Podcasts about Basie

On Wednesday, April 30, the Count Basie Orchestra will celebrate 90 years swinging at the Kansas City Music Hall. "Everybody in the orchestra will be featured. And we'll just be doing what Mr. Basie began in 1935," director Scotty Barnhart told Up To Date.

Fully immerse yourself into the World of Warcraft as Basie and Noah run duos on Azeroth and lead you through Asmongold's whole thing, Warcraft furries, WoW expansion packs cool factor, sexy fantasy purple nerds, giving up WoW for lent, game names immersion, parsing 99, WoW simulations, wiping your bloody gums against the wall, the most expensive item and best WoW player in the world, the JCS apology, zombie house flipping murder, advice for family killers, Gabby Petito cops, coasting with no qualifications, learning who your neighbours are, cop dps, kids clowning on the Minecraft movie, banning white boys, no more arcade outlets, the fall of video game bars, Nintendo ruining games, and pinball scams. So effing cool dude.

Magic awaits you as the boys return to the world's most upsetting game show Feud 34 to dissect which Harry Potter characters they think psychos want to bone the most. Noah's lovely fiance Amanda also joins us to discuss buying a Switch 2 or European prostitute, the Amsterdam of south Ontario, Basie's kidneys, why people vote conservative, the boys who fucks, rooster missions, Weezy, doing Bellatrix on it, Thimbleshag Bristletits, Polish Hagrid, Albus Brian Griffin Dumbledore, cucking Draco Malfoy, Myrtle Moanington, and checking your patronus. Wands at the ready!

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's time for our evil show! Topics butchered this ep include the Bye Bye Man, the Xbox 720, Dookimon, doing a US road trip, maga red coats, the Tesla rebate, pedestrian rights, man pigs, Reddit defenders, new Snow White production, jokes that didn't land, shaming Basie, Gman riding a segway, Brian Johnson rat torture, Unit 731, mysterious substances in Amsterdam, The Elephant Fent, Marvel Supermans, The Thunderbolts, Jack Black naming things from Minecraft, DeviantArt Minecraft concept art, genderless Jack Black, MineCon questions, deditated wam, low key chill pedophile vibes, and combining Ass Reddit and Sort by Poo. Nah this one's good actually.

Glenn Miller dijo una vez que Jimmie Lunceford tenía “la mejor de todas las bandas”, y agregó: “Duke es genial, Basie es extraordinario, pero Lunceford los supera a ambos”. Con José Manuel Corrales.

Walk down this lonely road with us as the boys regale you with tales of Stevie wonder interviews, Michael Jackson conspiracies, Kim Jung Un witness protection, explaining plane crashes, wholesome halftime show, friend of the show Kanye West, Content Nukes, right wing class solidarity, wrestler's wives, the ban on women, giving Alaska to China, Groundhog Day beef, racist Spiderman, the tariffs, Chris Bores, the Sonichu medallion curse, private Chris-Chan collectors, DEI food, McDonald's bought the beans, UK Canadian racism, anti work tv shows, Chinese Seinfeld, Basie gets Severanced, Joe Fixit, a good face for Hulk, Marvel's Israeli super soldier, and Hulk solving the conflict in the Middle East. It's very Hulk-centric, this one.

It's getting scary out there, so let the boys light the way, as we guide you through Yi Lan Ma, politics in video games, Al Queda Parademons, real life The Accountant, failing Duolingo, Chris as a JAV star, Basie vs the ADL, being globally delayed, Grimes, Chris-Chan streams, mushroom tea, Mexican reservation spliffs, Nosferatu tumblerinas, that damn strokers Dracula, depressing British pre show, The VVere VVolf, Kickassia on Letterboxd, Co-workers, reddit comments, italian discrimination in China, unc shit, causing a Marvel Rivals public scene, the Atlantis 2 effect, Harry Potter names, dwarf gate keeping, Robbie Williams monkey movie, people-first terminology, Littlest Hobo on the Prairie, The Toxic Avenger, anyone can be The Whale, and Ryan Reynolds Dubai commercials. There's a light bros.

Prof. Basie von Solms, 'n navorsingsprofessor in Kuberveiligheid by die Sentrum vir Kuberveiligheid aan die Universiteit van Johannesburg, gesels oor 'n skerp toename in kubermisdaad. Volg RSG Geldsake op Twitter

Basie tries to convince Noah to play Marvel Rivals with him, so they break down the game's roster, as well as explaining black Nick Fury, Milana Vayntrub, monkey kings, Florida monkey sex trafficking, Overwatch's holocaust survivors, Venom's asshole, White Iron Fist, Ancient Chinese Wakanda, Namor-heads, Squirrel Boy, the Punisher male fantasy, facsimiles of Jesus, Jeff the shark, Mantis obsessions, duck titties, The Leader leaks, The Hulk Dogs, Black Adam's DC Enemies, Reddit wishlists, Kelsey Grammar going beast mode, Alpha Flight, the first French Canadian gay wedding in comics, green aliens from Newfoundland, french video game antagonists, Facebook fact checking, YouTube reels powerscaling, Trudeau being voted back in, YouTube comment arguments, and ripping the heads off action figures in the store. Oh and happy new year.

Frank Sinatra et Count Basie, Count Basie et Frank Sinatra. L'association de malfaiteurs la plus sexy de la musique américaine. Où quand le roi des crooners s'offre la Rolls des Big Bands de jazz. “Les concerts du Sands de Las Vegas, avec Basie et Quincy Jones qui trainait dans les parages, furent sans doute l'engagement le plus excitant de toute ma vie”, confiait Sinatra. Sinatra At The Sands, It Might As Well Be Swing, Sinatra-Basie : trois disques témoignent de ce mariage historique ! Plongée en coulisse dans Pour Qui Sonne Le Jazz !Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

durée : 00:57:52 - "Blue and sentimental" (Count Basie / Jerry Livingston / Mack David) (1938) / Démarquage : 9e Live du Tetracordo Ensemble - par : Laurent Valero - "Blue and Sentimental" chanson écrite en 1938 par Count Basie, Jerry Livingston et Mack David. Enregistré par le Count Basie and His Orchestra le 6 juin 1938 !

durée : 00:57:52 - "Blue and sentimental" (Count Basie / Jerry Livingston / Mack David) (1938) / Démarquage : 9e Live du Tetracordo Ensemble - par : Laurent Valero - "Blue and Sentimental" chanson écrite en 1938 par Count Basie, Jerry Livingston et Mack David. Enregistré par le Count Basie and His Orchestra le 6 juin 1938 !

