Podcasts about boll weevil

Kyle Tolin is the Head Men's Basketball Coach at The University of Texas Permian Basin. In his first four seasons at UTPB the Falcons have a 62-54 overall record and made the Lone Star Conference Tournament in 2022.Prior to UTPB, Tolin spent the last seven seasons at the University of Arkansas - Monticello, where he reached the NCAA Tournament twice, won a pair of regular-season conference championships, and had 108 victories, completely turning around the Boll Weevil program. Tolin took the reins of the UAM program in 2014 after helping Oklahoma Baptist reach 14 straight NAIA national tournaments during his 10 years as an assistant coach and four years as a student-athlete. The 2010 Bison team won the NAIA national championship, while the 2002 and 2012 teams finished as national runners-up. During that 14-year span, the team's record in the national tournament was 30-12. The 2010 national championship team finished with an overall record of 34-2.As a student-athlete at Oklahoma Baptist, Tolin scored over 1,000 points during his four-year career and was a two-time All-SAC honorable mention. He played in every game during his career, and in addition to his scoring, averaged 4.3 assists per game overall. He was named OBU's Senior Male Athlete of the Year in 2004.On this episode Mike & Kyle discuss the significance of instilling a winning mentality in players, an ethos that shapes their approach to practice and competition. Kyle shares the importance of cultivating positive habits and fostering a culture of hard work and accountability within the team. Throughout the conversation, we delve into the intricate balance of coaching styles, player development, and the evolving landscape of college basketball, particularly in relation to the transfer portal and NIL dynamics. Ultimately, Tolan's reflections underscore the commitment required not only to enhance individual player's skills but also to build a cohesive and resilient team capable of achieving collective success.Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @hoopheadspod for the latest updates on episodes, guests, and events from the Hoop Heads Pod.Make sure you're subscribed to the Hoop Heads Pod on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there please leave us a 5 star rating and review. Your ratings help your friends and coaching colleagues find the show. If you really love what you're hearing recommend the Hoop Heads Pod to someone and get them to join you as a part of Hoop Heads Nation.Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Kyle Tolin, Head Men's Basketball Coach at The University of Texas Permian Basin.Website – https://utpbfalcons.com/sports/mens-basketballEmail – tolin_k@utpb.eduTwitter/X - @KyleTOLINVisit our Sponsors!Dr. Dish BasketballOur friends at Dr. Dish Basketball are doing things a little differently this month with $3,000 Off the Dr. Dish Rebel+, $3,000 Off the Dr. Dish All-Stat+, AND $3,000 Off the Dr. Dish CT+ during their first ever Semi-Annual Sales Event. Shop now and have your team more ready for the upcoming season than ever before.

Chirs Ballew returns to chat about his new record Void Crusher, the genius of Mark Sandman, his feelings on Kudos to You! a decade after releasing it with PUSA, how you can't force success and much more! CHRIS BALLEWhttps://chrisballew.orghttps://chrisballew.bandcamp.comhttps://www.instagram.com/chrisballewhttps://www.instagram.com/pusabandPCHInstagram - www.instagram.com/powerchordhourTwitter - www.twitter.com/powerchordhourFacebook - www.facebook.com/powerchordhourYoutube - www.youtube.com/channel/UC6jTfzjB3-mzmWM-51c8LggSpotify Episode Playlists - https://open.spotify.com/user/kzavhk5ghelpnthfby9o41gnr?si=4WvOdgAmSsKoswf_HTh_MgDonate to help show costs -https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/pchanthonyhttps://cash.app/$anthmerchpowerchordhour@gmail.comCheck out the Power Chord Hour radio show every Friday night at 8 to 11 est/Tuesday Midnight to 3 est on 107.9 WRFA in Jamestown, NY. Stream the station online at wrfalp.com/streaming/ or listen on the WRFA app.Special Thanks to my buddy Jay Vics for the behind the scenes help on this episode!https://www.meettheexpertspodcast.comhttps://www.jvimobile.com

