认为的各种歧视或者不公现象, 这个时候他们就可以高举 Wokeism警醒的这面大旗, 并且对于他们认为不够woke的人占据moral high grounds, 道德高地。正是因为这种概念的泛化和woke追随者的这种self righteousness, 自以为是道德高地的这种态度, 反而令woke这个本来应该很有力量的词引发了大量的反感. People are starting to watch out for what they say so that they don't get blamed and attacked for not being woke enough, especially in the United States where this concept of woke originated. It has been used in political fights, 特别是在美国这个词还被用来作为党争的工具, the Republican Party representatives, including Trump, and some senators, they are actually calling people who embrace wokeism as the woke mob.甚至共和党里的一些言论, 他们会把 wokeism觉醒主义的这些人称为woke mob, 叫做所谓的 “觉醒暴民” 。所以可以说短短几年间曾经被众多的美国年轻人用作觉醒号角, 在社交媒体上充当进步徽章的这个词woke, 如今很多时候都会在贬损和戏谑的语境里才会被使用。

In today's episode of the Divested Diary, I had the opportunity to delve into a topic close to my heart. As a black woman myself, I wanted to address the issue of the "ghetto personality" and its impact on our lives. Before you jump to conclusions, let me clarify that I am not here to perpetuate stereotypes or belittle anyone's experiences. Instead, I want to shed light on the importance of embracing proper English and communication skills for our own personal growth and success. The origins of Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English, can be traced back to the era of slavery. It was a way for enslaved individuals to communicate in broken English as they yearned to read, write, and integrate into society. They sought equality and recognition, not by holding onto their African roots but by mastering English. This historical context is crucial to understanding the significance of language in our lives. I want to clarify that I am not demonizing Ebonics or suggesting it is inherently wrong. It is a part of our cultural heritage; for some, it comes naturally. However, I personally do not speak Ebonics because it was not a part of my upbringing. Through adoption, I was fortunate to have parents who emphasized proper English pronunciation and grammar. They understood the importance of effective communication in navigating the world. As black women, we face unique challenges in our careers. There comes a point when we outgrow entry-level jobs and crave intellectual stimulation. We desire conversations that resonate with our experiences and aspirations. However, when our grasp of the English language is limited, breaking free from the confines of low-paying jobs becomes difficult. We inadvertently limit our opportunities for growth and advancement. I want to emphasize that this is not about conforming to societal expectations or assimilating into a white-dominated culture. It is about empowering ourselves and expanding our horizons. When we can effectively communicate and articulate our thoughts, we open doors to higher-paying positions and positions of influence. It is about creating a future where our past or our language does not limit us. I understand that the "ghetto personality" can be entertaining and even celebrated in certain contexts. We enjoy watching comedy skits or listening to rap music that embraces this style. However, we must recognize that it has its limitations. Unless we plan to be niche rappers or entertainers for the rest of our lives, we must consider the long-term implications of holding onto this persona. I want to challenge the notion that being educated or speaking proper English makes us less black. This harmful stereotype has held us back for far too long. We should not fear judgment or rejection from our own community for aspiring to be intelligent, well-spoken individuals. Our ancestors, like Harriet Tubman, fought for our freedom and equality. They envisioned a future where we could thrive intellectually and contribute meaningfully to society. So, my fellow black women, let us embrace the power of language and communication. Let us shed the limitations of the "ghetto personality" and strive for excellence. It is time to break free from toxic cultural expectations and create a future where our voices are heard and respected. Together, we can redefine what being a successful black woman means, one conversation at a time. Thank you for joining me on this journey of self-discovery and empowerment. Until next time, remember to let go of that ghetto personality and embrace the limitless possibilities that lie ahead. Connect with Sharika:Twitter: @SharikaSoal84 Divested Diary Website  Join the Movement at "Divested Diary: Empowering Women's Voices."Are you ready to make a difference? Join us at "Divested Diary" in our mission to uplift and empower women, especially Black women who face unique societal challenges. As the backbone of their families and often the primary financial providers, these incredible women deserve our support and recognition. What Can You Do? Visit Divested Diary to learn more about our cause. Whether sharing our message, donating, or simply offering encouragement, your contribution can significantly impact you. From providing cars for better mobility to supplying educational materials, every bit of help turns a struggle into a powerful testimony of resilience and hope. Be a Part of the Change: Your support is not just a donation; it's an investment in the lives of women and children striving for a better future. Let's work together to build a world where every woman has the resources and support they need to succeed. Act now: Visit Divested Diary. Your involvement could be the hand-up that someone needs to transform their life. Let's turn challenges into opportunities and struggles into success stories.  Listen to Divested Diary Wherever You Listen to PodcastsApple | Spotify | iHeart | Amazon | TuneIn | Pandora | Deezer | Google | Stitcher  

“It's a rot day, bestie. Just don't rot for like 5 days straight… it's giving Depression Era.”If you read that and you're like… ummm ??? — you're not alone.

I read from Ebola to ecchymosis.     "ebonics" is the older term for what is now known as "African-American Vernacular English" or AAVE.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English     I guess "ebony and ivory" and Ebony Magazine are the two main uses of "ebony" I can think of in pop culture.  Ebony, the wood, is quite cool.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony     The eccentric wheel is used in mechanical engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_(mechanism)     The word of the episode is "eccentric". I think I need more eccentricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(behavior) But eccentricity in math looks like it's more than I want to think about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(mathematics)     Theme music from Jonah Kraut https://jonahkraut.bandcamp.com/     Merchandising! https://www.teepublic.com/user/spejampar     "The Dictionary - Letter A" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter B" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter C" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter D" on YouTube     Featured in a Top 10 Dictionary Podcasts list! https://blog.feedspot.com/dictionary_podcasts/     Backwards Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmIujMwEDbgZUexyR90jaTEEVmAYcCzuq     dictionarypod@gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/thedictionarypod/ https://www.threads.net/@dictionarypod https://twitter.com/dictionarypod https://www.instagram.com/dictionarypod/ https://www.patreon.com/spejampar https://www.tiktok.com/@spejampar 917-727-5757

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Kris celebrates the birth of her new book… baby. Book babies are a thing, right? The book is called Cherish. You should check it out when it drops in September. If that doesn't tickle your fancy, Kris reveals the winning strategy to make it through the survival reality show, Alone. Tara and Kris discuss their troubled history with Mus musculus (the common house mouse), as well as the extent to which they will allow their home to be "hacked." Programming note: the actors and writers unions currently on strike in the United States have asked for podcasts to not review or promote "struck" work, and we at Queerly Recommended stand with union asks. So until the strike ends you'll be getting fewer movies and scripted TV series from us, and more books, documentaries, video games, etc.  Official Recommendations From Kris: Nothing Compares (2022) This week, Kris recommends the documentary, Nothing Compares, which details Sinead O'Connor's rise and fall in the public sphere, surrounding her infamous appearance on SNL when she ripped up a photo of the Pope. There is a lot to her struggle and her history that Kris didn't know before this documentary and she wishes she'd paid more attention sooner. Sinead O'Connor was a defiant, powerful, liberatory artist. The world is lesser without her in it. From Tara: Blackward by Lawrence Lindell Rounding it off, Tara recommends the graphic novel, Blackward by Lawrence Lindell, which will be released this September. It's about a group of black queer people trying to create community for themselves and others like them, and the challenges they face along the way. Blackward is written in African American Vernacular English. If you are not familiar with it, check out this quick primer to better your reading experience of this wonderful book. Works/People Discussed Crush by Ana Hartnett Reichardt Alone (History) Hack My Home (Netflix) The Last of Us (HBO) Diablo IV (Blizzard Entertainment) Venba (Visai Games) Support & follow the show Buy us a Ko-fi Sign up for our newsletter Twitter: @queerlyrec Facebook: @QueerlyRecommended Instagram: @queerlyrecommended Tumblr: @queerlyrecommended TikTok: @queerlyrecommended Get all our links on Linktr.ee Support local animal shelters by joining Kris's Patreon

Join Dr. Berry as she immerses us in the captivating realm of African American Vernacular and Chicano English. Prepare to uncover the fascinating truth behind the meticulously structured grammar, pronunciation, and usage rules that define these distinctive dialects. Journey through the intricate tapestry woven by African, Spanish, and English influences, shaping the vibrant languages we'll delve into. Discover the art of indirect communication, reflecting profound cultural values such as respect and courtesy. Together, let's recognize and celebrate the invaluable diversity of languages in our classrooms and communities. Get ready to be amazed by the power of language!Key Takeaways:Numerous words of African and Spanish origin are used in English conversations, reflecting the influence of enslavement, migration, and immigration in developing these sociocultural languages.  African American Vernacular and Chicano English are fully developed and systematic dialects of English with their own grammar, pronunciation, and usage rules.African American Vernacular and Chicano English are distinct languages with their own identities.Not all Mexican Americans speak Chicano English, not all Black Americans speak African American Vernacular English, as language use varies among individuals based on factors like region, socioeconomic status, and age.Recognizing and valuing socio-cultural English in the classroom promotes inclusivity, validates students' cultural identities, and creates a positive learning environment.Strategies for supporting emergent bilingual learners who speak African American Vernacular and Chicano English include recognizing their bilingualism, encouraging code switching and translanguaging, practicing culturally responsive teaching, fostering collaboration and peer support, and differentiating instruction and assessment.Language is a reflection of our history, culture, and experiences. By embracing and celebrating the diverse linguistic tapestry in our classrooms, we create spaces where every student feels seen, heard, and valued. As educators, it is our responsibility to recognize and honor the socio-cultural English spoken by our emergent bilingual learners. Tune in to this episode and let us bridge the gap between languages, validate cultural identities, and empower our students to succeed in a diverse world.Link for the Handout: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:b7a2df19-c0ec-326a-966a-6d2471b22ff6 Follow me on my social handles.FB: @almitraberryIG: @almitraberryLI: @almitraberryYT: @almitraberryDon't forget to get a FREE copy of "Roadmap to Emancipation" by visiting www.3epodcast.com. If you have questions that you would like answered in the upcoming episodes, please feel free to ask me through www.askdrberry.com.