Vor 20 Jahren ging die erste Jazz Collection über den Sender. Thema: Count Basie, der swingende Big Band-Leader und Graf des groovenden Grossklangkörpers. Zwanzig Jahre nach der ersten Sendung freuen wir uns, in einer Spezialwoche Studierende aus der ZHdK (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), der HKB (Hochschule der Künste Bern) und der HSLU (Hochschule Luzern) zu Gast zu haben. Musikerinnen und Musiker aus der Gen Z, die sich begeistern können für Musikschaffende, auf deren Schultern sie stehen. Für die Sängerin Maïka Nimi und den Saxophonisten Maurice Storrer gehört Basie mit seinem Sound da definitiv mit dazu. Warum das so ist, und wie Basie es geschafft hat, nach eher zähen Anfangsjahren zum Chef der langlebigsten Big Band überhaupt zu werden, das diskutieren sie vor Publikum, in der Jazz Collection mit Jodok Hess. Die gespielten Titel: Interpret:in: Titel (Album / Label) Count Basie: The Kid from Red Bank (The Atomic Mr. Basie / EMI) Count Basie: One O'Clock Jump (The Original Decca Recordings / MCA Records) Count Basie feat. Billie Holiday: I Can't Get Started (Billie Holiday: The Legacy (1933-1958 / Columbia) Count Basie: Dickie's Dream (The Essential Count Basie, Vol.2 / CBS) Count Basie Kansas City Seven: Lester Leaps in (The Definitive Lester Young / Verve) Count Basie Octet: Moten Swing (The Essential Count Basie, Vol.3 / CBS) Count Basie Octet: Little White Lies (Count Basie: The Octet Sounds / Ocium Recordings) Count Basie: 'S Wonderful (The Greatest!! Count Basie Plays Joe Williams Sings Standards / Verve)

Thank you for all of your support. Please let us know what you think about our podcast and what topic you may want to hear from us. Leaders, Lead Well!In music, some of the most memorable performances aren't about the notes musicians play—they're about the ones they leave out. The spaces between the sounds create rhythm, swing, and connection. What if leadership worked the same way? Take Count Basie's band, for example. Basie was famous for his minimalist piano style—he played fewer notes, giving the rhythm section room to groove and the soloists space to shine. The result? Music that felt effortless and alive. Leaders, like musicians, often feel the pressure to “play every note”—to solve every problem, attend every meeting, or micromanage every decision. But just as music depends on collaboration, so does effective leadership. Leaving space allows team members to take ownership, contribute creatively, and create synergy.Rich and Maikel jam to the beat of less is more on this episode of Mainline Executive Coaching ACT.  Leaders, Lead Well!Thank you to all of our listeners in over 70 countries and 750 cities worldwide, we greatly appreciate your support! We truly hope that what we bring to our listeners will improve your ability as leaders.Mainline Executive Coaching ACT has been recognized by FeedSpot as one of the top Executive Coaching Podcast in the world based on thousands of podcasts on the web and ranked by traffic, social media, followers & freshness.https://blog.feedspot.com/executive_coaching_podcasts/Sign up for our newsletter:https://www.richbaronexecutivecoaching.com/contactDownload our document on the Hottest Item in Business Today.https://www.richbaronexecutivecoaching.com/resources2fbc974dRich Baron:rbaron@richbaronexecutivecoaching.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-baron/https://www.richbaronexecutivecoaching.com/Maikel Bailey:mbailey@intelligentleadershipec.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/maikelbailey/https://maikelbailey.com/

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资深DJ有待介绍爵士乐发展史上各流派和代表人物，深入浅出，雅俗共赏。

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Small group sides led by the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young after his departure from the Basie band. All were done in the middle 1940's on the West Coast and feature Nat "King" Cole, Joe Albany, Irving Ashby, Frank Lacy, Red Callendar, Henry Tucker, Chico Hamilton, Howard McGhee, Vic Dickenson, Willie Smith and others. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Vu sur Poussières d'étoiles (jazz) : vendredi 08 novembre 2024 L'émission de Jean Neveu, le Jazz comme il l'aime et comme il nous le fait aimer : des pionniers aux créateurs actuels. Une émission accessible à tous, sans exclusive. Laurent de Wilde Off minor décembre 1992 « Open changes » I. D. A. C. Basie . M. Jackson Blues for me janvie r 1978 « Milt + Count » […] Cet article provient de Radio AlterNantes FM

The guys reflect on the monstrous career of Quincy Jones and what he meant (and continues to mean) to the world of popular music. SHOW NOTES: The Theme from Ironsides Ironside (Theme From “Ironside”) I’ve Got You Under My Skin – with Sinatra, Basie at the Sands Vegas 1966 I’ve Got You Under My Skin (Live At The Sands Hotel And Casino/1966) Lesley Gore – You Don’t Own Me Lesley Gore – You Don’t Own Me (Official Audio) Summer In the City – Quincy’s version 1973 Quincy Jones  – Summer In The City 1973 Soul Bossa Nova  1962 Quincy Jones – SOUL BOSSA NOVA PYT Michael Jackson – P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) (Audio) The Brothers Johnson – Strawberry Letter 23-1977 Strawberry Letter 23 Baby Come to Me-Patti Austin & James Ingram Patti Austin & James Ingram – Baby, Come To Me (1981 Original LP Version) HQ Lesley Gore in the Simpsons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upDAeY2L-6I

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An update on the Matthew Perry story, doing the right thing, some savoir-faire, drinking a big soda, the magical Gena Rowlands, some drinking quotes, the great Benjamin Franklin's weirdness, some falling down references, the totally cool band NOFX, Count fucking Basie, F/X, more Kim Shattuck, some thoughts on porn and normalcy, the passing of a French legend/louche, a perfectly French question, another psych hospital story, perhaps the worst phrase to ever say at a girl at a bar, a couple of Los Angeles movies, showcasing a showcase, eat your broccoli rabe, a beautiful streamer, and a promise. Stuff mentioned: A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Falling Down (1993), NOFX "Linoleum" (1994), NOFX "Punk in Drublic" (1994), NOFX "Linoleum" Live (1998 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kKod2qay94), Frank Sinatra "Sinatra at the Sands" (1966), F/X (1986), NOFX "Lori Meyers" (1994), Alain Delon, Marianne Faithful, and Mick Jagger Photo (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dollerosa/51285282253), Rain Man (1988), Skincare (2024), Crossroads of the World (6671 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028), Hollywood Homicide (2003), Boardner's (1652 N Cherokee Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028), David Rabe Hurlyburly (1985), Hurlyburly (1998), Hurlyburly (June 21-July 29, 1984 Promenade Theatre), William Shakespeare The Tragedie of Macbeth (1623), David Rabe Streamers (1975), Streamers (April 21, 1976-June 5, 1977 Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre), and Stephen Foster "Beautiful Dreamer" (1864).