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Ernie Hawkins  | Sweethearts On Parade (feat. Roger Day, Paul Consentino & Joe D  | Monongahela Rye  |  | Son House  | John The Revelator  | The Delta Blues Of Son House | Big Bill Broonzy  | It's A Low Down Dirty Shame  | Chicago 1937-1938 (CD8)  1937-1940 Part 2 | Tony Joe White  | You Got Me Running  | Baby Please Don't Go | The Georgia Browns  | Who Stole De Lock.  | Curley Weaver (1933-1935) | Pistol Pete Wearn  | Rosalynd  | Blues, Ballads & Barnstormers | Alger ''Texas'' Alexander  | Water Bound Blues (1929)  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1928 - 1930) | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Goin' Away  | Goin' Away (1963)  |  | Pinetop Perkins  | Willow Weep For Me  | Heaven  |   |  | W.C. Handy Preservation Band - Carl Wolfe  | Loveless Love  | W.C. Handy's Beale Street: Where The Blues Began | Guy Davis  | Did You See My Baby  | Juba Dance  |  | Jesse Fuller  | Morning Blues  | San Francisco Bay Blues | Jo Ann Kelly  | Boll Weevil  | Do It and More  |  | Mike Goudreau  | I'm So Glad I Have You  | Acoustic Sessions  |  | Auld Man's Baccie  | Whole Lotta Rosie  | 100% Homage  |  | Half Deaf Clatch  | Tumbledown Blues  | Eat Sleep Stomp Repeat

Intro song: The White Raven by Jack WhiteBonus excerpt: I'm Slowly Turning Into You by The White Stripes (Live in Mississippi)Bonus excerpt: Boll Weevil by The White Stripes (Live in Mississippi)Outro song: We're Going to Be Friends by The White Stripes (Live on Conan O'Brien)10. St. James Infirmary Blues by The White Stripes9. Blue Orchid by The White Stripes8. Rag and Bone by The White Stripes7. A Martyr For My Love For You by The White Stripes 6. Eosophobia (Reprise) by Jack WhiteShow Note: Correction - Jack plays all of the instruments on "The White Raven", not the whole album.

Scott Watson talks with Erin Grantham of Enterprise, Alabama about the town and its unique monument.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode: 2385 When cotton was king in Texas.  Today, think about cotton.

AlabamaState senator Arthur Orr talks potential tax cuts in legislative sessionUAB received its largest donation of $10 million dollars from CrimestoppersA Limestone City judge orders a mistrial in the case against Mason SiskMobile police arrest a 17 year old male re: fentanyl death of teen girlWoman files multi million dollar lawsuit re:  coffee at Dothan MacDonaldsThe city of Enterprise and Boll Weevil featured on CBS weekend editionNationalJoe Biden says Covid 19 is over in interview with CBS 60 MinutesMissouri senator takes on fentanyl deaths v. monkeypox  with CDC directorFormer CDC director talks Wuhan lab, Fauci, and Covid 19 conspiracy5th circuit court rules in favor TX censorship lawsuit against social mediaVirginia University to pay 1 million in settlement for hazing death of manCanada's Prime Minister sings in public night before Queen E's burial

Paul Harvey - Boll Weevil

This week you'll learn from Dr. Olivia Poole, Senior Pastor of St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Enterprise, AL. Among other great insights, you'll learn the best ways to get the word out about open staff positions. You'll also learn some of her tricks of recruiting dynamic young staff and helping them develop into seasoned leaders. You'll also learn why there is a statue of a Boll Weevil insect in the middle of downtown Enterprise, AL.    Podcast bumper music composed, recorded, and produced by David Couch: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgAK9Pr5685C4ZsmQYKbncg St. Luke United Methodist Church, Enterprise, AL http://www.stlukeenterprise.org/ Christ United Methodist Church: www.christunited.com  Changing Churches: http://changingchurches.net