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women's creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 83: At its core, "woke" is a term that refers to being aware of social injustices and inequalities, particularly related to gender, race and ethnicity. The word originated in African American Vernacular English in the 1940s, but it gained renewed popularity in the 2010s as a term used to describe a heightened awareness and understanding of systemic racism and social justice issues. However, the term has also become a source of controversy and debate, with some criticizing it for being overused and losing its original meaning, while others embrace it as a powerful tool for promoting social change. Hosts Richard Kyte and Scott Rada discuss how this movement has affected society and how our focus on the culture wars often drowns out more important issues facing Americans. About the hosts: Scott Rada is social media manager with Lee Enterprises, and Richard Kyte is the director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Rev. Emily E. Ewing (they) and Rev. Kay Rohloff (she) to explore new and nerdy connections to the scripture for the 5th Sunday after Epiphany, also known as Lectionary 5, which falls on February 5th this year, including our deep dive into salt! The scripture we refer to for this episode can be found here. For more on the health benefits and why salt and pepper are always on the table, check out this article. We also mentioned the salt of Hocus Pocus 2, which we covered with Horror Nerds At Church and you can check the episode out on their feed! For more on Woman Wisdom, check out last year's Holy Trinity episode. This babbel article on cultural appropriation connected to drag and African American Vernacular English slang is great! CN: we talk about fasting when discussing the first reading. To support Nerds At Church, you can become a Patreon Supporter at any tier for extra perks and bonus content including uncut guest episodes, Live Q&As, merch, and more. If becoming a paying supporter isn't possible right now, please leave us a review instead — it helps sustain the show and spread the word! Check us out on Facebook & Twitter at @NerdsAtChurch to connect! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nerdsatchurch/message

I like to say we're living in a precedent time, not an unprecedented one. How do we understand that? Being at the museum or writing histories both in poetry and in non-fiction are ways of trying to understand that.  “Gatekeepers” hold an essential role in our culture as those in positions of power who determine what we see and hear — and therefore how we understand our world. The poet Kevin Young holds dual gatekeeping roles as both director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture as well as the poetry editor for The New Yorker magazine.  In this episode, Young talks about how he holds these responsibilities and likens reading a poem to entering into a museum. He also shares his belief in the power of unexpected transformations, which songs have brought him comfort, and how it's always easiest to write about the place you've just left.  References: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture Public Enemy Chuck D Parliament Funkadelic African American Vernacular English Sister Sonya Sanchez Langston Hughes Gwendolyn Brooks Harriet Tubman's shawl David Hammonds' African American Flag Willie Nelson Earth, Wind and Fire John Coltrane's Love Supreme I Want You - Marvin Gay Mary Lou Williams Jean-Michel Basquiat Make Good the Promises Ida B. Wells Book of Hours - Kevin Young Stones - Kevin Young

On today's episode, Rachelle is once again joined by Daisy. The pair dive deep into the digital etymology of the phrase “invited to the cookout” which, in the past few years, has been applied to figures from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Justin Timberlake. They discuss the phrase's roots in African American Vernacular English and the future of The Cookout. This podcast is produced by Kevin Bendis, Rachelle Hampton, Daisy Rosario and Daniel Schroeder Thanks Avast.com! Learn more about Avast One at Avast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode, Rachelle is once again joined by Daisy. The pair dive deep into the digital etymology of the phrase “invited to the cookout” which, in the past few years, has been applied to figures from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Justin Timberlake. They discuss the phrase's roots in African American Vernacular English and the future of The Cookout. This podcast is produced by Kevin Bendis, Rachelle Hampton, Daisy Rosario and Daniel Schroeder Thanks Avast.com! Learn more about Avast One at Avast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode, Rachelle is once again joined by Daisy. The pair dive deep into the digital etymology of the phrase “invited to the cookout” which, in the past few years, has been applied to figures from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Justin Timberlake. They discuss the phrase's roots in African American Vernacular English and the future of The Cookout. This podcast is produced by Kevin Bendis, Rachelle Hampton, Daisy Rosario and Daniel Schroeder Thanks Avast.com! Learn more about Avast One at Avast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode, Rachelle is once again joined by Daisy. The pair dive deep into the digital etymology of the phrase “invited to the cookout” which, in the past few years, has been applied to figures from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Justin Timberlake. They discuss the phrase's roots in African American Vernacular English and the future of The Cookout. This podcast is produced by Kevin Bendis, Rachelle Hampton, Daisy Rosario and Daniel Schroeder Thanks Avast.com! Learn more about Avast One at Avast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join Herb & Moe as they discuss the meaning of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), how it has evolved and how a lack of understanding can produce harmful outcomes. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ybfpodcast/message

We form an impression of our voices early in life. While it might shift some as we age, those impressions tend to stick with us. For many of us, what we learn about our voices is how their don't quite measure up to the ideal: too high, too low, too soft, too loud, too this, too that. This is especially true for women, queer people, transgender people, non-native English speakers, Black people, people of color, indigenous people, and really anyone whose voice doesn't fit into the white, male baritone mold.So what do we do? We try to sound more like everyone else. And that can not only mess with our ability to use our physical voices, but it messes with our ability to use our metaphorical voices and confuses our sense of self.Samara Bay, a Hollywood dialect coach who's worked on blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy, is on a mission to help everyone find “permission to speak.” In this episode, we dig into how the self-help imperative to “own your voice” might be more complicated than it sounds.Footnotes: Find out more about Samara Bay Pre-order Samara's book Permission to Speak “I still have a voice” by Alice Wong Samara Bay on Anna Sorokin and Elizabeth Holmes's voices Women and Power by Mary Beard More about African American Vernacular English on Pause on the Play College students talk about their relationships to their Southern accents on Dolly Parton's America “The Magic of Voice Transitioning with Nicole Gress” on Camp Wild Heart with Mackenzie Dunham “Me minus me” on This American Life (Sandy Allen's vocal transition) “If you don't have anything nice to say” on This American Life (complaints about female voices) More on the mid-atlantic accent Radically rethink how you set goals: pre-order Tara's new book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting. Find it anywhere books are sold or at explorewhatworks.com/book. ★ Support this podcast ★

Tone policing is a way of invalidating what someone is saying because of how they're saying it. It goes beyond literal tone–too loud, too brash, too animated–and extends to using slang or African American Vernacular English and beyond. It often assumes that the speaker is uneducated, rendering their opinions or experiences as null and void. EK Powell joins Erica to discuss tone policing and respectability politics, how content creators are pushing back and influencing media, and why you can't address everybody. In this discussion: How respectability politics and tone policing create an obligation to assimilate How content creators are pushing back against respectability politics How calling words slang or jargon applies different implied value to language Why showing up authentically means you can't address everybody Connect with Our EK Powell:  Instagram: @whatsgoodenglish  TikTok: @whatsgoodenglish YouTube: What's Good English Support EK Powell on Patreon Contact EK Powell Ready to dive deeper? Pause on the Play® The Community has the resources that support you and other values focused individuals in creating change and impact in our world together. Join us for conversations that address the questions and challenges that come up as you're navigating visibility and values, Imperfect Allyship®, and the impact you want to create. Membership gets you access to live office hours, Q&A sessions with Erica and India, workshops, and our entire library of evergreen replays and resources. Learn more at  pauseontheplay.com/community Resources: Listen to EK Powell on African American Vernacular English The origin of the term “Sea-Lioning”

The world has been captivated by Beyoncé's 7th studio album RENAISSANCE ever since it dropped nearly two weeks ago. And while many have relished in the excitement of the new era Beyoncé has ushered in, it hasn't been without some controversy. Amidst a crediting conflict primarily between artist Kelis and music producer Pharrell, another issue arose. Some disability advocates took issue with a song lyric containing the word 'spaz' in the track “Heated.”  It's a word rooted in the word spastic, a medical term often used to describe those who suffer from disabilities involving muscle spasms. Beyoncé's not the only artist who has received criticism for the use of the term. In June, Lizzo also received similar backlash after including the word in the lyrics to the song "Grrrls." In response both artists removed the word from their lyrics. Writing this month for OkayPlayer, Clementine Williams noted that the term has often been used by Black artists to mean “going wild,” and that the initial call outs on the Beyoncé and Lizzo lyrics were largely made by white disability activists. However, the double meaning and history of its use in African American Vernacular English does not negate the harm the term can cause for the disabled community. Instead, moments such as these have helped create dialogue around what accountability can look like in the music industry, and even drawn the conversation to the growing movement and consciousness around disability. But for Black disabled writer, poet, activist, and scholar Leroy Moore Jr., he couldn't help but notice a critical voice missing from the conversation: Black disabled artists. Leroy was born with cerebral palsy and has dedicated much of his writing and activism to disability rights. He co-founded Krip-Hop Nation, a movement that uses hip-hop as a means of expression for people with disabilities and this movement has grown to different parts of the world including parts of Africa and Europe. He is also a doctoral student in linguistic anthropology at UCLA, and he writes and delivers lectures and performances that reflect the intersections between racism and ableism, in the United States and abroad.  Leroy joined The Takeaway to give us his take on the situation. He addressed the problematic nature of both policing Black language while erasing Black disabled voices and he shined a light on the ways Krip-Hop Nation is working to make change.      

The world has been captivated by Beyoncé's 7th studio album RENAISSANCE ever since it dropped nearly two weeks ago. And while many have relished in the excitement of the new era Beyoncé has ushered in, it hasn't been without some controversy. Amidst a crediting conflict primarily between artist Kelis and music producer Pharrell, another issue arose. Some disability advocates took issue with a song lyric containing the word 'spaz' in the track “Heated.”  It's a word rooted in the word spastic, a medical term often used to describe those who suffer from disabilities involving muscle spasms. Beyoncé's not the only artist who has received criticism for the use of the term. In June, Lizzo also received similar backlash after including the word in the lyrics to the song "Grrrls." In response both artists removed the word from their lyrics. Writing this month for OkayPlayer, Clementine Williams noted that the term has often been used by Black artists to mean “going wild,” and that the initial call outs on the Beyoncé and Lizzo lyrics were largely made by white disability activists. However, the double meaning and history of its use in African American Vernacular English does not negate the harm the term can cause for the disabled community. Instead, moments such as these have helped create dialogue around what accountability can look like in the music industry, and even drawn the conversation to the growing movement and consciousness around disability. But for Black disabled writer, poet, activist, and scholar Leroy Moore Jr., he couldn't help but notice a critical voice missing from the conversation: Black disabled artists. Leroy was born with cerebral palsy and has dedicated much of his writing and activism to disability rights. He co-founded Krip-Hop Nation, a movement that uses hip-hop as a means of expression for people with disabilities and this movement has grown to different parts of the world including parts of Africa and Europe. He is also a doctoral student in linguistic anthropology at UCLA, and he writes and delivers lectures and performances that reflect the intersections between racism and ableism, in the United States and abroad.  Leroy joined The Takeaway to give us his take on the situation. He addressed the problematic nature of both policing Black language while erasing Black disabled voices, shining a light on the ways Krip-Hop Nation is working to make this change.      

When you think of our pattern of speech do you think what's proper or improper; correct or incorrect; standard or unorthodox? In this episode we dive into vernacular and discuss African American Vernacular English. For decades African Americans have been stripped of our language and told the way we speak isn't necessarily proper. But what's united us over time has been our ability to adapt our speech with native tongue and the language that was mandated on our ancestors. As our way of speaking has become mainstream and acknowledge, we have to ask some tough questions. Should we gatekeep? Is it appropriation? Why should we code switch? Don't forget to subscribe plus visit us on Twitter and Instagram! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Visit our guest: https://www.youtube.com/c/WhatsGoodEnglish --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/resetrace/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/resetrace/support

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Erec Smith. We discuss his field of rhetoric, what led him to it, African-American Vernacular English versus Standard English, the implications of what activists call "linguistic justice," what it's like teaching rhetoric in our polarized climate, the utility of ridiculing bad ideas, interacting with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Candace Owens' "Blexit," and the publication he co-founded called Free Black Thought. Dr. Erec Smith is an associate professor of rhetoric at the College of Pennsylvania, whose focus is in the rhetoric of anti racist activism, theory, and pedagogy. He is also the co-founder of Free Black Thought, a website dedicated to highlighting viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia.