Spin It is getting Splanky! We're talking about Big Band royalty, the one and only Count Basie! His 1958 instrumental record The Atomic Mr. Basie is the culmination of the talent of dozens of musicians and decades of bandleading experience. Find out how The Kid From Red Bank went from being the town's (second) best drummer to one of the genre's best pianists! On E=MC2, the Count joins arranger (and Batman theme song composer) Neal Hefti to create a pop-friendly swing record that holds tight to jazz tradition. Will they accomplish their goals? The Mixtaper teaches us about Spain, space, and a namesake kingdom that's 472,000,000 wide. Fight the Foo Birds, watch the Fantails, and hop along with Teddy The Toad as we give Basie a good ol' Double-O this week! And remember... it's all about the notes you DON'T play.Keep Spinning at www.SpinItPod.com!Thanks for listening!0:00 Intro4:46 About Count Basie14:56 About The Atomic Mr. Basie18:45 The First Grammys21:58 Basie's Career Continued23:10 Awards & Accolades24:20 Fact Or Spin25:17 He's A Real-Life Count30:31 His Kingdom Is 472,000,000 Wide34:15 Neal Hefti Helped Basie Accomplish His Goal39:33 Batman Can Go Space Truckin' Past Count Basie43:49 Album Art45:09 The Kid From Red Bank47:50 Duet49:41 After Supper51:32 Flight Of The Foo Birds54:39 Double-O56:41 Teddy The Toad57:49 Whirly-Bird59:22 Midnite Blue1:00:57 Splanky1:02:54 Fantail1:04:28 Lil' Darlin'1:06:47 Final Spin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Longtime sax player with Basie's band, Wess was a dependable sideman and section player who was also one of the first great jazz flute players. Here, he displays his tenor sax and flute on three sessions - one with Kenny Clarke for Riverside (with Henry Coker, Charlie Fowlkes and Milt Jackson - on piano!), one for Jazztone with Urbie Green (strange bedfellows - Ruby Braff, Med Flory, Freddie Green, Sir Charles Thompson) and one track from the Joe Newman session for Vanguard with Frank Foster, Matthew Gee and Johnny Acea. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

The music of Count Basie is essential to any jazz education, so we bring you sound and score recordings of 9 essential charts for young bands (Grade 1-2.5). Learn some history about each chart along the way! To gain access to all show notes and audio files please Subscribe to the podcast and consider supporting the show on Patreon - using the button at the top of thegrowingbanddirector.com Our mission is to share practical  advice and explore topics that will help every band director, no matter your experience level, as well as music education students who are working to join us in the coming years. Connect with us with comments or ideas Follow the show: Podcast website : Thegrowingbanddirector.com On Youtube The Growing Band Director  Facebook-The Growing Band Director Podcast Group Instagram @thegrowingbanddirector Tik Tok @thegrowingbanddirector If you like what you hear please: Leave a Five Star Review and  Share us with another band director! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kyle-smith95/support

Historian Larry Tye returns to discuss his new work, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.

Kissa is so much more than just playing records in a cafe or bar. In "Nick Dwyer Speaks Volumes," Derrick dives into the rich history of jazz kissa - also known as listening cafes - Japanese hi-fi culture, and ponders the good and bad of trendy, Japanese-inspired record bars in the west. Notable Kissa mentioned in this episode: Cafe Lion, Eigakan, Basie, Milonga Nueva, Posy, Rhinoçéros (Berlin), Hosoi (Stockholm), ESP Hi Fi (Denver, USA) Follow Nick Dwyer Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nickdwyernz/ Learn more about "A Century in Sound" here: https://cphdox.dk/film/a-century-in-sound/ Speaks Volumes is produced by Julia Wang. Logo and branding by Jonny Sikov. Support the show and access exclusive content: https://patreon.com/gee_derrick Follow Derrick Gee TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gee_derrick Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gee_derrick/ Newsletter: https://derrickgee.substack.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/derrickgee?si=a604e4b34a1d4255 Watch the video podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLArYIy4cER9tNSFhTWsAJVE21EJmFkOF4 Speaks Volumes is kindly sponsored by: Squarespace Get 10% off your first purchase of website or domain. Head to squarespace.com/volume and use code word VOLUME

How does someone take a solid Broadway musical number and turn it into a Jazz tune? Well, on this episode of Same Difference we hear some interesting results, when "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" goes under the microscope. Join AJ and Johnny as they listen to and discuss versions by Rex Harrison, Tony Bennett and Count Basie, Chris Botti and Dean Martin, Chet Baker, Stan Getz and Cal Tjader, and new-to-us artist Scott Chapman.

durée : 00:59:27 - Banzzaï du mardi 04 juin 2024 - par : Nathalie Piolé -

Count Basie and Harry "Sweets" Edison are in the songwriting seat with "Jive At Five" on this episode of Same Difference! Join AJ and Johnny as they listen to and discuss versions by the Count Basie Orchestra, Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry and Mike Vax, Martin Taylor and Stephane Grappelli, Joe Newman, and new-to-us artist The Shirt Tail Stompers.

Trumpeter, composer/arranger Thad Jones born March 28, 1923, was the middle son in a family that also produced younger brother Elvin Jones, perhaps best known as John Coltrane's longtime drummer, and pianist Hank Jones, who performed and recorded with almost everyone in his long career, as one of the first black musicians to have a long and fruitful career in the New York studios. Thad first made his mark on the national scene as a soloist and arranger/composer for the Basie band in 1954. When he moved to New York City in the 1960's, he founded a big band he co led with drummer Mel Lewis that still plays weekly at the Village Vanguard, still playing much of the music Thad wrote. In 1979 he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark where he lead the Danish Radio Big Band, and taught at the Royal Danish Conservatory. In 1985 he took over leadership of the Basie Band, but tragically passed way in 1986 of cancer.

Jazz88's Peter Solomon speaks with trumpeter Scotty Barnhart, the leader of the Basie Orchestra for the past twenty years. Barnhart discusses his early exposure to music at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, how he came to play the trumpet, how he felt the first time he heard the Basie Orchestra, the background behind his Grammy-winning album "Basie Swings the Blues," and what to expect from the MMEA All State Jazz Band which he will be leading in two sets at the Dakota Friday night.

durée : 00:59:35 - Banzzaï du jeudi 15 février 2024 - par : Nathalie Piolé - La playlist jazz de Nathalie Piolé.

Welcome to another captivating holiday edition of "Saturday Matinee" on Vintage Classic Radio, your gateway to the golden age of radio entertainment during this festive season between Christmas and New Year's Day. Our lineup begins with "Our Miss Brooks" in "Babysitting on New Year's Eve," originally aired on January 1st, 1950. In this delightful episode, Miss Connie Brooks, portrayed by Eve Arden, decides to babysit on New Year's Eve, only to find herself in a series of comedic misadventures. The cast features Gale Gordon as Principal Osgood Conklin, Richard Crenna as Walter Denton, and Jane Morgan as Mrs. Davis, each adding to the humor and charm of the episode. Next, we journey with "The Railroad Hour" in "Review of 1950," which was broadcasted on January 1st, 1951. Hosted by Gordon MacRae, this episode offers a musical look back at the events and culture of 1950, blending historical insights with popular tunes of the time, capturing the essence of the era in a nostalgic and entertaining way. Following this, we present "New Year's Fantasy," a special episode from "The Jell-O Show starring Jack Benny" originally broadcasted on December 31st, 1950. In this imaginative and humorous episode, Jack Benny takes the audience on a whimsical journey through various scenarios of what might happen in the upcoming year. Known for his sharp wit and comedic timing, Benny, along with Mary Livingstone, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, and Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, delivers a performance filled with laughter and light-hearted fun, perfect for ringing in the New Year. To conclude our "Saturday Matinee," we feature Count Basie and his Orchestra live from Birdland in New York City on January 1st, 1953, as part of "NBC Stars in Jazz." This segment showcases Basie's iconic jazz and swing music, setting a vibrant tone for New Year's celebrations with energetic and soulful performances that resonate with the spirit of the era. Join us for this wonderful look through time with "Saturday Matinee" on Vintage Classic Radio, where the golden age of radio comes alive!