Boll weevils are an agricultural pest that feeds primarily on cotton. After their arrival in the 1890s, they caused devastation across the South-Eastern United States, starting a battle that's raged for more than 130 years. This episode, Paul Csomo of the award-winning Varmints! podcast joins us to discuss these creatures, their adaptions, and their agricultural history. Tune in to learn: How many types of weevils are in the world How boll weevils shaped agriculture in the South-Eastern United States How scientists, farmers, and government agencies united to eradicate the boll weevil threat How boll weevils have slipped into pop culture today If you would like to find transcripts for this episode or sign up for our newsletter, please visit our website: http://fieldlabearth.libsyn.com/ Contact us at podcast@sciencesocieties.org or on Twitter @FieldLabEarth if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for show topics, and if you want more content like this don't forget to subscribe. If you would like to reach out to Paul, you can find him here: varmintspodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @varmintspodcast Resources CEU Quiz: https://web.sciencesocieties.org/Learning-Center/Courses/Course-Detail?productid=%7b66F129ED-AA32-EC11-8139-005056A7AFA5%7d  Varmints! Podcast: https://varmints.podbean.com/ Matt Shipman, NC State, 2017: The Boll Weevil War, or How Farmers and Scientists Saved Cotton in the South: https://news.ncsu.edu/2017/05/boll-weevil-war-2017/ Boll Weevil by The Presidents of the United States of America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uBmii5es7Q Boll Weevil Monument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_Weevil_Monument Boll Weevil Economic Impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_weevil#Impact Encyclopedia Entry for Boll Weevil: https://www.britannica.com/animal/boll-weevil National Cotton Council of America: https://www.cotton.org/tech/pest/bollweevil/eradication4.cfm The Great Migration: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration#:~:text=The%20Great%20Migration%20was%20the,from%20about%201916%20to%201970 The Boll Weevil in Missouri: https://extension.missouri.edu/publications/g4255 Boll Weevil Eradication: https://www.cotton.org/tech/pest/bollweevil/eradication2.cfm Boll Weevil general info: https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Anthonomus_grandis/ Field, Lab, Earth is copyrighted to the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America.

Row Sixty #8 - Georgia @ Auburn 2021 00:00:01 - Introduction & Welcome00:02:25 - Row 60 vs ESPN00:08:19 - Gameday Atmosphere00:10:45 - Weekly Concession Stands Report00:12:20 - Offensive Power00:14:52 - Arm-chair QB's Need to STOP!00:16:30 - Stetson00:20:06 - The Stable00:22:18 - GUT-PUNCHED!00:23:42 - 1st in the Nation00:28:55 - Blocked Punt = HYPE00:31:59 - The Only Bad Thing...00:34:51 - Auburn Preview00:44:58 - A+ Game00:49:01 - Last Week's Pick 'Em00:52:02 - Is THIS Team IN?!00:55:02 - Florida..... LOL00:56:50 - Oklahoma vs Texas00:57:42 - Arkansas @ Ole Miss00:58:27 - Penn State @ Iowa01:00:05 - LSU @ Kentucky01:01:32 - What is a Boll Weevil?01:04:33 - GAME OF THE WEEK01:05:58 - UGA @ Auburn Score Predictions01:07:47 - THE TRAIN IS COMING! CONNECT WITH US:FACEBOOK - Join fellow DAWGS & get exclusive content!INSTAGRAM - Follow us on Instagram! (@rowsixty)YOUTUBE - Rather watch our podcast?MERCH ON THE WAY! GO DAWGS!