Josh & Zino sip green tea (with honey, lemon, and turmeric) to discuss African-American Vernacular English being appropriated, the intersectionality of queer culture and black culture, Josh's birthday month celebrations, white women getting too comfortable in the club, the intricacies of trusting people – do you trust someone or wait for them to break the trust? OR do you not trust people to begin with and then wait for them to do something to trust you?, having difficult conversations with friends, and the problem with Twitter spaces. DISCLAIMER: Josh would like to send his apologies for the cold.  Pour yourself some tea and come sit down with Josh & Zino. Visit us on our Instagram and Twitter: @coconutplantain

John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics, emeritus, at Stanford University. He received his BA with highest honors in Sociolinguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. He is an expert in the relation between language and ethnicity, social class and style, language variation and change, pidgin and creole languages, Caribbean and African American Vernacular English, and the application of linguistics to educational and social problems. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including his most recent book, Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language, which is the honest story of his life from his early years as the youngest of ten children in Guyana to his status as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, of the transformation of his identity from colored or mixed race in Guyana to black in the USA, and of his lifetime of work championing Black Talk and its speakers.How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you'll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. Join Rachael's Slack channel, Onward Writers: https://join.slack.com/t/onwardwriters/shared_invite/zt-7a3gorfm-C15cTKh_47CEdWIBW~RKwgRachael can be YOUR mini-coach, and she'll answer all your questions on the show! http://patreon.com/rachael See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Before her current role as the local host of WXXI's Weekend Edition and reporter at WXXI News, April spent 12 years working in the Emergency Department at URMC. Her passion for community and storytelling led her to earn a Bachelor's degree in Journalism and Broadcast from SUNY Brockport.  April is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the current Vice President of Rochester Association of Black Journalists.  Above all, she is a mom and community member who wants to elevate the voices of the marginalized in Rochester   Links:  Rochester School for the Deaf https://www.rsdeaf.org/ NTID/RIT https://www.rit.edu/ntid/ WXXI https://www.wxxi.org/ Section 8 https://www.hud.gov/topics/housing_choice_voucher_program_section_8 Rochester Rhinos https://rnyfc.com/ Rochester Housing Authority https://www.rhanh.org/ URMC Strong Hospital https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/strong-memorial.aspx Swillburg (neighborhood) https://swillburg.com/ The German House https://thehistoricgermanhouse.com/ African American Vernacular English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English American Sign Language https://www.nad.org/resources/american-sign-language/ The Black ASL Project (Gallaudet) http://blackaslproject.gallaudet.edu/BlackASLProject/Welcome.html   Keywords: podcast, good, do good, amplify, amplify good, housing, deaf, asl, Black, African American, journalist, public radio, public television, racism, racial health disparities, gentrification, soccer, urban, city, neighborhood, entertainment, AAVE, Black ASL, African American Vernacular English

Just a short conversation on why African American Vernacular English is considered a bad thing until adopted by the dominant society.Leave a comment with #bowthought if you think a topic needs further exploration or if you have a question.Regular episodes drops every Tuesday. Occasional FIRST FRIDAYS will drop when the spirit hits.website: iamabow.comInstagram: @iamabowalwaystwitter: @iamabowalwaystiktok: @iamabowalwaysCheck out my live streams, typically Monday or Friday evenings around 830pm EST. You will also find me live on weekday mornings around 700am before putting my children on their respective buses. 

On today's episode, Anthony sat down with Jamel Clarke and talked about the importance of authenticity cross all spaces, fashion, Tumblr, Computer Science, African American Vernacular English, and the difficulties of breaking out of your comfort zone

Walter F. Edwards of Wayne State University grew up speaking Guyanese Creole, which shaped his approach to linguistics. He shares how Afro-Caribbean languages have spread to African American Vernacular English and what this looks like for Black Detroiters. GUEST:  Walter F. Edwards, professor of linguistics at Wayne State University and director of the Wayne State Humanities Center  ---- Looking for more conversations from Stateside?Right this way. If you like what you hear on the pod, considersupporting our work. Stateside's theme music is by14KT. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this special three-part series, Julie and Casey sit down together to look at the elements of executive presence: Polish, Poise and Power . . . what they are, what they represent, and where they go wrong. They also look at new tools and alternate pathways as we work toward a more inclusive definition of leadership. Watch the video version here. Episode 1: Polish Calling someone “polished” seems to be shorthand for: Looking the way we expect you to look — looking expensive, “understated”, “neat”, fitting into whatever spoken or unspoken standards this industry has for clothing and appearance Speaking the way we expect you to speak — eliminating accents, regionalisms, speech we consider too “youthful”, slang, and dialects like African American Vernacular English; eliminating “problem words” like just, like, sorry; eliminating verbal fillers; using “good speech” Acting the way we expect you to act — knowing your cultural etiquette, manners, and hierarchy. Being rehearsed . . . but not in any visible way - effortlessness is key Translation: Polish is about looking (and sounding) financially well-off, about pretending human beings never sweat or get dirty or disheveled, and about pretending that we come from the same culture (or at least can learn to seamlessly fit into the dominant culture). The problem is that this extremely narrow definition often only leaves room for those who learn to dress, speak, and act like those who are ALREADY leaders: i.e. white, wealthy, cisgender, straight, conventionally attractive, able-bodied men (and ocasionally women). This has enormous consequences for anyone who falls outside any of those categories. If you are seen as lacking traditional polish, you may not advance.   Join us as we dissect, laugh, call bullshit, and brainstorm some practical strategies and solutions to what for many is a minefield of double binds.    Thank you to our Season 3 sponsor, Armoire! If you're ready to try a new look, Armoire's high-end clothing rental service (full of amazing women-owned brands) will hook you up! For 50% off your first month's rental + a free item, go to http://armoire.style/voiceis and use VOICEIS in the referral box!

African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, gave birth to words such as "finna" "deadass" and "lit." But when these words leave our communities and enter the ether of popular culture, how do we as Black people ensure that they aren't used in an incorrect or harmful way? VOX ATL Board member Zariah Taylor heard from VOXers Jennie, Ryan, and Alexis to answer these questions, and more.

37: Chapter 37. The Thunder Builds Up Scripted by John Ruths and Newell Fisher This is the second of the thunder chapters and has a lot of back and forth setting changes, which keep the reader well informed and stimulate the building tension. The pre-chapter quote is from Uncle Remus.  It is spoken in Joel Chandler Harris's portrayal of African-American Vernacular English. The proverb, in standard American and British English, says "You can hide the fire, but what are you going to do with the smoke?" The quote is a clear reference to the secretive activities of Bigwig, the does, and eventually Blackavar who are also in the know.  Chapter 36 ends with Woundwort interrupting Bigwig just as the escape is about to begin.  Bigwig controls his emotions as he is asked many questions. The nature of these tell us that information is being brought to Woundwort.  Woundwort is starting to add things up. Bigwig was the rabbit who, albeit accidentally, got Mallow killed by a fox. He was recognised by Groundsel. The fact that Bigwig didn't mention this is clearly suspicious to Woundwort. Woundwort shares that he is aware of a band of rabbits on the far side of the Iron Road. He directly asks if Bigwig was with this group, forcing Bigwig to deny it. Then he is quizzed about the 'white bird' he was seen near, who was Kehaar, and simply says he's never been harmed by one of them before. As a parting shot, Woundwort asks about his meeting with Hyzenthlay ask him to keep an eye on her. It is intriguing to wonder if there is any chance that Woundwort might have put them all these pieces together eventually to guess their plan. Given the way he is fooled in the next chapter, it is easy to think not. This, for Bigwig, is a very dangerous moment but, overall, Bigwig gets through yet another social encounter in Efrafa.  At this point, he must feel somewhat emboldened. But the escape is over for now. He checks on Blackavar and deliberately knocks into one of the guards and even verbally dresses him down. The scene now moves to the little patrol-base like location where the rest of our heroes are, near the  river, and opens with Hazel.  Kehaar flies in and Hazel questions him about some important details that he's apparently repeated before.  Hazel is nervous.  What is certain is that the escape attempt is off for now and that their escape plan location at the railway arch, which is far nearer Efrafa, needs to change back to the river right away. We now cut back to Bigwig who is with Hyzenthlay. The signs of the stress he's been carrying is really starting to show and he's shaking. Hyzenthlay makes Bigwig even more nervous when she asks if it's possible to get away that evening.  She then relates that it's even possible that there could be a doe spy amongst the group she's spoken to.  If he lost his nerve and made a quick escape with just the ringleaders he would be seen as having failed, no matter what he had been through.  It is now the next morning and Bigwig's own common sense keeps him from panicking when he finds that Hyzenthlay is not there. It's quiet right now due to the building weather system overhead.  He hears Blackavar being brought up the run, who looks more pitiful than before if that's possible.  Chervil arrives and even he, as the mark's captain, seems subdued.  Nelthilta makes an unwise comment to him about a possible "surprise" coming up and that rabbits might be able to fly away.  Soon after they're outside, Bigwig plays a trick that El-ahrairah would really approve of.  Bigwig cleverly fools Chervil with a fake charm, consisting of a dance and a poem, while simultaneously giving Kehaar vital information about returning that night.     Some time later, Bigwig chances upon Blackavar. He uses this private moment to tell Blackavar the plan. This chapter reminds us just how intelligent and brave Bigwig can be under pressure. He goes to his burrow and sleeps. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/watershipdown/message

Too fly. Fire. Dope. So much of American expression comes straight from Black English, a.k.a. African American Vernacular English. But you won't find this colorful and dynamic language taught in schools. Ohio State education researchers say Black students need their language heritage to finally be validated.    View transcript   X - 2018 Kendrick Lamar (featuring ScHoolboy Q, 2 Chainz & Saudi); TikTok audio - cstreetblvd; Wade in the Water - 2002, Blind Boys of Alabama; Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ODEI) at Grand Rapids Community College; We Must Learn - 1989 KRS-One/Boogie Down Productions 'Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop'; Thieves in the Night - 1998, Mos Def & Talib Kweli, Black Star

In this episode of Cool Ass Conversations, hosts Ashua Nicole, Big Gee, Johnny Holmes a.k.a. Apostle, and guest Eyembe Elango discuss the tricky business of effective communication. Technology has created a global environment for communication that transcends common language barriers through the use of emojis and text language (sms/text speak, like OMG or LOL). African American Vernacular English phrases and expressions have also become globally adopted. These are common elements of communication. However we sometimes experience issues of being understood and intending to help others see what we mean. Have you ever said something that was taken entirely differently than you meant it? Do you sometimes misinterpret what others say to you? This can be frustrating or disappointing. When we release expectations, we learn to communicate more effectively. Listen in as we examine funny examples of how this has come to our attention. www.Enlighten1.com; VSGEE_NME Podcast; www.FacetoftheJewel.com; --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/enlighten-one/message

Learn English in this extremely funny video on the Aussie English podcast! You must have seen that viral video of a 'flight attendant' who tied a 'passenger' to his seat because 'he smelled of ah-co-hol' and had 'touched his *****'. I'd like to introduce you mob to the African American Vernacular English - known as Black English, or Ebonics, this is a variety of English largely spoken in urban communities by African Americans. This short video is a treasure trove of real life English phrases that I am sure you have heard of either from watching movies or someone at your local community. So grab a cuppa, join me in this unusual English lesson, and let's widen your English vocabulary!

This book is murder in a bottle, featuring a Scooby-Doo gang of all our fav detectives solving the murder of a mephistophelian poseur during a bridge game. It registered only a 6 on The Portia Scale, but Amanda thinks it's peak Poirot and thinks would be a great first book to introduce a new reader to Agatha Christie. The episode is super rambling with "Bobby got a sandwich" tangents including: mercury retrograde, boobs, challenging conversations about language in the context of African American Vernacular English, appropriation, code switching, racism, and white supremacy. We occasionally remember to discuss the plot, which brilliantly features the character of Mrs. Oliver as a stand in for Christie herself, as a vehicle for both self-depreciating humor and jabs at the audience.