Scotty Barnhart is a noted trumpeter, composer, arranger, and educator. Most of his work has come through his association with the Count Basie Orchestra, where he began as a featured trumpeter in 1993. Since 2013, Barnhart has been the orchestra's director and has continued to preserve the legacy and tradition of one of the most essential musical establishments of the 20th century. Barnhart not only carries Count Basie's musical legacy with elegance and grace but also connects with Basie's personality. Basie was known to be kind, caring, accessible, and positive. The Count Basie Orchestra's newest album, The Count Basie Orchestra Swings the Blues! has been nominated for a Grammy Award.    To read host Jay Sweet's article on Scotty Barnhart, visit New Jersey Jazz Magazine https://njjs.org/. To learn more about Scotty Barnhart, go to http://www.scottybarnhart.com/  To learn more about the Count Basie Orchestra, https://www.thecountbasieorchestra.com/

Recordings made by one of the greatest versions of the Basie band for Verve in January, 1956. Featuring arrangements by Ernie Wilkins, Neal Hefti, Joe Newman, Frank Wess and Frank Foster and solos by the two Franks, Newman, Thad Jones, Bill Hughes, Henry Coker, Benny Powell, Bill Graham, Marshall Royal and the great rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Eddie Jones and Sonny Payne. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Great Roulette recordings by the New Testament Basie Band reinterpreting the tunes from his 1930's and 40's band. Featuring great work by Billy Mitchell, Henry Coker, Thad Jones, Joe Newman, Jimmy Nottingham, Seldon Powell, Frank Foster, Frank Wess, Marshall Royal, Benny Powell and Basie himself! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. 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/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

Are you ready to shift your perspective on cybersecurity? We've got Dr. Karen Renaud, the general chair of Dewald Roode Workshop (DRW) this year and a renowned figure in information security research, to guide us on this fascinating journey. We'll be dissecting the paradigm-shifting presentations, lively debates and thought-provoking discussions from the workshop, with a special focus on Basie von Solms' revolutionary thoughts on the future of cybersecurity.Looking to understand why people often disregard security procedures? Or how personality traits can impact the security decisions we make? Our discussion reveals that cautiousness, morality, and self-consciousness can positively affect security decisions, but increasing security knowledge doesn't always correlate with safer decisions. As we navigate through the papers, we'll also investigate how AI-enhanced security systems could alleviate user stress and transform the way we approach security training.We also tackle an under-discussed issue in the cybersecurity sphere: the misuse of system access and the potential for computer abuse by managers. With their unique position of trust and autonomy, could managers be the new insider threat to watch out for? We'll also delve into the role of habits in cyber hygiene, the promises and perils of AI in the field, and how these insights can be applied in the workplace. Join us for this enlightening discussion -- it's an episode you won't want to miss!DRW Website: https://drw2023.github.io/(All papers and the Key Note slides are available on the website.)Papers discussed:4Personality Facets and Behavior: Security Decisions under Competing Priorities,  Sanjay Goel, Jingyi Huang, Alan Dennis, Kevin WilliamsAn Examination of How Security-Related Stress, Burnout, and Accountability Design Features Affect Security Operations Decisions,  Mary Grace Kozuch, Adam Hooker, Philip Menard, Tien N Nguyen, Raymond ChooBosses Behaving Badly: Managers Committing Computer Abuse, Laura AmoEncouraging Peer Reporting of Information Security Wrongdoings: A Normative Ethics Perspective, Reza Mousavi, Adel Yazdanmehr, Jingguo Wang, Fereshteh GhahramaniImpact of Cyber Hygiene Behavior on Target Suitability using Dual Systems Embedded Dual Attitudes Model, Harsh Parekh, Andrew SchwarzThe Blend of Human Cognition and AI Automation: What Will ChatGPT Do to the Cybersecurity Landscape?, Hwee-Joo Kam, Chen Zhong, Hong Liu, Allen JohnstonIntro audio for the Cyber Ways Podcast Outro audio for Cyber Ways PodcastCyber Ways is brought to you by the Center for Information Assurance, which is housed in the College of Business at Louisiana Tech University. The podcast is made possible through a "Just Business Grant," which is funded by the University's generous donors.https://business.latech.edu/cyberways/

Time to revisit an old favorite! We originally covered "Fly Me To The Moon" way back on episode 2, but we were still finding our rhythm to the show then AND fine tuning our technical aspects. So, we thought we'd take a fresh look at this true Jazz standard. You'll hear versions by Frank Sinatra with Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Sinatra with Antonio Carlos Jobim, The Montclair Women's Big Band, Diana Krall, and new-to-us artist the Eik Trio.

August 24, 1904 is the birthday of the late bandleader William Count Basie. To celebrate his birthday, I have pulled out a program I produced back in 2013. I decided to focus on the year of 1939 and play many of the songs recorded by the Basie band during that year. I am a big fan of the Basie band as my father had a couple of his records and as I grew older I began to explore the history and recordings of the man known as Count Basie. In addition to Basie, there were those great sidemen of his to spotlight. Musicians like Lester Young, Helen Humes, Buck Clayton, Dickie Wells, and Jo Jones make this a really great year for the Count. This is a good program and I hope you enjoy the music as well as a brief biography of the William Bill Basie known in the big band circle as Count. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

The music of Thelonious Monk is tonight's Jazz Feature subject and a fine album from June of 1959 that spotlights the Monk working quartet with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Sam Jones and the always swinging Arthur Taylor on drums. However there is a worthy addition to the Quartet which gives us the album title. That addition is cornetist Thad Jones who adds much musical spice to Monk's Quartet. If there is anyone who could have been added to Monk's working band it would be Thad. However this was a one shot recording date as Thad had a coveted position in the Count Basie Orchestra and had a little time off from Basie to do this date. The compositions are a mix of old and new all by Monk of course. Two new ones written for the date are "Played Twice" and "Jackie--ing" and the older ones are "Straight, No Chaser", "Ask Me Now" and "I Mean You". Thad in this writer's opinion is the star of the date and adapts so well to Monk's music. "Five By Monk By Five" is the Jazz feature tonight.