Welcome to Get Up in the Cool: Old Time Music with Cameron DeWhitt and Friends. This week's friend is Robyn Burns. We recorded this a few weeks ago at the Centralia Campout in Centralia, Washington. Tunes and songs in this episode: * Maiden Rock Waltz (0:38) * Possum on a Rail (10:57) * Folding Down the Sheets (16:22) * Boll Weevil (28:12) * Katie Dear (33:26) * Bonus track: Chinese Breakdown Buy Robyn Burns' album Learning in the Dark on Bandcamp: https://robynburns.bandcamp.com/releases Visit Burns Violins' website: https://www.burnsviolins.com/ Sign up for Cameron's banjo workshops with Caffè Lena! Beginning Clawhammer: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/165579253003 Intermediate Clawhammer: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/166397971813 Support Get Up in the Cool on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/getupinthecool Buy Get Up in the Cool merch like t-shirts, phone cases, and masks! https://teespring.com/new-get-up-in-the-cool-swag Sign up at https://www.pitchforkbanjo.com/ for my clawhammer instructional series! Check out Cameron's other podcast, Think Outside the Box Set: https://boxset.fireside.fm/

From the fiddle playing of Tommy Jarrell and Jake Blount, and when the singing is added Boll Weevil tells the plight of the farmer victimized by the insect pests that destroyed his cotton crop.

From the fiddle playing of Tommy Jarrell and Jake Blount, and when the singing is added Boll Weevil tells the plight of the farmer victimized by the insect pests that destroyed his cotton crop.

Hannah informs us all of the wonderful Boll Weevil Monument.

BRS is on the road down in the deep south. Fort Rucker, the helicopter training army base, is close to this small community. Known for the Boll Weevil statue in the middle of town, Enterprise is the birthplace of Michael Reynolds. While we didn't go deep into his story, he did put out an audio tale titled Never Had a Chance detailing his life memoir. Listen to his words on the current status of his hometown of Enterprise, AL. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

"55 miles north of Natchez, Mississippi is the campground and village site of Rocky Springs. "A settlement grew up around the spring here in the late 1790s. The town of Rocky Springs prospered during the time of the Old Trace and much later with the population reaching 2600 people. But, like its name, the history of the town was "Rocky." The town and farms suffered during the Civil War, and over a decade later in 1878, it was struck by Yellow Fever. Then in the early 1900s the Boll Weevil attacked and destroyed the cotton crops. Farming also suffered from over a hundred years of neglect and poor land management -- the erosion scars can still be seen in the area today. People left after all that, and during the 1930s the last store here went out of business. Now, even the spring's dried up. "If you like you may walk a loop trail through the old town site. You'll see all that's left, a brick church and cemetery, a couple of rusty safes and several cisterns. The old Methodist Church was built in 1837 and still holds regular services. Both the church and the cemetery rest on a hilltop overlooking the abandoned town. "Next time we'll look at a related exhibit, Owens Creek Waterfall. For Natchez Trace: A Road Through the Wilderness, I'm Frank Thomas." For more about Natchez Trace: A Road Through the Wilderness, visit eddieandfrank.com

Hey GWNTTers, Interested in learning more about early 2000s trivia? Don't know who DB Cooper is? Wonder where the term "Downstairs" came from? Well do we have the episode for you! Join us this week as we take a deep dive, I'm talking deep deep dive, into the early 2000s comedy, Without A Paddle. Starring some of our faves-Matthew Lillard, Dax Shepard, Seth Green, and the beloved Burt Reynolds. We'll go into what spurred Krystle into rewatching this movie in the first place, Scooby Doo, a take on cancel culture, what exactly is a Boll Weevil is, and so, so much more. As always, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Podomatic, Deezer, Audible, and Amazon Music! Search: Girl, We Need to Talk OR check out the link in our bio! Thanks to everyone for listening in- If you enjoy what you hear, please remember to rate, review, and subscribe! #withoutapaddle #matthewlillard #sethgreen #daxshepard #armchairexpert #burtreynolds #early2000smovies #newpodcast #newepisode #dbcooper #girlweneedtotalk

"All things work together for good for those who love God," the Bible says, but sometimes it does not seem like it. Listen to this amazing story about the Boll Weevil. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayskey/message

Live weekdays at 3 pm California time on Facebook Wednesday Jan 6 2021

Full playlist and backup tracks at clawhammerbanjo.net/jam Key of A Banjo Tuning: dADF#A (double C minus 5)