How to leave a review for DOF: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-leave-a-review-on-apple-podcastsMore great instructions on how to leave reviews: https://ratethispodcast.com/guides/where-can-people-leave-podcast-reviewshttps://determineourfuture.com/Determine Our Future's Facebook group page@LParkerPierce#determineourfuturetsgrant22@gmail.comTiffany Grant is a Business Consultant for First Children's Finance, supporting child care providers, Center Directors, and owners on the business side of child care. Tiffany is also an independent trainer and coach for early childhood professionals; trainings include early childhood trauma, African American Vernacular English, understanding behaviors in children, and how to support families suffering from trauma. Tiffany also a board member of the MnAEYC-MnSaca child care agency.Season 2 promotional info, post-roll

Hello everyone! Today, sadly, we are missing John :(, but that's ok because we still had a great episode. We talked about the newest episode of the Bad Batch (**No Spoilers**), Olivia Rodrigo's new album, and A$AP Rocky and Rihanna announcing their relationship! We also talked about Demi Lovato changing their pronouns, and an in-depth discussion of AAVE's (African American Vernacular English) place in Pop Culture. If you're enjoying the podcast make sure to leave us a rating and review wherever you can, as well as leaving us a voice message either answering the question of the week or just telling us what you're enjoying about the podcast on Anchor at the link below. Leave us a Voice Message! Anchor: anchor.fm/tcfm-popping Catch us LIVE! Twitch: www.twitch.tv/whats__popping Watch BTS and Funny Clips! TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@whatspoppingtiktok Watch the Video Version! Youtube: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4McOuDWrTABpuakSWVw5rU6AydBeWRZp TCTV Nonstop! 24/7 Student Powered Content!: www.youtube.com/channel/UCj7eG6hEgNLtI1FCcp8whMQ/featured

The code-switching conversation with my two guests continues in this episode. University students, Bradley Hutchinson and Malik McFarlane share their views and experiences including the use of African-American Vernacular English within the United States. We also explore the social structures that have been established by the majority. I encourage you to listen with an open mind and hold space for reflection on your own or others experiences. CREDITS: THEME SONG: Vocals - Shevaughn James; Music - Malik McFarlane; Lyrics - Shevaughn James & Maxine McFarlane Website: theteacherstribe.com SOCIAL MEDIA Instagram: www.instagram.com/theteacherstribe/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheTeachersTribe Twitter: twitter.com/teachers_tribe YouTube: The Teachers' Tribe SOURCES: Rita Pierson - Guess What Happened to Jack? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwdtjlN818o Anitiz Muonagolu https://pepperdine-graphic.com/opinion-try-switching-it-up/

Rachelle and Madison discuss Elon Musk’s episode of Saturday Night Live. Specifically they break down the ”Gen Z Hospital” sketch, where everybody seems to be speaking in internet slang, and the backlash to it. Rachelle explains how all the language used isn’t just from the internet or from Zoomers but from African-American Vernacular English. This isn’t a new thing, of course—white Americans have been appropriating Black culture for as long as America has been around—but as this Paper magazine article by Rob Dozier points out, the internet has made it particularly easy for those words to lose their original context. Podcast Production by Daniel Schroeder and Derek John. Support ICYMI and listen to the show with zero ads. Sign up to become a Slate Plus member for just $1 for your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachelle and Madison discuss Elon Musk’s episode of Saturday Night Live. Specifically they break down the ”Gen Z Hospital” sketch, where everybody seems to be speaking in internet slang, and the backlash to it. Rachelle explains how all the language used isn’t just from the internet or from Zoomers but from African-American Vernacular English. This isn’t a new thing, of course—white Americans have been appropriating Black culture for as long as America has been around—but as this Paper magazine article by Rob Dozier points out, the internet has made it particularly easy for those words to lose their original context. Podcast Production by Daniel Schroeder and Derek John. Support ICYMI and listen to the show with zero ads. Sign up to become a Slate Plus member for just $1 for your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Whew Chile,” “Slay” and “Yass” are common terms in the media amongst many people, especially white Americans.  Ironically, terms that are commonplace in African American Vernacular English were once viewed as a pejorative, but now they are being added to mainstream dictionaries. Cultural appropriation is nothing new especially when Black Americans are the victims – but now that elements of Blackness are into the mainstream, what can Black people do to reclaim the culture we curated and cherish?  In this episode, The Revs talk about the history of cultural appropriation, and how oftentimes it’s people who are not Black taking Black culture for their own pleasure.  

Woke is broke y'all! Until 2020, the only woke I knew was was the act of not being asleep. According to Wikipedia "Woke is a term that refers to a perceived awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice. It derives from the African-American Vernacular English expression stay woke." Woke is showing itself to be the opposite of " not asleep" but rather " deep in a coma of LIES!" Social justice is infiltrating our church and private schools as well. When we are so intertwined with the government (501c3, school choice etc) do we feel obligated to have to adopt the "woke" curriculum a bit here and there so we don't lose our funding? Are we afraid of what the world will think if we simply stick to God's word as our great heritage rather than social justice as our mission. We are looking to bring souls to eternity not simply kum ba yah around the fire on earth. Some churches are even going as far to say "Social justice is THE mission of Christ" and recently one pastor even went was far as to say, "Jesus was a racist with the woman at the well, and realized his sin and repented." HUH!!!! Hang on to your seats as the "woke vs Christian" war is a doozy. But as always, we remember that we are NOT in a fight against flesh and blood, but against the evil one and his principalities. Are you seeing "wokeness" creeping into your church and Christian schools? I'd love to hear what you are dealing with in your neck of the woods! Simply click on the "leave a message" link for the anchor app in the show notes! https://bit.ly/3enUViU use code "SARA10" at check to get an extra 10% off!!! (30% off through March 22nd total!) https://anchor.fm/sara-stuebs/message www.bluerosewellness.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sara-stuebs/message

Black people have always created beauty from the bleakest conditions. And to survive in America, we even had to create our own language. This week on BHY, sociolinguist Dr. Sherese King explores the complexity of African American Vernacular English, the innovative spirit embedded in Black languages, and the cultural significance of how Black people talk. BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation's largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com and share this with your people! PushBlack exists because we saw we had to take this into our own hands. You make PushBlack happen with your contributions at https://BlackHistoryYear.com​. Most people do 5 or 10 bucks a month, but everything makes a difference. Thanks for supporting the work. The Black History Year production team includes Tareq Alani, Abeni Jones, Patrick Sanders, Tasha Taylor, William Anderson, Jareyah Bradley, Brooke Brown, Shonda Buchanan, Briona Lamback, Akua Tay, Leslie Taylor-Grover, and Darren Wallace. Our producers are Cydney Smith and Ivana Tucker, who also edits the podcast. Black History Year’s Executive Producer is Julian Walker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, what up race cars and z-cast listeners! Jon Daly is here to figure out if it’s racist to transcribe conversations into African American Vernacular English with misspellings or is it racist to disregard these features and translate it to “proper” English. Ask us more academic questions at 323-389 RACE.

Jennifer M. Cunningham (@jenmcunningham) reads her chapter "African American Language is Not Good English." (Don't miss the joke: the author of the chapter is disagreeing with the bad idea stated in the chapter's title.) It's a chapter from Bad Ideas about Writing, which was edited by Cheryl E. Ball (@s2ceball) and Drew M. Loewe (@drewloewe). Kyle Stedman (@kstedman) produces the show and will be back as narrator next week. Chapter keywords: African American Language, African American Vernacular English, Black English, Ebonics, grammar, linguistics, Standard American English, Standard English, Standard Written English Here's Cunningham's 2017 bio from the book: Jennifer M. Cunningham is an associate professor of English at Kent State University at Stark. Her teaching and research center on the themes and connections among digital literacies, African American Language, and online pedagogies. Jennifer has a background in composition, linguistics, and education, earning her B.A. in integrated language arts, her M.A. in composition and linguistics, and her Ph.D. in literacy, rhetoric, and social practice. Among other scholarly activities, she has developed and taught online versions of research writing and first-year composition and is currently researching social presence in online writing classes as well as digital African American Language and Nigerian Pidgin English within digital messages. Her Twitter handle is @jenmcunningham, and her website is https://jencunningham.weebly.com/. Here's a 2020 update: Since publishing her chapter in Bad Ideas, Jennifer is currently the Writing Program Coordinator for Kent State University. She continues to research African American Language and recently submitted an NSF grant with a faculty member in computer science at another university with the hope of continuing her work by applying her methodological experience to a forensics linguistics project. As always, the theme music is "Parade" by nctrnm, and both the book and podcast are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The full book was published by the West Virginia University Libraries and Digital Publishing Institute; find it online for free at https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas. All ad revenue will be split between the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and the Computers and Writing Graduate Research Network.

In this episode of As In Heaven, hosts Jim Davis and Mike Aitcheson welcome Jon Aragón and Ameen Hudson to discuss the nuances of the Afro-Latino experience, and the ways in which language and code switching relate to power dynamics from a pastoral and cultural perspective. The group addresses:An introduction to Jon Aragón and Ameen Hudson (1:13)Afro-Latinos in South America (3:50)Afro-Latinidad culture in the US (8:17)Afro-Latina diaspora (17:43)Afro-Carribean, American Descendants of Slavery, and African Americans (24:04)Speaking to White Americans as an Afro-Latino (26:14)African American Vernacular English (30:15)Code switching (39:37)Understanding the heart behind code switching (45:05)“Not sounding like you’re black” (52:26)Code switching in the Christian community (58:22)Explore more from TGC on the topic of race.DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What has been your understanding of the Afro-Latino diaspora? How does this history shape the way we relate to those of Afro-Latino descent? Why is it important to recognize the unique cultural realities that the Afro-Latino diaspora presents? How does this impact the church? How have you generally interpreted and understood the history and development of African American Vernacular English (AAE)? How did the history Ameen Hudson presented change your view? What is code switching? Why do those in minority cultures feel the need to code switch? Why does understanding this help give full affirmation to the humanity of a person? How does the diversity of language and cultures offer a beautiful picture of who God is and how he acts in the world?

Chris and That Black Guy discuss what code-switching means and the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) versus Standard English (SE).

Did you know Ebonics has an official name and is starting to be recognized for what it is...it's own language? Listen in as we talk about African American Vernacular English also called AAVE. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/unitedwithkassanddor/message

Code switching and African American Vernacular English -- commonly referred to as ebonics -- are common among members in the black community as they navigate the intricacies of their worlds. In this episode, we discuss scenarios that call for each of these adjustments and the ways they influence our lives.

Rondez is joined by expert Speech-Language Pathologist Sarah Scott in a discussion of the effects of racial segregation on American English and the evolution of the English language

Quizmasters Lee and Marc are joined by artist and streamer Jon Lewis to ask, suss and answer a general knowledge quiz with topics including Sports, Famous Authors, Movie Formats, Famous Revolutionaries, Popcorn, World Leaders, Musical Instruments, Box Office, Award Winners, Streaming Services, Soda, Literature, Drive-Ins, Fall Guys, World History and more! Round One SPORTS - In what sport is a score of 111 sometimes referred to as a ‘Nelson’, named after Admiral Nelson, who allegedly only had one eye, one arm, and one leg? FAMOUS AUTHORS - Before his unpublished manuscript was optioned by director Alexander Payne for the 1999 Academy-award nominated film Election, what author was a ghostwriter for R.L. Stine? MOVIE FORMATS - In what year was the first IMAX movie released? FAMOUS REVOLUTIONARIES - Born in 11 B.C. Described by Plutarch as a thracian of nomadic stock, who helped lead the fight as the third commander in chief of the third Servile War? WORLD LEADERS - Since first winning a presidential election in 1994, which world leader is Europe’s longest-running currently-ruling elected head of state? POPCORN - Which U.S. state produces the most popcorn? Missed Corrections/Know Notes FROM EPISODE 110 - Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president. - submitted by Andrew FROM EPISODE 109 - Lee said it was the mother of Monkee Davy Jones who invented whiteout, Proverbial Lightkeeper Matt points out that it was actually Mike Nesmith’s mother, Betty Nesmith Graham. “African-American Vernacular English is preferred over ‘ebonics’ among linguists. The Strawberry Generation is mainly used in Taiwan; in mainland china, members of the Millenial generation are called “Little Emperors. The cognates that aren’t cognates which Lee calls “deceptive cognates” and Clare calls “homophone cognates” do have a legit linguistic name!! They are false cognates. Sometimes in language learning contexts they are also known as “false friends.” - submitted by Adelle Round Two MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - Which composer of broadway, film and television whose career lasted over six decades never learned to play in any key other than F# (the black keys), and utilized a “transposing piano” to write? BOX OFFICE - What movie is Steven Spielberg’s highest world-wide box office gross (not adjusted for inflation)? AWARD WINNERS - Born on January 11th, and known mostly for her music career with albums such as “No More Drama” and “Growing Pains”, who was nominated for both Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards for the movie Mudbound? STREAMING SERVICES - SoundCloud was first established in 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss in what country? SODA - In what year was ‘New Coke’ released? LITERATURE - 111 is pronounced “eleventy-one” when what character turns that age at the beginning of a well-known book? Rate My Question “For the X-men animated series, lawyers were concerned that one x-person’s name was too similar to a DC character, so it was changed. The Marvel character actually predated the DC character, originating in 1967. What was the original x-person’s name, and for bonus points, what was it changed to for the show?+ - submitted by Rumplesnailtskin Mike C. "Purchased in 1968 for 2.46 Million by Robert McCulloch; what landmark was taken apart, shipped across the Atlantic by boat and reassembled in Lake Havasu City, Arizona; where it is still a top tourist attraction in the area today?" - submitted by Myles Final Questions DRIVE-INS - In what state and year did the official drive-in theater open? FALL GUYS - According to developers, the hit 2020 game Fall Guys takes inspiration from which Japanese physical challenge game show that ran from 1986 to 1990 and which British game show that ran from 1966 to 2001 and featured players competing in cumbersome, oversized costumes? WORLD HISTORY - 111 is the emergency number of what country which gained full statutory independence in 1947 and is one of only three countries to have a female head of government directly succeed another? Upcoming LIVE Know Nonsense Trivia Challenges August 20th, 2020 - Know Nonsense Trivia Challenge - Live on Twitch 8pm - 9pm EDT You can find out more information about that and all of our live events online at KnowNonsenseTrivia.com All of the Know Nonsense events are free to play and you can win prizes after every round. Thank you Thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Thank you, Quizdaddies – Dylan, Tommy (The Electric Mud) and Tim (Pat's Garden Service) Thank you, Team Captains – Gil, David, Rachael, Aaron, Kristen & Fletcher Thank you, Proverbial Lightkeepers – Jenny, Logan, Spencer, Kaitlynn, Manu, Mo, Matthew, Nicole, Luc, Hank, Justin, Cooper, Elyse, Sarah, Karly, Kristopher, Josh, Shaun, Lucas and Max Thank you, Rumplesnailtskins – Tiffany, Allison, Paige, We Do Stuff, Mike S. ,Kenya, Jeff, Eric, Steven, Efren, Mike J., Mike C. If you'd like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content, please visit http://theknowno.com and click "Support." Special Guest: Jon Lewis.