Legendary bandleader, composer and jazz pianist William "Count" Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on Aug. 21, 1904. As a young man, Basie toured the Vaudeville circuit as a solo pianist and music director. He would go on to record alongside legends including Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. He is perhaps best known for his 1937 hit, "One O'Clock Jump," which helped solidify his status as one of the great band leaders in the big band and swing genres. Basie also recorded with Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaughan. In 1984, at the age of 79, he passed away from pancreatic cancer in Hollywood, Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Para el verano de 1962 la fiebre del Twist está completamente desatada. No solo surgen decenas de bailes paralelos, como el Pony, el Watusi o el Jerk, que intentaban clonar el éxito del Twist, sino que prácticamente todos los artistas del momento, vinculados o no al rocknroll, hacen alguna canción con referencias al baile más famoso de su tiempo.Playlist; (sintonía) THE VENTURES “The twist” (1962)FATS DOMINO “Dance with Mr Domino” (junio 1962)PROFESSOR LONGHAIR “Whole lotta twistin’” (1962)RAY ANTHONY and HIS BOOKENDS “Night train twist” (enero 1962)COUNT BASIE and HIS ORCHESTRA “The Basie twist” (1962)HENRY MANCINI and HIS ORCHESTRA “Tooty twist” (marzo 1962)PÉREZ PRADO and HIS ORCHESTRA “Venezuela Twist” (1962)FRANK SINATRA “Everybody’s twistin’” (marzo 1962)RAY BENNETT “Twistin’ to the blues” (noviembre 1962)SPEEDY WEST “Tulsa Twist” (1962)JOE HOUSTON “Crazy Twist” (1962)PETULA CLARK “Ya Ya Twist” (junio 1962)MINA “Ecclise Twist” (abril 1962)MIKE RIOS “Twist de Saint Tropez” (1962)DUO DINAMICO “Bailando Twist” (1962)SANDY NELSON “Twisted” (1962)DUANE EDDY “Twistin’ and Twangin’” (1962)STEVE DOUGLAS and THE REBEL ROUSERS “Surfer’s Twist” (1962)THE DOVELLS “Bristol Twistin’ Annie” (noviembre 1962)HANK BALLARD and THE MIDNIGHTERS “The Twist” (diciembre 1958) Escuchar audio

In this episode we examine and listen to Disc #853 of the V-Disc Collection.  This V-Disc features vintage recordings by Count Basie, Les Brown, Nellie Lutcher and Kay Starr. (E018) * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

Know. Be. Live.   Listen as John Basie (Director, Residency at the Impact 360 Institute) unpacks these three simple, yet powerful words and what it means for how we approach creating more leaders.   The Impact 360 Institute was founded by John and Trudy Cathy White in 2006 and Chick-fil-A's roots still run deep through the entire campus.   Click here to learn more about the Impact 360 Institute.   Click here to purchase Basie's book: Know. Be. Live.   Stay saucy!    