This week’s program is just a tad different. Recently, the Library of Congress published a memoir of the Seeger Family by Archivist Anita M. Weber. This was this set’s inspiration. We'll hear some of the piano and symphonic music of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, some of Ruth’s arrangements of folk tunes for piano and others performed by some of the Seeger Family. We’ll also hear pieces from Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, contemporaries of Ruth. So stretch your ears and hear an entirely different side to the music of the Seeger Family … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine. Episode #20-37: The Orchestral Seeger Host: Tom Druckenmiller Artist/”Song”/CD/Label Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways WM Stepp / “Bonaparte's Retreat” / Music of Kentucky / Yazoo Academy of St. Martin in the Fields-Marriner / “Cowell-Hymn and Fuging Tune No.10 for Oboe and Strings” / Barber Adagio et al / Argo Orchestra New England / “Ives-Putnam's Camp, Redding Connecticut” / The Orchestral Music of Charles Ives / Koch Reinbert De Leeuw / “R C Seeger-Piano Study in Mixed Accents” / Ruth Crawford Seeger Portrait Deutsche Grammophone Schonberg Ensemble / “Charles Seeger-John Hardy” / Ruth Crawford Seeger Portrait / Deutsche Grammophone Jenny Lin / “R C Seeger-Kaleidoscopic Changes on and Original Theme” / The World of Ruth Crawford Seeger / BIS Jay Ungar and Molly Mason / “Bonaparte's Retreat and Hoedown” / Harvest Home / Angel Penny Seeger / “The Old Cow Died” / Animal Folksongs for Children / Rounder Mike Seeger / “Stewball” / Animal Folksongs for Children / Rounder Sonya Cohen / “Little Rooster” / Animal Folksongs for Children / Rounder Jenny Lin / “Jumping the Rope” / The World of Ruth Crawford Seeger / BIS Jenny Lin / “Mrs Crow and Miss Wren Go for a Walk” / The World of Ruth Crawford Seeger / BIS Virginia Eskin / “Boll Weevil” / Music of Marion Bauer and Ruth Crawford Seeger / Albany Virginia Eskin / “What'll We Do With The Baby” / Music of Marion Bauer and Ruth Crawford Seeger Albany Virginia Eskin / “Cindy” / Music of Marion Bauer and Ruth Crawford Seeger / Albany George Winston / “Living in the Country” / Summer / Windham Hill Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Louis Avallone and Stephen Parr discuss rumors they are hearing from sources they believe are trustworthy about Mayor Perkins being given special treatment by the Shreveport Police. They are concerned because they are not under the impression Shreveport City Council members or Shreveport residents are receiving the same special treatment.Since Shreveport is boarding up statues which some people find offend, should we add the statue of “Lead Belly” to the project list? Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) was a successful black musician whose songs include “Goodnight, Irene”, “Midnight Special”, “Cotten Fields, and “Boll Weevil”. Louis explains.Our @American Mamas, Teri Netterville and Denise Arthur, are very upset over the ambush murder of Jessica Doty-Whitaker, age 24 and mother of a 3-year old boy, because she asserted her belief that “all lives matter” to a group of BLM supporters in Indianapolis, IN. She was shot in the back as she passed by. Her murderer is still at large.After explaining that Alex J. Washington of the law firm, Washington & Wells, has agreed to suspension of his law license for one year and one day because of problems involving the handling of client money by a subordinate of his, Louis Avallone and Stephen Parr wonder if the law firm of Washington & Wells should continue as the law firm handling Shreveport’s bond issuances.Stephen and Louis also talk about how other nations have already opened their schools. They look at the data from these schools and conclude children, especially under the age of 10, are not likely going to be getting and spreading COVID-19.Ivanka Trump, along with Apple and IBM, to promote looking for career fields that do not require a college education. They are doing this through the website www.findsomethingnew.org . Stephen Parr likes this program because it shows there is more than one way to achieve the American Dream.And very importantly, Stephen provides a tribute to Louis "Luigi" Avallone, Louis’ father who passed away this week.