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn’t be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk towards sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action. Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn’t be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk towards sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action. Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn’t be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk towards sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action. Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn’t be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk towards sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action. Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall's work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn't be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk towards sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action. Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people's lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Join Bifflecup and American Sign Language interpreter Deon from Harrell Moves on a discussion about ASL, African American Vernacular English, code switching and how to communicate in 2020! With featured music by Super Fetch 

Sidney, Emma, Sara & Rachel discuss how African American Vernacular English and Black Vernacular English has been the route of a lot of pop culture in the United States, and dissect the use of AAVE in our own lives. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/suburbanrealtalk/support

Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo’ Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don’t buy the “Kindle edition” at that link, because it’s just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he’s also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis’ less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today’s episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I’m dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I’ve used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I’ve come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I’ll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I’ll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we’re going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we’re going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don’t, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino’s biggest hits. Price had a song, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino’s earlier hit “The Fat Man”, and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, “Just Because” went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Just Because”] But it wasn’t until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I’ve changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that’s better known as “Alabamy Bound”, but was here called “Don’t You Leave Me Here”: [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, “Don’t You Leave Me Here”] The line, “If the boat don’t sink and the Stack don’t drown” refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were “more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell”. But it was probably the boats’ reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name “Stack Lee”, at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn’t want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as “Billy the Bully”, but bully didn’t quite, or didn’t only, mean what it means today. A “bully”, in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family — one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons’ rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, “Stack-A-Lee Blues”] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it’s difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, “Who’s treating?” and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons’ step-brother had murdered Shelton’s friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other’s hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons’ hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton’s hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits — seventy-five cents — for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn’t going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn’t hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said “You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to *make* you kill me” and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said “I told you to give me my hat”, picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, “Stack O’ Lee Blues”] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail — that’s something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today’s money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer — a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics — a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton’s arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater’s political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton’s faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn’t reselected, Shelton’s trial wasn’t held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn’t going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he’d gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison — presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial — just before Dryden’s death, in fact — a song called “Stack-A-Lee” was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin’s performance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as “Little Egypt” who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin’s, had written “Harlem Rag”, which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, “Harlem Rag”] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton’s release. While we can’t know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the “Stagger Lee” song were written by Turpin. It’s been suggested that he based the song on “Bully of the Town”, a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here’s a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, “Bully of the Town”] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully — in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully — and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It’s easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went “Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee”. In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called “Stack O’Lee Blues”, and we’ve heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode — that’s what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called “Skeg-A-Lee Blues” in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, “Skeg-A-Lee Blues”] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from “Frankie and Johnny”, another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn’t sound like him to me, and I can’t find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to “the Bully of the Town”: [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull — Down Home Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues”] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can’t arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, “Stack O’Lee (1928 version)”] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn’t be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as “Bama” who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, “Stackerlee”] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone’s repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with — Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender’s glass. From there, the story might change — in some versions, Lee would go free — sometimes because they couldn’t catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn’t as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I’ve read, able to play “Stagger Lee” for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by “Archibald and His Orchestra”: [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, “Stack A’Lee”] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald’s only hit. That’s the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts — which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price’s career was revitalised — and “Stagger Lee” was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song — in versions usually based on Price’s — became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, “Stagger Lee”] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, “Stagger Lee”] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we’ve been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority — a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some — I’ve seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of “Stagger Lee” at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said “Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how ‘lumpen’ had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I’m concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee.” The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called “toasts”. Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Jo Jo Gunne”), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain’s daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition”, whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson’s field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here’s the version of Stagger Lee he collected — there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you’re listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, “Stagger Lee”] After Jackson’s book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including “The Great Stack-A-Lee”, which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “The Great Stack-A-Lee”] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson’s book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there’s more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There’s this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] That’s not in the versions of the toast in Jackson’s book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, “Two-Time Slim”: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “Two-Time Slim”] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin’s great poem “Stagolee Wonders”, a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from “Stagolee Wonders” on “Poems for a Listener”,] Baldwin’s view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, “a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee’s roots are there, and Stagger Lee’s often been a preacher. He’s one who conveys the real history.” It’s a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it’s a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price’s hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of “Stagger Lee”, Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he’s now best known, “Personality”: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Personality”] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion — he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours — indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with “Stagger Lee”, and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.

Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Stagger Lee" by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "That Crazy Feeling" by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I've uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo' Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children's Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don't buy the "Kindle edition" at that link, because it's just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he's also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis' less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today's episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you're squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I'm dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I've used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I've come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I'll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I'll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we're going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we're going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don't, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa's studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino's biggest hits. Price had a song, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino's earlier hit "The Fat Man", and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, "Just Because" went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Just Because"] But it wasn't until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Stagger Lee"] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I've changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that's better known as "Alabamy Bound", but was here called "Don't You Leave Me Here": [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, "Don't You Leave Me Here"] The line, "If the boat don't sink and the Stack don't drown" refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were "more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell". But it was probably the boats' reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name "Stack Lee", at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn't want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as "Billy the Bully", but bully didn't quite, or didn't only, mean what it means today. A "bully", in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family -- one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons' rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Stack-A-Lee Blues"] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it's difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, "Who's treating?" and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons' step-brother had murdered Shelton's friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other's hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons' hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton's hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits -- seventy-five cents -- for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn't going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn't hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said "You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I'm going to *make* you kill me" and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said "I told you to give me my hat", picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, "Stack O' Lee Blues"] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail -- that's something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today's money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer -- a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics -- a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton's arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater's political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton's faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn't reselected, Shelton's trial wasn't held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn't going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he'd gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison -- presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial -- just before Dryden's death, in fact -- a song called "Stack-A-Lee" was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin's performance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair -- the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as "Little Egypt" who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin's, had written "Harlem Rag", which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, "Harlem Rag"] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton's release. While we can't know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the "Stagger Lee" song were written by Turpin. It's been suggested that he based the song on "Bully of the Town", a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here's a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, "Bully of the Town"] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully -- in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully -- and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It's easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went "Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee". In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called "Stack O'Lee Blues", and we've heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode -- that's what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called "Skeg-A-Lee Blues" in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, "Skeg-A-Lee Blues"] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from "Frankie and Johnny", another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn't sound like him to me, and I can't find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to "the Bully of the Town": [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull -- Down Home Boys, "Original Stack O'Lee Blues"] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can't arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Stack O'Lee (1928 version)"] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn't be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as "Bama" who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, "Stackerlee"] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone's repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with -- Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender's glass. From there, the story might change -- in some versions, Lee would go free -- sometimes because they couldn't catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn't as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I've read, able to play "Stagger Lee" for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by "Archibald and His Orchestra": [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, "Stack A'Lee"] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa's studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald's only hit. That's the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Stagger Lee"] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts -- which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price's career was revitalised -- and "Stagger Lee" was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song -- in versions usually based on Price's -- became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, "Stagger Lee"] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Stagger Lee"] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we've been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority -- a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some -- I've seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of "Stagger Lee" at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said "Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how 'lumpen' had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I'm concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee." The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called "toasts". Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry's "Jo Jo Gunne"), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain's daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition", whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson's field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here's the version of Stagger Lee he collected -- there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you're listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, "Stagger Lee"] After Jackson's book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including "The Great Stack-A-Lee", which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, "The Great Stack-A-Lee"] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Stagger Lee"] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson's book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there's more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There's this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Stagger Lee"] That's not in the versions of the toast in Jackson's book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, "Two-Time Slim": [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, "Two-Time Slim"] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin's great poem "Stagolee Wonders", a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from "Stagolee Wonders" on "Poems for a Listener",] Baldwin's view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, "a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee's roots are there, and Stagger Lee's often been a preacher. He's one who conveys the real history.” It's a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it's a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price's hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of "Stagger Lee", Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he's now best known, "Personality": [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Personality"] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion -- he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours -- indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with "Stagger Lee", and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.

Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo’ Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don’t buy the “Kindle edition” at that link, because it’s just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he’s also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis’ less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today’s episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I’m dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I’ve used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I’ve come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I’ll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I’ll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we’re going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we’re going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don’t, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino’s biggest hits. Price had a song, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino’s earlier hit “The Fat Man”, and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, “Just Because” went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Just Because”] But it wasn’t until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I’ve changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that’s better known as “Alabamy Bound”, but was here called “Don’t You Leave Me Here”: [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, “Don’t You Leave Me Here”] The line, “If the boat don’t sink and the Stack don’t drown” refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were “more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell”. But it was probably the boats’ reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name “Stack Lee”, at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn’t want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as “Billy the Bully”, but bully didn’t quite, or didn’t only, mean what it means today. A “bully”, in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family — one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons’ rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, “Stack-A-Lee Blues”] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it’s difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, “Who’s treating?” and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons’ step-brother had murdered Shelton’s friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other’s hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons’ hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton’s hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits — seventy-five cents — for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn’t going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn’t hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said “You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to *make* you kill me” and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said “I told you to give me my hat”, picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, “Stack O’ Lee Blues”] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail — that’s something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today’s money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer — a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics — a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton’s arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater’s political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton’s faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn’t reselected, Shelton’s trial wasn’t held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn’t going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he’d gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison — presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial — just before Dryden’s death, in fact — a song called “Stack-A-Lee” was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin’s performance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as “Little Egypt” who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin’s, had written “Harlem Rag”, which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, “Harlem Rag”] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton’s release. While we can’t know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the “Stagger Lee” song were written by Turpin. It’s been suggested that he based the song on “Bully of the Town”, a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here’s a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, “Bully of the Town”] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully — in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully — and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It’s easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went “Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee”. In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called “Stack O’Lee Blues”, and we’ve heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode — that’s what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called “Skeg-A-Lee Blues” in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, “Skeg-A-Lee Blues”] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from “Frankie and Johnny”, another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn’t sound like him to me, and I can’t find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to “the Bully of the Town”: [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull — Down Home Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues”] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can’t arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, “Stack O’Lee (1928 version)”] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn’t be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as “Bama” who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, “Stackerlee”] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone’s repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with — Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender’s glass. From there, the story might change — in some versions, Lee would go free — sometimes because they couldn’t catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn’t as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I’ve read, able to play “Stagger Lee” for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by “Archibald and His Orchestra”: [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, “Stack A’Lee”] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald’s only hit. That’s the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts — which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price’s career was revitalised — and “Stagger Lee” was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song — in versions usually based on Price’s — became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, “Stagger Lee”] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, “Stagger Lee”] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we’ve been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority — a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some — I’ve seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of “Stagger Lee” at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said “Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how ‘lumpen’ had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I’m concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee.” The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called “toasts”. Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Jo Jo Gunne”), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain’s daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition”, whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson’s field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here’s the version of Stagger Lee he collected — there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you’re listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, “Stagger Lee”] After Jackson’s book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including “The Great Stack-A-Lee”, which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “The Great Stack-A-Lee”] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson’s book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there’s more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There’s this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] That’s not in the versions of the toast in Jackson’s book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, “Two-Time Slim”: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “Two-Time Slim”] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin’s great poem “Stagolee Wonders”, a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from “Stagolee Wonders” on “Poems for a Listener”,] Baldwin’s view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, “a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee’s roots are there, and Stagger Lee’s often been a preacher. He’s one who conveys the real history.” It’s a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it’s a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price’s hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of “Stagger Lee”, Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he’s now best known, “Personality”: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Personality”] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion — he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours — indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with “Stagger Lee”, and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.

Toni Morrison said that language is the measure of our lives. With that, I wanted to explore this sect of language known as African American Vernacular English. Yes, the AAVE in this 3-part series we will explore just how powerful (and needed) this dialect is. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/onthewritersblock/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/onthewritersblock/support

I've been looking at media the last few weeks, YouTube, Instagram, the news outlets, print media and there has been this weird balkanization of media between those that think they are the spokesperson for whatever cause they think deserves attention and those too afraid to speak honestly for fear of retribution from the first group. "Woke", which according to Wikipedia is defined as; “As a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression "stay woke", whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.” Yeah. I've watched the celebration of mediocre movies that were praised simply because they had women behind the camera, had a majority Black cast, or in the case of the Academy Award winning movie Parasite being praised as though “Crazy Rich Asians” wasn't extremely popular months earlier, or the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon didn't win Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography at the 2001 Academy Awards. Least we do not mention the open hostility towards White men, including Brie ‘Captain Marvel' Larson's "I don't need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn't work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn't made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.” Considering that it was more than likely Anglo men that financed the movie, and that many of Anglo men have children with non-Anglo women, that comment didn't prevent that movie form bombing at the office. Lets Talk About It.

Ok so today we will be focusing on a slang word that has got so much negative and positive attention recently. This word is "woke"... So what does it mean? Is it positive or negative? Let's explore it and get some answers now! In formal English woke is a verb and the past of wake: "I woke early this morning", simple yeah? Not so much when we are using it within slang! The slang word woke W-O-K-E is an adjective that means to be conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice. Woke sometimes takes a superlative form, "wokest", emphasizing the extent of someone's "wokeness", or the state of being woke.For example "he always stays woke", meaning he is alert to injustice in society. Woke can also more generally describe someone as being "with it" or awake to injustice, showing its connection to its formal meaning. The expression "stay woke" is frequently used within social media and the press, referring to a continuing awareness of these issues.Woke is derived from African-American Vernacular English which is often found in urban communities. The first recorded use of "woke" in its political context was in May 1962 in the N.Y. Times Magazine glossary of "phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem".The Times published a piece on white beatniks appropriating black culture titled "If You're Woke, You Dig It."Nowadays "woke" had been adopted as a more generic slang term to demonstrate the need for awareness of an issue. It's widespread use has been suggested as a result of the black lives matter movement. It is also used by music artist, like Erykah Badu. In her song master teacher she sings "Only master teachers? I stay woke".However recently this word has been seen through a negative or ironic lens. Firstly, it has become the subject of memes and ironic usage, with people mocking the use and need for this term.Furthermore Barack Obama has expressed his disapproval of "woke", while speaking at the Obama Foundation summit last month. He commented being woke "is not activism and that it is not bringing about change", he continued to comment "If all you're doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far". It has now been suggested that woke started out as a way to label people as politically aware and has now become evidence of how politically aware people like to think they are.So that's our word of the day! Let us know your thoughts on the positive and negative connotations of woke.You can find us on our website https://theslangpodcast.com and from there you can see our transcript and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many more apps. Let's catch up soon to explore our next slang word.

In this week's episode I recap Thanksgiving, "Hymen-gate" continues at TI visits Red Table Talk, Kanye West's newest Christian endeavors, Collin Kaepernick, Stephen A Smith, Terrell Owens and what I call "black cannibalism". Enjoy!

Simon Calder meets speakers of indigenous languages (like Welsh in Britain), of dialects (like Moselfrankish in Germany) and vernaculars (like African-American Vernacular English, in the US). These speakers all use the mainstream language every day, but code-switch to their variants, questioning whether their societies are monolingual. Is there even something sinister and oppressive to the idea of monolingualism?

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late — health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn’t see the previous post — my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried — everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney — nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was — and still is — someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story — we’ve dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I’m talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I’m fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he’s queer, I’m using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use “he” and “him” pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we’re again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale — the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil — several times he’s gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I’ve seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he’s happy in his current situation. But at the time we’re talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces — wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn’t much different to Vicks’ VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with “Doc Hudson”, and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, “Caldonia” by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Caldonia”] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan’s vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard’s own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name “Little Richard”. However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Married Woman’s Boogie”] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright’s style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage — Pancake 31 — and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English — people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard’s talent, he got them to sign him. Richard’s first single was called “Every Hour”, and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Every Hour”] It was so close to Wright’s style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard’s song, “Every Evening”. [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Every Evening”] At this point Richard was solely a singer — he hadn’t yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as “Eskew” Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word “excreta”. Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard — who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations — has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita’s, Esquerita was better. It’s hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard’s piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn’t make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard’s later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: “Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: “I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then.” Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: “Ain’t That Good News”] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of “Directly From My Heart To You”, a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called “Little Richard’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, “Little Richard’s Boogie”] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for “lewd conduct” — what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn’t allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he’d moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price’s label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard’s constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles’ gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty’s owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of “Wonderin'”, and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Wonderin'”] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars — one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu” from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith, “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu”] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino’s style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino’s records. However, the session didn’t go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it “If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.” They did record some usable material — “Wonderin'”, which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded “I’m Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy” by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of “Directly From My Heart to You”, a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, “Directly From My Heart to You”] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn’t have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard’s potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard’s career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. “Tutti Frutti” started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. “Tutti Frutti” in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable — “A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, make it easy”. But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn’t understand that songs had to have different melodies — all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington’s “Blowtop Blues”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Blowtop Blues”] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, “I’m Just a Lonely Lonely Guy”, with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem — Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn’t have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her — but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn’t see this innocent-looking young woman’s face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years — both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn’t deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie’s new lyrics were rudimentary at best. “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do”. But they fit the metre, they weren’t about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn’t have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”] “Tutti Frutti” was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But… you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Tutti Frutti”] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard’s version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn’t be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like “Tutti Frutti” for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate — normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He’d got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn’t want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do — hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction… Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than “Tutti Frutti” had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he’d have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for “Long Tall Sally” came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there’s no such place — Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt — the “Aunt Mary” in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn’t want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Long Tall Sally”] The song, about a “John” who “jumps back in the alley” when he sees his wife coming while he’s engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with “Sally”, who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Long Tall Sally”] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing “Ain’t” rather than “Isn’t”. But he was also becoming a big star himself — and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we’ll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late -- health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn't see the previous post -- my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried -- everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney -- nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was -- and still is -- someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story -- we've dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I'm talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we're talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I'm fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he's queer, I'm using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use "he" and "him" pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we're again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale -- the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase "sex and drugs and rock and roll" and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil -- several times he's gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I've seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he's happy in his current situation. But at the time we're talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces -- wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn't much different to Vicks' VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with "Doc Hudson", and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Caldonia"] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan's vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard's own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name "Little Richard". However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Married Woman's Boogie"] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright's style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage -- Pancake 31 -- and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English -- people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard's talent, he got them to sign him. Richard's first single was called "Every Hour", and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Every Hour"] It was so close to Wright's style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard's song, "Every Evening". [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Every Evening"] At this point Richard was solely a singer -- he hadn't yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as "Eskew" Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word "excreta". Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard -- who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations -- has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita's, Esquerita was better. It's hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard's piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn't make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard's later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: "Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay"] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: "I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then." Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: "Ain't That Good News"] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of "Directly From My Heart To You", a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called "Little Richard's Boogie": [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, "Little Richard's Boogie"] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for "lewd conduct" -- what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn't allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he'd moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price's label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard's constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles' gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty's owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of "Wonderin'", and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Wonderin'"] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars -- one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa's studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey "Piano" Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu" from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey "Piano" Smith, "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu"] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino's style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino's records. However, the session didn't go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it "If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out." They did record some usable material -- "Wonderin'", which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded "I'm Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy" by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of "Directly From My Heart to You", a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn't have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard's potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard's career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. "Tutti Frutti" started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. "Tutti Frutti" in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable -- "A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn't understand that songs had to have different melodies -- all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington's "Blowtop Blues": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Blowtop Blues"] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, "I'm Just a Lonely Lonely Guy", with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem -- Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn't have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her -- but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn't see this innocent-looking young woman's face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years -- both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn't deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie's new lyrics were rudimentary at best. "I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do". But they fit the metre, they weren't about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn't matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn't have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti"] "Tutti Frutti" was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But... you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, "Tutti Frutti"] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard's version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn't be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like "Tutti Frutti" for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate -- normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He'd got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn't want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do -- hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction... Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than "Tutti Frutti" had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he'd have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for "Long Tall Sally" came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there's no such place -- Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt -- the "Aunt Mary" in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn't want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"] The song, about a "John" who "jumps back in the alley" when he sees his wife coming while he's engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with "Sally", who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Long Tall Sally"] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing "Ain't" rather than "Isn't". But he was also becoming a big star himself -- and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we'll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late — health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn’t see the previous post — my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried — everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney — nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was — and still is — someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story — we’ve dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I’m talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I’m fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he’s queer, I’m using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use “he” and “him” pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we’re again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale — the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil — several times he’s gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I’ve seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he’s happy in his current situation. But at the time we’re talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces — wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn’t much different to Vicks’ VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with “Doc Hudson”, and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, “Caldonia” by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Caldonia”] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan’s vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard’s own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name “Little Richard”. However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Married Woman’s Boogie”] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright’s style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage — Pancake 31 — and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English — people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard’s talent, he got them to sign him. Richard’s first single was called “Every Hour”, and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Every Hour”] It was so close to Wright’s style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard’s song, “Every Evening”. [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Every Evening”] At this point Richard was solely a singer — he hadn’t yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as “Eskew” Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word “excreta”. Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard — who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations — has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita’s, Esquerita was better. It’s hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard’s piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn’t make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard’s later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: “Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: “I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then.” Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: “Ain’t That Good News”] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of “Directly From My Heart To You”, a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called “Little Richard’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, “Little Richard’s Boogie”] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for “lewd conduct” — what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn’t allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he’d moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price’s label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard’s constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles’ gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty’s owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of “Wonderin'”, and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Wonderin'”] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars — one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu” from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith, “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu”] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino’s style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino’s records. However, the session didn’t go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it “If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.” They did record some usable material — “Wonderin'”, which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded “I’m Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy” by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of “Directly From My Heart to You”, a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, “Directly From My Heart to You”] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn’t have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard’s potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard’s career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. “Tutti Frutti” started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. “Tutti Frutti” in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable — “A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, make it easy”. But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn’t understand that songs had to have different melodies — all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington’s “Blowtop Blues”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Blowtop Blues”] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, “I’m Just a Lonely Lonely Guy”, with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem — Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn’t have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her — but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn’t see this innocent-looking young woman’s face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years — both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn’t deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie’s new lyrics were rudimentary at best. “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do”. But they fit the metre, they weren’t about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn’t have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”] “Tutti Frutti” was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But… you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Tutti Frutti”] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard’s version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn’t be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like “Tutti Frutti” for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate — normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He’d got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn’t want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do — hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction… Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than “Tutti Frutti” had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he’d have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for “Long Tall Sally” came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there’s no such place — Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt — the “Aunt Mary” in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn’t want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Long Tall Sally”] The song, about a “John” who “jumps back in the alley” when he sees his wife coming while he’s engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with “Sally”, who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Long Tall Sally”] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing “Ain’t” rather than “Isn’t”. But he was also becoming a big star himself — and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we’ll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