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

Many of the problems modern teachers are facing aren't new, so we're going back in time to find out how our education system became a system that teachers are currently fleeing. Come to find out, modern teachers inherited low pay, limited respect, and a system that strips communities of their cultural traditions. In this episode, hear how Indian Boarding Schools and the American Industrial Revolution have left traces on modern education, and how these traces are contributing to teachers' decisions to leave education.   Music:  Theme Song By Julian Saporiti “Sonata No.13 in E Flat Major, Op. 24 No. 1-II. Allegro, Molto, e Vivace” by Daniel Veesey is in the Public Domain. “Railroad's Whisky Co” by Jahzzar is Licensed under a CC BY-SA license. “Ugly Truth” by HoliznaCC0 is in the Public Domain. “Upsurge” by Jonah Dempcy is  a  CC BY-NC license. “Green Lights”  by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license. “Pizz” by Andrew Christopher Smith is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA Transcript: I had a band teacher once hold me after class and force me eat a beef and bean burrito. He sat in front of me on the piano bench to make sure that I ate it. I was a freshman, in the middle of the high school wrestling season, and I was cutting weight for my first varsity tournament – where I'd end up getting my lips knocked off. My teacher, Mr. Duran, was short, wiry, wore jeans with a braided leather belt and a button-down shirt. He had round-framed glasses, combed his hair to the side, and more than once told me to listen to the greats like Chick Webb and not just the white guys that made it on the radio.  He was in his 30th year of teaching, and he was not shy about giving advice. While I ate the burrito, Duran talked about playing baseball in college and how abruptly a life of sports could come to an end but how long a life of music could last. This was mature guidance, albeit, guidance that I see more value in now than I did then. Duran would garnish each class with stories that worked to guide us towards being kind human beings. There were days in Jazz band where he would sit in the center of the tiered room, legs crossed, saxophone neck strap still on, and tell us about his past. When Mr. Duran was in college at the University of Northern Colorado in the 1960s, the Count Basie Orchestra went through town and stopped at the university. UNC was known for its jazz programs and one of Basie's saxophone players dropped out and they needed a replacement. Count Basie was one of the most influential musicians from the Swing Era – he was like a swing minimalist. Duran jumped at the opportunity. He got to travel and play with the band and experience life as a musician – more specifically as a musician of color. One time he and a buddy from the orchestra went into a diner and were refused anything more than water. Duran was Mexican and his friend was Black, and it was the middle of the 1960s. In protest, they sat in the big window of the diner for 3 hours, sipping their water, putting themselves on display for anyone who walked by. I love that story – this man, my teacher, saw inequity and faced it with defiance. Duran's lessons were eye-opening. I didn't realize that those stories served as parables on ethics and kindness until I became a teacher and started telling stories of my own to serve the same ends. Duran used his history to help us become better humans. And isn't that why we turn to history? Well, today, we're going to take a lesson from Duran and examine the history of education in the U.S. And because the history of education is tremendous, we have to narrow it down. So we'll focus on two aspects of history that set precedents for modern education, for the current system from which modern teachers are exiting.. We are going to start with Indian Boarding Schools, and then we'll take a look at the American Industrial Revolution. This is Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I'm Charles Fournier. Here is part 2: “Inheritance” Caskey Russell:  I'm going crabbing this weekend. I own a boat with my brothers. And yeah, we go out and catch crab. And there'll be salmon season soon. So I kind of got back into the ocean style lifestyle. This is Caskey Russel. I got to catch up with him over a zoom call this summer. He is the Dean of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University. He grew up in Washington and is from the Tlingit tribe. I know Caskey because he taught for 17 years at the University of Wyoming, he was a dean of American Indian Studies, and he was my thesis chair and educational guide when I was at the university. Some of Caskey's research for his PhD program dug into the history of Indian Education, specifically Indian boarding schools. Caskey Russell: My grandmother and her brothers, aunts and uncles, all went to Chemawa Indian School, in Salem. And it was a mixed bag. If you are asking yourself, wait, who's this Caskey guy and what do Indian Boarding Schools have to do with teachers quitting? Here's how. We know that historical atrocities leave a trace on modern institutions, so we need to recognize that Indian boarding schools have left their mark on modern education. They are a  part of the system of inequity modern teachers have inherited. Indian Boarding Schools are an example of the deculturalization that has occurred in education. One of many. Attempts to strip communities of their cultures happened with just about everyone in this country at some point that didn't fit into the male, able-bodied, straight, white, Anglo Saxon Protestant category. Traces of these inequities remain in education, deculturalization still happens, and teachers working towards inclusion in a system that was based on exclusion often run into roadblocks – think book bans or accusations that teachers are trying to indoctrinate kids - and these roadblocks are pushing teachers out of education. So to better understand the inequities in modern education, this thing that is frustrating teachers to the point of quitting, we need to look at where some of those attempts at deculturalization originated. We need to look at Indian Boarding Schools. And we need to listen to someone like Caskey.  Caskey Russell: They liked the sports. They like some of the music, but my uncle Stanley Pradovic, I remember he said, “I used to dream of feasts, seafood feasts that they had in Alaska.” And  my grandmother was able to keep the Tlingit  language because she didn't go to boarding school, but her brothers did not.  You step back and look at the whole system and how destructive and just kind of the cultural genocide aspect. My grandmother would say she didn't know her brothers because when she was born, her brothers were gone away from her earliest memories. And so she didn't get to know her brothers right away. It did break families up. And I was just chatting with my mom last night. My mom said the other family had no control over what it was determined for them. And again, not having control over that seems to be the key to it, nor having input in the education nor valuing…and then having a different model, different cultural notion of success. And then the military and the Christianization, all that together, just adds problem on top of problem, instead of being empowering and enlightening, that really becomes conforming, sort of thing. What happened to Caskey's family was a result of centuries of efforts to deculturalize tribes. Early European colonizers of the US  set a precedent of trying to assimilate tribes into a single monolithic culture. Colonizers disregarded tribal traditions and languages and failed to see that tribes already valued education for their youth. So the assumption that public education started with Horace Mann in 1837 is an assumption that values eurocentric education over the public education that was already in the Americas.  Part of this is because the purposes of education differed. Many Native communities saw educating children as a means to pass on generational knowledge and teach children how to be a successful part of the community. 17th-century Plymouth settlers specifically saw education and literacy as a method to keep Satan away. Children needed to be able to read so they could read the Bible. A pilgrim minister explained: “[There] is in all children, though no alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon” (42). But tribes did not beat down their children, did not read the Bible, and were able to survive and thrive in what Pilgrims saw as wilderness. So Pilgrims worked to impose their educational priorities onto tribes as a way to cast out Satan, and ultimately gain control of Indigenous people. This effort to assimilate and control only compounded over the next few centuries By the 19th century, congress was also making efforts to deculturalize and assimilate tribes. Thomas Jefferson who had a big role in the removal of Native Americans from their lands also had a One Nation idea when it came to Native Americans – an assumption that required assimilation through education. In 1816, Jefferson explained the value of education: “Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible of much improvement, and most of all in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is to be effected” (101)). Jefferson believed a democratic, not a moral education which was what kids were getting at the time, was essential to democracy and he's right, but his One Nation idea required a monolithic ideal that did not value other cultures. He wanted tribes to conform to his image of being American. This focus on conformity was baked into the American educational philosophy. The Civilization Act of 1819 saw Thomas McKenney, the first head of the Office of Indian Affairs begin a process of Native American deculturization  – they created a tribal school system run by white missionary teachers hoping to gain control of tribes through the power of education and assimilation. When Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, he saw some of the educational progress made by tribes as dangerous to America's goals of gaining control of lands.   So, in 1830, America passed the Indian Removal Act, which brutally uprooted tribes and relocated them. Thirty years later, the Indian Peace Commission began reservation schools or day schools. But again, the cultural genocide that all of these acts and efforts had hoped for weren't as effective as the government Wanted. This is when the government stepped in again. Paired with the Dawes Act of 1877 that worked to split reservation lands into private property began the start of the boarding school movement in 1879. Each step was a process working towards killing cultures in an attempt to control land, people, and ideas – all largely through some form of education. The start of the boarding school experiment can  be attributed to Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Caskey Russell: Pratt actually had a number of prisoners of war under his charge at St. Augustine, Florida. Besides being given military uniforms, they would teach them. And so the way he sold the first  boarding schools was that instead of being at war with natives, you can educate them. The US could educate them, and kind of eradicate native culture through educating towards whiteness. Caskey explained that the thought was that education would help the government avoid the expenses of war. Caskey Russell: So there are a group of Plains Natives that were transported to St. Augustine, that was his kind of first experiment. And then he was able to go to Congress and get some money. And he took them to The Hampton Institute and eventually to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School So Pratt's experiment led to the establishment of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879. This was around the same time that Pratt made a famous statement to congress: Caskey Russell: He says to Congress, “You have heard Sherman say the only good Indian's a Dead Indian. I would agree with this one kind of difference that you can kill the Indian save the man.” That's what education can do. That's the motto. And so, there was based on military kind of military boarding school style, and they opened up across the country. And they were often religiously affiliated, and religious institutions given  them control of them. Which, you know, was another part of the boarding schools was the religious education, the eradication of tribal cultures, tribal religions, and the inculcation of Christianity, the various sects of Christianity across the country. Each step taken by congress, in the name of education, was an effort to prioritize one culture over others, one idea of success over others - often through religious means, because again, early education was morality based. And they did this through legislation and through educational policy. Even though many of these efforts are pretty old, we still feel the educational effects of prioritizing a single culture or single idea of success.. Elizabeth Smith, a veteran teacher of 20 years who teaches on a reservation still sees this today.  Elizabeth Smith: Even though I can count on my hand, the number of students that I've taught that have graduated and have a white culture, sort of experience with what would be known as success, quote, unquote   Caskey sees this idea in what is tested or valued as a bottom line in public education. These are things that dismiss differentiated cultural values. Caskey Russell: Did the schools reward students let's say for instance, this the schools Wind River  reward students for knowing the traditional clan system,  speaking Arapaho or Shoshone for knowing traditional ways, whether it's kind hunting, traditional use of land, traditional plants respond medicine, knowing being prepare, or being an apprentice for ceremony, none of that none of that culturally important stuff that was really important to Native people, especially young people they could dream of, you know, I'm going to fulfill these goals, these roles, these social roles one day, none of that's important, it seems like an American school system, right? When you're going to take the SAT or the ACT, are they going to value the hours you spent with your grandparents trying to learn the language or learning stories or learning traditional ways? Of course not. This is a part of the inheritance of modern education, something teachers have to grapple with consistently. How can we educate students to be a part of a community that through legislation or policy doesn't seem to value all traditions and cultures within that community? Or how to reach a measure of success that isn't culturally misaligned or based on morality? Caskey Russell:A handful of them might be successful in kind of the white American ideal. But that's not the only measure of success, nor is it maybe a healthy measure of success, right, for Native people. It would be wonderful to let other ideas of success, community success, success as a human being within a community flourish in the school setting. This question of how to honor a diverse spectrum of students lands on teachers in the classroom. Though legislators and school boards may make efforts to dictate what can and can't be taught in the classroom, the reality is it's teachers and administrators who are working with kids – and kids from a wide spectrum of communities who have often been forced into a specific, standardized idea of success, which might not be culturally conscious. This is exactly how Indian boarding schools started, they forced kids from diverse tribes into a standardized idea of success initially using arguments for morality to do so. We recognize this as bad now, so why are forms of it still happening?   A big concern of some of the teachers who have decided to leave teaching was the start of limits and  restrictions about what can and can't be taught in the classroom. Many of these limits originate from argument about morality that are backed by religious groups that want to dictate what is happening in the classroom. Think of Mr. Wacker from last episode who is still frustrated with the banning of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye for moral arguments or Mr. Atkinson who felt his curriculum being squeezed by people who didn't appreciate class conversations about varying cultural perspectives on current events.  And, as we saw with the history of Native American education, this is not new – even though many founding fathers, who were deists themselves, advocated for the separation of church and state and were adamant that education focus on democratic values rather than religious values. John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:  “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” John Adams does not reference education and say study the Bible. And fellow former president James Madison did not mince words in a letter that pushed against church use of government land, which would later include schools: “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.” And these beliefs worked their way into legislation with the inclusion of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson said was “A wall of separation between the church and state.” And though we know Jefferson's view of education wasn't very inclusive, if we combine this idea of the separation of church and state with a modern inclusive reading of Jefferson's thoughts that education is to “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty,” We get a pretty good idea that education is a means to inform a free-thinking, diverse population that has different belief systems.  The founders knew the danger of letting religion seep its way into government - they just broke free of a country that allowed that to happen. So to have a system of education that would inform the whole mass of people without perpetuating the deculturalization we saw with the Indian Boarding schools, which have their origins in religious schooling, that system would need to accommodate the diversity of that mass of people.  This means that teachers would need the trust of the public and  freedom to use their expertise to do their jobs, which would likely include selecting a wide range of materials to accommodate a diverse student population. This freedom and trust is not something being granted to modern teachers. There is currently a trend of parents, legislators, and school board members criticizing teacher efforts to support diverse student needs, often through moral critiques. Which stems from a lack of trust and the same morality based fear that sparked early deculturalization efforts in the United States. So, this isn't new. This is another part of what teachers have inherited from previous generations of educators, a lack of professional respect that translates to a lack of autonomy in the classroom, low pay, and a smattering of other things that are driving teachers from their jobs. Here's Elizabeth again: Elizabeth Smith: And let me clarify, you know, when I say I love teaching, I do love teaching. To say that I love where I'm at right now, no, I do not. I am not satisfied with the way my job is going. I'm not satisfied with the way I feel inside every single day coming home from work. It's like a battlefield. It is intense. It is stressful. My family has noticed it and made comments on it, you know, and I don't have the patience to deal with my own children. And what am I going to do if I don't do this? I've got 20 years of expertise invested in this. And I've spent a lot of time learning how to do the things that I do and I enjoy improving it. As of now, she is planning on staying in education. And all of those 20 years have been spent teaching on reservations. She attributes this in part to why she loves her work so much, why she's planning on staying. There is a different level of respect that she sees in these schools and a higher level of appreciation, which goes a long way. But this doesn't mean that there still isn't a lack of professional trust or respect that she feels from being a teacher.  Elizabeth Smith: There's so much micromanaging and so many expectations that are put on us that are really insulting, actually, to our intelligence and to our professionalism. And I understand that there are teachers who are unaware of the ways that they're doing things are unprofessional and unintelligent. So I get the admin has to make some allowances and come up with some plans for how to deal with teachers that are not as aware of themselves and their skills as they should be, you know, so I understand that but the blanket statements.. To address where these blanket solutions may originate from, we are going to take another look at history through a little different lens than what we've been using so far.  When I asked teachers about what pushed them out of education, they echoed Elizabeth's frustrations. Lack of respect was a major reason people left. But this is not new, like the history of inequity in education, the lack of professional respect has been a thread through public education's history. So we are going to pull on that thread and look at the tradition of not valuing or respecting teachers.   Stephanie Reese: As a teacher, you're going to be marginalized, and you're not going to be taken seriously. Ron Ruckman: I think a lot of administrators, They just don't have any idea there, and they don't really think of us as professionals, you know, they don't really think of us as being able to do our job. Christie Chadwick: As a teacher, we're managing all these expectations. And I think that that's not acknowledged by the general population. Teachers want to be seen as professionals. This came up in interviews in reference to being trusted to make decisions about curriculum, in being more autonomous, and in getting paid better. When thinking about why teachers have inherited a lack of professional respect in the present, it might have to do with the American Industrial Revolution: Colby Gull: We were built on an industrial model. Get them in, stick the widget on him and get him out the other side of the door. Right. And that's just not how humans work. This is Colby Gull, he is the managing director for the Trustees education Initiative in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming. Colby has been a teacher, a coach, a principal, and a superintendent. He's run the educational gamut. And he points out that the structure of education does not necessarily promote the growing and sharing of ideas. Colby Gull: And we live in now the idea economy. And we're still not teaching in the idea economy. We're teaching in the industrial economy where you buying and selling goods. But our economy now is based on ideas and sharing of ideas and debating and discussing, and I don't know, people make a lot of money with their ideas.  And this structure of education, this factory style model, which looks similar to the military approach seen with Indian Boarding Schools, started and gained popularity during the American Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Along with this more industrial model the precedent for the amount of respect teachers received was set. I see several ways in which history has handed down a dismissive attitude toward teachers.  As Common Schools gained popularity in the mid-19th century, young women were also moving to cities for better economic opportunities. And these women were hired as teachers in droves because they could be paid substantially less than men. This compounded since teaching was seen as respectable employment for women - it matched the stereotype that women were naturally nurturing. Both the image of teachers as nurturers and the trouble with pay is consistent with what we see today.  