THIS WEEK IS SPONSORED BY KWANZAA — Episode 015 - WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO DO? — Issa new year and we’re taking some time to reflect. How do you plan for success and what do those steps look like? Goals vs intentions and are intentions always reality or naw? a new year also means new aesthetics and new topics.... we also touch on some old shit like R. Kelly. Maybe in 2019 he’ll stop getting away with being awful or at least y’all will stop stepping in the name of pedophilia. INSPIRATION CONTENT: https://youtu.be/kV7Trgx4LhI?t=94 LINKED UP: History of African American Vernacular English - https://bit.ly/2F8ME1p APPS FOR ORGANIZATION: Mindly - https://apple.co/2VxQqGE Asana - https://apple.co/2khXjx Clear - https://apple.co/2RHtdiF Timepage - https://apple.co/2vDhE39 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/blkmlnl/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/blkmlnl/support

Georgette and Rob dig deeper into the whole idea of talking 'black' and talking 'white' with special guest and educator, TJ Smith, Georgette's sorority sister doing big things in Dallas. They dish on their experiences on what most people of color know as code switching, how labeling what we know as 'talking white' is the language of power, and how the term ebonics and what we know as ebonics is recognized as AAVE, African American Vernacular English. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/blacknuancedpod/support

On this episode you will hear about African American Vernacular English and how people look at it. I personally love it and it sounds like music to my ears. Enjoy the show!

In this episode we cover: 2:39: How Jennifer began the 100 Angels series 5:15: What it means to be in a black body and why it's important to create art that speaks to that unique experience 11:43: How to make a space for yourself as a woman/person of color/etc in an industry still dominated by white males 13:45: Jennifer shares some thoughts on ways that those who benefit from the status quo can make space for others and create a seat at the table for them, so to speak 21:45: What it means to see black women represented in art 25:45: Jennifer shares some artists representing people of color in interesting ways 30:05: The inspiration for Jennifer's new work-in-progress "Cold-blooded", the value of African American Vernacular English, and what it means to not feel safe to use your language openly 37:45: A brief discussion of Colin Kaepernick and the effects of his protest 42:58: Not a Very Good Day at All is Jennifer's new children's book; she shares the origins of that story and the heart behind the main character

The first portion of this show, as referenced at the end of last episode, is about Peter Boghossian finally showing himself to be a sexist asshole. I also respond to the argument I frequently see of "Stop infighting, stop calling out atheist leaders, it distracts from our movement!" I think I have a good counter to that. After that, it's some amazing and difficult voicemails! Really top notch calls. I love hearing from you guys and being challenged! Some links: African American Vernacular English; The Word "Thug"; The Cornrows Incident Come to the Inciting Incident 100th show! I'll be there with Andrew and many of your other podcasting faves! Leave Thomas a voicemail! (916) 750-4746, remember short and to the point! Support us on Patreon at:  patreon.com/seriouspod Follow us on Twitter: @seriouspod Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/seriouspod For comments, email thomas@seriouspod.com Direct Download

Join me as I elaborate on the premise of this project and explain the terminology that will be used. Diglossia Discourse seeks to be a short, insightful glimpse into the impact of having to code switch between African-American Vernacular English and Standard American English on a small sample of Black Americans. This podcast is a capstone project for Regis College CO-401-01, Spring 2017. Host: Blessing Ajaero Producer: Blessing Ajaero Composer: Blessing Ajaero https://diglossiadiscourse.tumblr.com https://twitter.com/BlAjaero

To understand the 2012 election, you had to ask a political scientist. To understand the 2016 election, you need to call a linguist.At least, I did. Deborah Tannen is a Georgetown University linguist who's done pioneering work in how men and women's communication styles differ. Her book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as number one. But I got to know her earlier this year, as part of a reporting project to understand Hillary Clinton's leadership style, and the ways in which it's lost — and even a liability — on the campaign trail.Tannen's work has helped me understand not just Clinton and Trump's communication styles, but my own — her analysis of how men and women communication at home, and in the workplace, is useful no matter who you are. This episode, more than any other I've done, is full of practical insight into situations we all face daily. Among our topics:-How she became a linguist-Why everyone in her doctoral program was recording the conversations at dinner parties-The ways in which linguistics can solve the same problems as psychology-How cultural attitudes about interruptions and silence lead to miscommunication and frustration (I found this one *very* relevant)-The debate over African-American Vernacular English, and the crucial research that both powered it, and has been forgotten about it -The components of what she calls “conversational style” and how they vary depending on who you are-How gender roles can create conflict within relationships, even just in end-of-the-day check-ins with your partner-Why women are perceived to speak more than men, even when they're speaking less-How gendered forms of communication have changed perceptions of Hillary Clinton-Why she tries to never use the word "sexism" when discussing evaluations of Clinton and other female politicians-How expectations of good leadership are caught up in gendered ideas of what leaders look and sound likeAnd so, so much more. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have a question about objective pronouns? Whom ya gonna call? Wait--is that right? Or would it be "who ya gonna call"? "Whom" may be technically correct, but insisting on it can get you called an elitist. It's enough to make you nervous as a polecat in a perfume parlor! And if you really want to dig a hole all the way to China, don't start anywhere in the continental United States--you'll come out at the bottom of the ocean! Plus, how to pronounce the name of the Show-Me State, catfishing, gallon smashing, and what it means to conversate.FULL DETAILSMarch 4 was National Grammar Day, an occasion that prompted thoughtful essays and discussions about grammar, as well as a Tweeted Haiku Contest, for which Martha served a judge. Arika Okrent, author of In The Land of Invented Languages, took the prize with this one: I am an error/ And I will never reveal myself/ After you press send. Actually, that tweet became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because she soon followed up with an apt correction: Make that "send". The idea of digging a hole to China surfaces as early as 1872 in a Chamber's Journal fiction piece about beavers and engineers. Unfortunately, digging from almost anywhere in the United States would lead you to open water on the other end. To dig straight through to China, you'd have to start shoveling in Northern Argentina. There'd also be a few pesky physics problems to work out, like the fiery, molten mass at the center of the Earth. Here's how to find out where you'd end up when you start digging from anywhere on the planet, and how to make an earth sandwich with your antipodes.Whom you gonna call about discrepancies regarding who and whom? Grant and Martha, that's who. Although whom to contact is a correct use of whom, it's fast becoming obsolete, with growing numbers of people viewing it as elitist, effete, or both. But fair warning: Do not correct someone on this unless you're sure you have your facts straight! Here's another tweeted haiku from Liz Morrison in San Diego: "Serial comma/ Chicago yes, AP no/ You bewilder me."Quiz Master John Chaneski has a game about professions that match their respective verbs. What, for example, does a tutor do? Conversate, a variation of the word converse, is part of African-American Vernacular English, but with a slightly different meaning. To conversate is "to converse raucously." This word goes back to at least 1811, and it's well-known to many African-Americans. It's commonly heard in the Bahamas and Jamaica as well. Martha spoke recently at an Audubon Society event, where she traced the role of the Latin stem greg-. It's a form of the Latin word grex meaning "flock" or "herd." This root appears in many English words involving groups, including aggregate, congregate, gregarious, as well as the word egregious--literally, "standing outside the herd." Cain from Dublin, Ireland, wonders why sportscasters in his country often say a team's at sixes and sevens when they're looking disorganized or nonplussed. The leading theory suggests that sixes and sevens, primarily heard in the United Kingdom, comes from a French dice games similar to craps, called hazard, wherein to set on cinque and sice (from the French words for five and six) was the riskiest roll. Old Eddard sayings were plentiful in the 1930s, when the Lum and Abner radio show was a hit in households across the country. Lum Edwards, who made up half of the cornball duo, would offer up such wise sayings as I always found that the best way to figure out what tomorrow's weather was going to be is to wait until tomorrow comes along. That way you never make a mistake.Did you know that the word rack can also mean "one thousand," as in, he has four racks, or four thousand dollars? Here's another slang term: Gallon Smashing. It's the latest craze in pranks involving gallons of milk, a grocery store aisle to smash them on, and plenty of free time to waste. And of course, no slang roundup could fail to mention catfishing, the practice of lying to someone on the Internet in order to manipulate them, as in the case of former Notre Dame star Manti Te'o and noted Pacific Islander uberprankster Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. On the occasion of National Grammar Day, University of Illinois linguist Dennis Barron has pointed out some arresting posters from a wartime version from the early 20th century. They're from a 1918 Chicago Women's Club initiative called Better American Speech Week, a jingoistic campaign tinged with nationalism and ethnocentrism.Stanley Wilkins, a listener from Tyler, Texas, shares the idiom nervous as a pole cat in a perfume parlor. A polecat, more commonly known as a skunk, also fronts such gems as mean as a polecat, nervous as a pole cat in a standoff with a porcupine, and tickled as a polecat eating briars. In other news, Grant admits that, from a reasonable distance, he enjoys the mephitic emanations of Mephitis mephitis.A while back, we talked about the game Going To Texas, where two kids hold hands and spin around until they fall over dizzy. Becca Turpel from San Diego, California, said she knows the game as Wrist Rockets. Others have identified it as Dizzy Dizzy Dinosaur. Has anyone ever called it Fun?How do you pronounce Missouri? The late Donald Lance, a former professor from the University of Missouri at Columbia, compiled the exhaustive research that became The Pronunciation of Missouri: Variation and Change in American English, which traces the discrepancy between Missour-ee and Missour-uh all the way back to the 1600s. Today the pronunciation mostly divides along age lines, with older people saying Missour-uh and younger ones saying Missour-ee. The exceptions are politicians, who often say Missour-uh to sound authentic or folksy.Nancy Friedman, who writes the blog Fritinancy, tweeted this haiku for National Grammar Day: Dear yoga teacher/ if you say down once more/ I'll hurt you, no lie.If someone's a pound of pennies, it means they're a valuable asset and a pain in the butt, all at the same time. Grant and Martha are stumped on the origin of this one, though it is true that a pound of pennies comes out to about $1.46. One suspects that this guy's banker felt the same way about him. Have you heard chick used as a verb? Runners and triathletes use it to refer to a female passing a male in a race, as in You just got chicked!This episode was hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.....Support for A Way with Words comes from The Ken Blanchard Companies, celebrating 35 years of making a leadership difference with Situational Leadership II, the leadership model designed to boost effectiveness, impact, and employee engagement. More about how Blanchard can help your executives and organizational leaders at kenblanchard.com/leadership.--A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donateGet your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:Email: words@waywordradio.orgPhone: United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673London +44 20 7193 2113Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donateSite: http://waywordradio.org/Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/Skype: skype://waywordradio Copyright 2014, Wayword LLC.

Have a question about objective pronouns? Whom ya gonna call? Wait--is that right? Or would it be "who ya gonna call"? "Whom" may be technically correct, but insisting on it can get you called an elitist. It's enough to make you nervous as a polecat in a perfume parlor! And if you really want to dig a hole all the way to China, don't start anywhere in the continental United States--you'll come out at the bottom of the ocean! Plus, how to pronounce the name of the Show-Me State, catfishing, gallon smashing, and what it means to conversate.FULL DETAILSMarch 4 was National Grammar Day, an occasion that prompted thoughtful essays and discussions about grammar, as well as a Tweeted Haiku Contest, for which Martha served a judge. Arika Okrent, author of In The Land of Invented Languages, took the prize with this one: I am an error/ And I will never reveal myself/ After you press send. Actually, that tweet became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because she soon followed up with an apt correction: Make that "send". The idea of digging a hole to China surfaces as early as 1872 in a Chamber's Journal fiction piece about beavers and engineers. Unfortunately, digging from almost anywhere in the United States would lead you to open water on the other end. To dig straight through to China, you'd have to start shoveling in Northern Argentina. There'd also be a few pesky physics problems to work out, like the fiery, molten mass at the center of the Earth. Here's how to find out where you'd end up when you start digging from anywhere on the planet, and how to make an earth sandwich with your antipodes.Whom you gonna call about discrepancies regarding who and whom? Grant and Martha, that's who. Although whom to contact is a correct use of whom, it's fast becoming obsolete, with growing numbers of people viewing it as elitist, effete, or both. But fair warning: Do not correct someone on this unless you're sure you have your facts straight! Here's another tweeted haiku from Liz Morrison in San Diego: "Serial comma/ Chicago yes, AP no/ You bewilder me."Quiz Master John Chaneski has a game about professions that match their respective verbs. What, for example, does a tutor do? Conversate, a variation of the word converse, is part of African-American Vernacular English, but with a slightly different meaning. To conversate is "to converse raucously." This word goes back to at least 1811, and it's well-known to many African-Americans. It's commonly heard in the Bahamas and Jamaica as well. Martha spoke recently at an Audubon Society event, where she traced the role of the Latin stem greg-. It's a form of the Latin word grex meaning "flock" or "herd." This root appears in many English words involving groups, including aggregate, congregate, gregarious, as well as the word egregious--literally, "standing outside the herd." Cain from Dublin, Ireland, wonders why sportscasters in his country often say a team's at sixes and sevens when they're looking disorganized or nonplussed. The leading theory suggests that sixes and sevens, primarily heard in the United Kingdom, comes from a French dice games similar to craps, called hazard, wherein to set on cinque and sice (from the French words for five and six) was the riskiest roll. Old Eddard sayings were plentiful in the 1930s, when the Lum and Abner radio show was a hit in households across the country. Lum Edwards, who made up half of the cornball duo, would offer up such wise sayings as I always found that the best way to figure out what tomorrow's weather was going to be is to wait until tomorrow comes along. That way you never make a mistake.Did you know that the word rack can also mean "one thousand," as in, he has four racks, or four thousand dollars? Here's another slang term: Gallon Smashing. It's the latest craze in pranks involving gallons of milk, a grocery store aisle to smash them on, and plenty of free time to waste. And of course, no slang roundup could fail to mention catfishing, the practice of lying to someone on the Internet in order to manipulate them, as in the case of former Notre Dame star Manti Te'o and noted Pacific Islander uberprankster Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. On the occasion of National Grammar Day, University of Illinois linguist Dennis Barron has pointed out some arresting posters from a wartime version from the early 20th century. They're from a 1918 Chicago Women's Club initiative called Better American Speech Week, a jingoistic campaign tinged with nationalism and ethnocentrism.Stanley Wilkins, a listener from Tyler, Texas, shares the idiom nervous as a pole cat in a perfume parlor. A polecat, more commonly known as a skunk, also fronts such gems as mean as a polecat, nervous as a pole cat in a standoff with a porcupine, and tickled as a polecat eating briars. In other news, Grant admits that, from a reasonable distance, he enjoys the mephitic emanations of Mephitis mephitis.A while back, we talked about the game Going To Texas, where two kids hold hands and spin around until they fall over dizzy. Becca Turpel from San Diego, California, said she knows the game as Wrist Rockets. Others have identified it as Dizzy Dizzy Dinosaur. Has anyone ever called it Fun?How do you pronounce Missouri? The late Donald Lance, a former professor from the University of Missouri at Columbia, compiled the exhaustive research that became The Pronunciation of Missouri: Variation and Change in American English, which traces the discrepancy between Missour-ee and Missour-uh all the way back to the 1600s. Today the pronunciation mostly divides along age lines, with older people saying Missour-uh and younger ones saying Missour-ee. The exceptions are politicians, who often say Missour-uh to sound authentic or folksy.Nancy Friedman, who writes the blog Fritinancy, tweeted this haiku for National Grammar Day: Dear yoga teacher/ if you say down once more/ I'll hurt you, no lie.If someone's a pound of pennies, it means they're a valuable asset and a pain in the butt, all at the same time. Grant and Martha are stumped on the origin of this one, though it is true that a pound of pennies comes out to about $1.46. One suspects that this guy's banker felt the same way about him. Have you heard chick used as a verb? Runners and triathletes use it to refer to a female passing a male in a race, as in You just got chicked!This episode was hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.....Support for A Way with Words also comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. More at http://www.nu.edu/.--A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donateGet your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:Email: words@waywordradio.orgPhone: United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673London +44 20 7193 2113Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donateSite: http://waywordradio.org/Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/Skype: skype://waywordradio Copyright 2013, Wayword LLC.

Have a question about objective pronouns? Whom ya gonna call? Wait--is that right? Or would it be "who ya gonna call"? "Whom" may be technically correct, but insisting on it can get you called an elitist. It's enough to make you nervous as a polecat in a perfume parlor! And if you really want to dig a hole all the way to China, don't start anywhere in the continental United States--you'll come out at the bottom of the ocean! Plus, how to pronounce the name of the Show-Me State, catfishing, gallon smashing, and what it means to conversate.FULL DETAILSMarch 4 was National Grammar Day, an occasion that prompted thoughtful essays and discussions about grammar, as well as a Tweeted Haiku Contest, for which Martha served a judge. Arika Okrent, author of In The Land of Invented Languages, took the prize with this one: I am an error/ And I will never reveal myself/ After you press send. Actually, that tweet became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because she soon followed up with an apt correction: Make that "send". The idea of digging a hole to China surfaces as early as 1872 in a Chamber's Journal fiction piece about beavers and engineers. Unfortunately, digging from almost anywhere in the United States would lead you to open water on the other end. To dig straight through to China, you'd have to start shoveling in Northern Argentina. There'd also be a few pesky physics problems to work out, like the fiery, molten mass at the center of the Earth. Here's how to find out where you'd end up when you start digging from anywhere on the planet, and how to make an earth sandwich with your antipodes.Whom you gonna call about discrepancies regarding who and whom? Grant and Martha, that's who. Although whom to contact is a correct use of whom, it's fast becoming obsolete, with growing numbers of people viewing it as elitist, effete, or both. But fair warning: Do not correct someone on this unless you're sure you have your facts straight! Here's another tweeted haiku from Liz Morrison in San Diego: "Serial comma/ Chicago yes, AP no/ You bewilder me."Quiz Master John Chaneski has a game about professions that match their respective verbs. What, for example, does a tutor do? Conversate, a variation of the word converse, is part of African-American Vernacular English, but with a slightly different meaning. To conversate is "to converse raucously." This word goes back to at least 1811, and it's well-known to many African-Americans. It's commonly heard in the Bahamas and Jamaica as well. Martha spoke recently at an Audubon Society event, where she traced the role of the Latin stem greg-. It's a form of the Latin word grex meaning "flock" or "herd." This root appears in many English words involving groups, including aggregate, congregate, gregarious, as well as the word egregious--literally, "standing outside the herd." Cain from Dublin, Ireland, wonders why sportscasters in his country often say a team's at sixes and sevens when they're looking disorganized or nonplussed. The leading theory suggests that sixes and sevens, primarily heard in the United Kingdom, comes from a French dice games similar to craps, called hazard, wherein to set on cinque and sice (from the French words for five and six) was the riskiest roll. Old Eddard sayings were plentiful in the 1930s, when the Lum and Abner radio show was a hit in households across the country. Lum Edwards, who made up half of the cornball duo, would offer up such wise sayings as I always found that the best way to figure out what tomorrow's weather was going to be is to wait until tomorrow comes along. That way you never make a mistake.Did you know that the word rack can also mean "one thousand," as in, he has four racks, or four thousand dollars? Here's another slang term: Gallon Smashing. It's the latest craze in pranks involving gallons of milk, a grocery store aisle to smash them on, and plenty of free time to waste. And of course, no slang roundup could fail to mention catfishing, the practice of lying to someone on the Internet in order to manipulate them, as in the case of former Notre Dame star Manti Te'o and noted Pacific Islander uberprankster Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. On the occasion of National Grammar Day, University of Illinois linguist Dennis Barron has pointed out some arresting posters from a wartime version from the early 20th century. They're from a 1918 Chicago Women's Club initiative called Better American Speech Week, a jingoistic campaign tinged with nationalism and ethnocentrism.Stanley Wilkins, a listener from Tyler, Texas, shares the idiom nervous as a pole cat in a perfume parlor. A polecat, more commonly known as a skunk, also fronts such gems as mean as a polecat, nervous as a pole cat in a standoff with a porcupine, and tickled as a polecat eating briars. In other news, Grant admits that, from a reasonable distance, he enjoys the mephitic emanations of Mephitis mephitis.A while back, we talked about the game Going To Texas, where two kids hold hands and spin around until they fall over dizzy. Becca Turpel from San Diego, California, said she knows the game as Wrist Rockets. Others have identified it as Dizzy Dizzy Dinosaur. Has anyone ever called it Fun?How do you pronounce Missouri? The late Donald Lance, a former professor from the University of Missouri at Columbia, compiled the exhaustive research that became The Pronunciation of Missouri: Variation and Change in American English, which traces the discrepancy between Missour-ee and Missour-uh all the way back to the 1600s. Today the pronunciation mostly divides along age lines, with older people saying Missour-uh and younger ones saying Missour-ee. The exceptions are politicians, who often say Missour-uh to sound authentic or folksy.Nancy Friedman, who writes the blog Fritinancy, tweeted this haiku for National Grammar Day: Dear yoga teacher/ if you say down once more/ I'll hurt you, no lie.If someone's a pound of pennies, it means they're a valuable asset and a pain in the butt, all at the same time. Grant and Martha are stumped on the origin of this one, though it is true that a pound of pennies comes out to about $1.46. One suspects that this guy's banker felt the same way about him. Have you heard chick used as a verb? Runners and triathletes use it to refer to a female passing a male in a race, as in You just got chicked!This episode was hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.....Support for A Way with Words also comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. More at http://www.nu.edu/.And from The Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere. More about Ken Blanchard's leadership training programs at kenblanchard.com/leadership.--A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donateGet your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:Email: words@waywordradio.orgPhone: United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673London +44 20 7193 2113Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donateSite: http://waywordradio.org/Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/Skype: skype://waywordradio Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.