Here's Stephanie Reese, a former PE teacher who left education and became the general manager of Blacktooth Brewing Company. Stephanie Reese: Absolutely money matters. I was in so much debt. You know, with loans, whether they're student loans, or just credit card, or whatever it is, I had a lot in college, had a lot while I was teaching. and teaching just doesn't give you that opportunity.. And  level increases are a fucking joke. Unless you've been in, you've been in I call it like, like you've been in the pen. You've been in for 34 years, you've given one kidney, you have four degrees, master's degrees, preferably doctorate even better, and you've given up your will to live, and those those things will give you more money. Part of the consistently poor pay has to do with the hierarchical structure in education. After the Civil War, the first iteration of the department of education was created, in order to track what the nation's schools were doing. So there was an expectation for the availability of public schooling. Once the American Industrial Revolution hit towards the end of the 19th century, factory jobs boomed. More people flocked to cities meaning there were more kids and more of a need for teachers. With more men transitioning to better paying factory jobs, even more women were moving to the classroom. The large number of women serving as teachers was accepted at a time when women weren't given many professional opportunities. Administrative roles – principals, superintendents, and the like – were held by men. And many high school positions were still held by men. So a hierarchy that prioritized male control and male decision making was very clearly in place. Mark Perkins, a former teacher and administrator and current parent and professor of Educational Research methods at the University of Wyoming, points out that this hierarchy has remained even if the original gendered reasons for its creation haven't. Mark Perkins:  I think there's a power hierarchy. And I don't think that teachers have been empowered enough to express their professional expertise. I think that teachers are approached as a service industry. And so, we want teachers to parrot curriculums. We want them to be experts in their content, as long as their expertise doesn't contradict with our preconceived notions of reality. So I think there's a sociological phenomenon that goes on in schools.  I think it's a common phenomenon. The system of becoming an administrator in some cases  was once based on seniority. So the most senior teacher would inherit the role of principal. This changed when a degree was required to become a principal or superintendent, which also prevented women from gaining access to these administrative positions by making them require a degree because women weren't often able to access such an education. So these days, some administrators are in the position without having had a tremendous amount of time in education, which can make administrator impact or insight into the classroom difficult. Ron Ruckman, who just left teaching after 23 years, explains that the lack of experience can be glaringly obvious for some administrators who are disconnected from the teachers. Ron Ruckman:  You know, and then there's other administrators that just don't want to have anything to do with your classroom, you know, and they want to make decisions, but they don't want to, they don't communicate with you or ask you things. There's a lot of that especially in rural districts. We've spent so much time and money in this district doing initiatives and buying products. And, you know, I can't imagine how much money we've just wasted, you know, buying stuff that, you know, on, based on a good salesman that convinced somebody that they needed it. Whereas had they come and asked us would have been like, no, no, that that would be a really dumb thing to do. That's not going to work. You know, but there's just that kind of an apt idea that teachers really are, you know, don't really know what they're what, you know, they don't really know anything other than their subject. And we're, we're pretty smart. Most of us, you know. (Beeping) This was perfect timing. That beeping was for a fire. Ron is the Battalion Chief for the Pinedale fire department - he has a lot of roles in his community because he is intelligent and capable and because of not being respected for being intelligent and capable, he quit teaching to pursue the other things he's good at.  Some of the ways teachers are not seen as capable has to do with how education is standardized. In the late 19th century, as cities got larger and more and more kids were put into schools, urban schools started to split students into grade levels. Around this time and into the early 20th century, there was a development of what historian David Tyack (Tie-yak) described as the One Best System of education – this saw a focus on specific, easily assessed, and easily sequenced subjects of study. This also did more to highlight non-academic items like good attendance, behavior, and willingness to follow directions, which all aid in creating people who would fit into an industrial economy. This structure was useful when more and more students were placed into a class. And by the early 20th century, politicians and administrators were seeing schools as being a solution to the nation's woes. Traces of these industrialized values are very present in modern classrooms, and it makes Allison Lash, who taught art in New York City and Austin, Texas, sad at what she sees. Allison Lash: A friend of mine had said one thing about why he's doesn't like education is just that you go to school to learn how to work, basically, to get you ready to go out in the world and work. And that's sad. Like, I just want to live. I don't want to worry about working and how to make money and pay your school loans and your bills. It used to bother me that kids would get rewarded for being in school every day. And it's all about money. It's all about how many kids are in their seats every day for the school district to make money. And it was sad, it was sad that kids would win awards for like, being their everyday awards. Like who really cares? They're totally ignoring mental health and even if the kid is sick, you stay home. It's really sad when you go into elementary school and you see the kids quiet and lined up in a line and like “shhhhh,” and I remember teaching that and  I know that I guess order is not wanted, and I don't know if needed is even the right answer. Teach kids to be a good person. The rise of industry during the American industrial revolution also saw a rise in unions and strikes. Because teachers were mostly women, and many of the strikes of the time were more militant and potentially violent, women were less likely to take part in strikes and efforts to gain better pay. This was not helped by the fact that men held leadership positions in education, so they did not make efforts to better the work environments of teachers because these men just weren't affected. The  National Education Association, which was founded in 1857, wasn't just for teachers, so administrators, men, were also in charge of Union happenings. It wasn't until 1910 when Ella Flagg Young was elected as the NEA president that the union started taking more steps to help teachers. But the difficulty in changing and revising educational structures is still present. Chris Rothfuss, a parent and Wyoming State Senator and member of the Senate Education committee, knows this all too well. While we have a coffee in Laramie, Wyoming, Chris explains that change may require a cultural shift inspired by younger generations .  Chris Rothfuss:  I think a large part of the reason why we develop into what we are really is the way this country industrialized and grew and had a middle-class work ethic through the mid-20th century, that shaped a lot of the way things are done. And the philosophy about why things are done, the way they're done, where there is a common viewpoint that I think is handed down from generation to generation that if you just work hard, put your nose to the grindstone, that you will be successful, and things will go your way, and you'll have a good life. I think part of what's changing that, is that this emerging generation is realizing that while that may have been true, a lot of what allowed that to be true, was frankly, taking on debt that is generational debt and handing that debt down to the next generation. So effectively exploiting the future for the benefit of the present. This younger generation isn't enthused about that as they're learning more about it, and rightly so. And they don't see a path to a traditional life as being what they aspire to. A potential reason for major shifts not having occurred in the past might have to do with economic uncertainties. For every economic depression and war to occur in the 20th century, money was pulled from education to help the war or economic problems, but that money was not necessarily given back to education. Teacher pay was often cut when other unionized jobs like factory work was not cut because there was an assumption that teachers, being mostly women, would not need to support their families. During WWII, when more women went to work in factories, those women who were still teaching saw how much better the pay was for the women who went to work in factories. The impact of war and economic troubles also resulted in  a more factory-like structure in the classroom. This was often a result of trying to accommodate a larger student population with less resources, and it was also an easier way to measure student achievement. This created an educational structure that overwhelms teachers, which makes best practices more difficult and stretches teachers thin. Molly Waterworth, who just left teaching this year after 8 years in the classroom, explains the reality of being overwhelmed as a teacher.   Molly Waterworth:  The reality is that if you have 150 kids, there's no way that you're going to grade all of their work in seven and a half hours that you have with them during the day. There's no way. It's just a mathematical impossibility.  The truth is, teachers have inherited being paid poorly, being overworked, and not being treated with respect. Sadly, much of this is associated with the trend of women in the profession within a patriarchal society. And the teaching profession is still dominated by women. The NEA reports that about 3 quarters of teachers are women, and teachers still get payed about 74% of what equivalent degreed professions earn.  So, teachers are leaving education, but the reasons they are leaving are a result of problems that have been percolating since the start of public education in the United States. Efforts at deculturalization seen with the Indian Boarding Schools have left an impact and pattern on modern education, just like the treatment of women and industrialization of education has left an impact on how teachers are currently treated.  This does not mean that public education needs to end, but like any inheritance, we need to acknowledge and deal with the problems. We need to see that there have been attempts to address inequity in education with efforts like Brown v Board in 1954, Title IX in 1972,  and the disabilities act of 1975. But continuing to return to a standardized, one-size-fits-all approach that matches an industrial structure of education just does not work – it doesn't value teacher expertise, nor does it meet the students with unique cultural backgrounds or needs where they are. And because teachers have been tasked with addressing these inequities with limited freedom and trust and resources, many are calling it quits. This needs to change – teachers need to be able to disclaim this inheritance for their sake and for the sake of their students.  Next time, we will look at how the perception of teachers might be influenced by pop-culture.  TEASE: “Robin Williams isn't going to do that.” That will be next time on Those Who Can't Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of. This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Tennesee Watson. Voice Acting by Rory Mack, David Whisker, Rick Simineo, and Markus Viney who also offered editing help. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Elizabeth Smith, Caskey Russell, Stephanie Reese, Ron Ruckman, Molly Waterworth, Christy Chadwick, Colby Gull, Mark Perkins, and Allison Lash for taking time to sit down and chat with me. This dive into history was greatly aided by two books: American Education: A History by Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr. and Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States by Joel Spring……This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.