Louis Avallone and Stephen Parr discuss rumors they are hearing from sources they believe are trustworthy about Mayor Perkins being given special treatment by the Shreveport Police. They are concerned because they are not under the impression Shreveport City Council members or Shreveport residents are receiving the same special treatment.Since Shreveport is boarding up statues which some people find offend, should we add the statue of “Lead Belly” to the project list? Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) was a successful black musician whose songs include “Goodnight, Irene”, “Midnight Special”, “Cotten Fields, and “Boll Weevil”. Louis explains.Our @American Mamas, Teri Netterville and Denise Arthur, are very upset over the ambush murder of Jessica Doty-Whitaker, age 24 and mother of a 3-year old boy, because she asserted her belief that “all lives matter” to a group of BLM supporters in Indianapolis, IN. She was shot in the back as she passed by. Her murderer is still at large.After explaining that Alex J. Washington of the law firm, Washington & Wells, has agreed to suspension of his law license for one year and one day because of problems involving the handling of client money by a subordinate of his, Louis Avallone and Stephen Parr wonder if the law firm of Washington & Wells should continue as the law firm handling Shreveport’s bond issuances.Stephen and Louis also talk about how other nations have already opened their schools. They look at the data from these schools and conclude children, especially under the age of 10, are not likely going to be getting and spreading COVID-19.Ivanka Trump, along with Apple and IBM, to promote looking for career fields that do not require a college education. They are doing this through the website www.findsomethingnew.org . Stephen Parr likes this program because it shows there is more than one way to achieve the American Dream.And very importantly, Stephen provides a tribute to Louis "Luigi" Avallone, Louis’ father who passed away this week.

Disaster can be a catalyst for success.

Hi everyone...Welcome to Monday Morning Mastery powered by The NEXT Academy - leadership built for contractors. In today's episode titled "What's Your Peanut

On this episode of Word Has It, the boys are joined on the air by Eric Crocker. We discuss Crockers rise from growing up in Stockton , California all the way to the New York Jets. Cant forget about a major pit stop in Monticello , Arkansas as a Boll Weevil. Junior College, NCAA D2, Arena Football League, National Football League.

Civil rights attorney, documentary film maker, and novelist James Radford talks about his new book “Boll Weevil", a fascinating courtroom and political drama that draws attention to life in the rural South, race relations, social justice, and economic and cultural changes. Jamie is a founding partner in Radford & Keebaugh, which you can find at decaturlegal.com. He has argued before the Georgia Supreme Court, and served as a staff attorney for the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.We talk about growing up in a small town, and what lead him to go to law school. We reflect on those memories as adults, and how being a parent has changed how we view those places. We talk about his experience as a trial attorney and what it takes to pursue that career. The conversation deals with some challenging issues like racial discrimination, criminal sentencing, and some bold predictions about marijuana legalization in the Southeast.His novel is available on Paperback and digital download, you can find links here at jamesradford.com. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.Visit me at adamdrinkwater.com • Instagram • Twitter • PatreonSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/adamdrinkwater)

Boll Weevil Podcast - Ep 2 by Boll Weevil Podcast

Boll Weevil Podcast - Ep 1 by Boll Weevil Podcast

You probably have never heard of the Enterprise, AL nor have you heard of the Boll Weevil. Yet it is the saviour of the “South” here in America.

What's a boll weevil? What did it do? Why sing about a boll weevil? What might a boll weevil represent? Explore these questions in Charley Patton's "Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues."

Dr. Scott Stewart discusses the upcoming Boll Weevil referendum (March 11-22), a historical perspective, and the benefits of this program.

  Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast. One I haven't talked about before is Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Defaa. The information on "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee" comes in part from Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, but a word of caution -- it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he's a bit of an edgelord who'll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh.  Much of the information I've used comes from interviews with Ruth Brown and Ahmet Ertegun in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Ruth Brown also wrote an autobiography. And there are many good compilations of Brown's R&B work -- this one has most of the important records on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript While I've often made the point that fifties rhythm and blues is not the same thing as "the blues" as most people now think of it, there was still an obvious connection (as you'd expect from the name if nothing else) and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts with a song that couldn't have been more blues inspired. For the story of "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country-blues picker who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation -- he was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount Records, notoriously the label with the worst sound quality in the 20s and thirties (which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something). One of his songs was "One Dime Blues", which is a very typical example of his style: [excerpt "One Dime Blues" by Blind Lemon Jefferson] See what I mean both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality? That song was later picked up by another great blind bluesman, Blind Willie McTell. McTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved and try to turn them into something they're not. A substantial proportion of McTell's recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax, for the Library of Congress, but if you listen to those recordings you can hear the Lomaxes persuading McTell to play music that's very different from the songs he normally played -- while he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform traditional folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another Leadbelly (a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the twelve-string guitar). He said he didn't know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren't in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realise about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it -- and it's something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There's a reason why I call this podcast "A History of Rock Music..." rather than "THE History of Rock Music..." -- the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing, when they were collecting their recordings, was taking sophisticated entertainers, who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds, and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes *thought* was typical black music, rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got McTell to perform songs he knew, like "The Boll Weevil" and "Amazing Grace", because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than having him perform his own material. To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience -- imagine you're a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You've been playing the clubs for several years, you've got a repertoire of songs you've written which the audiences love. You get your big break with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly like "All Things Bright and Beautiful". You probably could perform those, but you'd be wondering why they wouldn't let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a *lot* of black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw as unsophisticated. It's something we'll see particularly in the late fifties as musicians travel from the US to the UK, and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn't want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos -- they thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that's what he gave those audiences. But McTell's version of "One Dime Blues", retitled "Last Dime Blues", wasn't like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit: [excerpt: “Last Dime Blues” by Blind Willie McTell] And that line we just heard, “Mama, don't treat your daughter mean”, inspired one of the most important records in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was seventeen -- she'd wanted to become a singer, and she eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept even though the marriage didn't last long. She quickly joined Lucky Millinder's band, as so many early R&B stars we've discussed did, but that too didn't last long. Millinder's band, at the time, had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night performing live with them, and apparently went down well with the audience, but that was all she was meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas on to the stage... and Millinder said "I hired a singer, not a waitress -- you're fired. And besides, you don't sing well anyway". She was fired that day, and she had no money -- Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she'd had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything she owed him money. She had no way to make her way home from Washington. She was stuck. But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Calloway, Cab's sister, who was running a club at the time. Well, I say Blanche Calloway was Cab's sister, and that's probably how most people today would think of her if they thought of her at all, but it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother. Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother's career, and she'd recorded songs like this: [excerpt "Just a Crazy Song": Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys] That was recorded several months *before* her brother's breakout hit "Minnie The Moocher", which popularised the "Hi de hi, ho de ho" chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn't the first person to sing that song – Bill “Bojangles” Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style – but she's clearly the one who gave Cab the idea. She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise all-male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early thirties. And that wasn't her only achievement by any means -- in later years she became prominent in the Democratic Party and as a civil rights activist, she started Afram, a cosmetic company that made makeup for black women and was one of the most popular brand names of the seventies, and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida, in 1958. But while her band was popular in the thirties, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the Mafia, who controlled live music in the thirties, decided that there wasn't room for two bands led by a Calloway, and put their weight behind her brother, leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi, she used a public toilet that was designated whites-only, and while she was in jail for that one of the band members ran off with all the band's money and so she couldn't afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for a job. Calloway said that the club didn't really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown's plight -- and impressed enough by her talent -- that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she'd earned her fare home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure -- he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom -- a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown's performance -- impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her. Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We've talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race -- and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on -- but that was certainly true of Ahmet Ertegun. Ertegun was considered white by the then-prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default. He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Ahmet had ostensibly been studying Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gabler's Commodore Music Shop. He and his brother Neshui had over fifteen thousand jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Ahmet decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist, and took on Herb Abramson, one of the dentist's proteges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic's first few records -- while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren't especially successful, but then in 1949 they released "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee" by Sticks McGhee: [excerpt "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] That record is another of those which people refer to as "the first rock and roll record", and it was pure good luck for Atlantic -- McGhee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier, for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different -- before McGhee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing spo-de-o-dee he'd sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adults-only section on iTunes; while instead of singing "mop mop" he'd sung "goddam". Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertegun knew McGhee's brother, the more famous blues musician Brownie McGhee, and called him up to get in touch with Sticks. They got Sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success,and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, and many more musicians we've talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks McGhee never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things -- firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly that if she was going to record for them, she'd have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing to something more... spo-de-o-dee. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Calloway, who had become her manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning twenty-one in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn't meant to be a session for her, it was just a way to ease her back into her career -- Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon's band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then Ahmet Ertegun decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown, just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson -- who would produce most of Brown's early records -- listed a handful of songs that she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgan's "So Long". The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer -- one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, among others -- stopped the session and said "Wait a minute. Let's go back and do this right. The kid can *sing*!" And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test or, at best, as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for Cavalcade of Music, was instead released as a single, by "Ruth Brown as heard with Eddie Condon's NBC Television Orchestra" "So Long" became a hit, and the followup "Teardrops From My Eyes" was a bigger hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts and staying there for eleven weeks. "Teardrops From My Eyes" was an uptempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked -- she thought of herself primarily as a torch singer -- but it can't be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn't what she'd have been singing by choice: [excerpt: Ruth Brown "Teardrops From My Eyes"] While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown's recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertegun had always advocated -- to take black musicians who played or sang the more "sophisticated" (I don't know if you can hear those air quotes, but they're there...) styles and to get them instead to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of "Teardrops From My Eyes", this required a lot of work -- Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toombs, the song's writer, and working out the arrangement -- and this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio or songs that had been honed by months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic's ethos -- making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren't the best instrumentalists -- the idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. "Teardrops From My Eyes" became a million seller -- Atlantic's first. Or at least, it was promoted as having sold a million copies -- Herb Abramson would later claim that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then, he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate – if the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they'd want a million copies' worth of royalties. But Brown's biggest hit was her third number one, "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean", which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number twenty-three. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but twenty years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn't do a show without playing it and that when she said her name people would ask "the Ruth Brown who sings 'Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean'?" The song also made a difference to Brown because it meant she had to join the musicians' union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn't have to be union members. But "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. [excerpt: "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean", Ruth Brown] Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lance wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly “Last Dime Blues”, and contained a line which they heard as “Mama, he treats your daughter mean”. Brown didn't want to record the song originally -- the way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues -- but Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of "Teardrops From My Eyes", turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song's influence, for example, in "Work With Me Annie" by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later: [Excerpt: "Work With Me Annie", Hank Ballard and the Midnighters] But Brown always claimed that the reason for the song's greater success than her other records was down to that tambourine -- or more precisely because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the sixties, though she never became one of the most well-known artists -- in the seventies she used to talk about adults telling their children "she was our Aretha Franklin", and this was probably true. Certainly she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the fifties, and was popular enough that for a while Atlantic Records became known as "the house that Ruth Brown built", but like many of the pioneers of the rock and roll era, she was largely (though far from completely) erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has prehistory start in 1954 with Elvis and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid fifties, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them, but it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed, but as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and their hit rate -- at least for those who didn't write their own material -- got lower. So by the early sixties, Ruth Brown was something of a has-been. But she got a second wind from the late seventies onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again -- not a pop star as she had been in her first career, but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV. And she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records -- like most independent labels of the fifties, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed by the eighties it was a major label itself -- it had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn't just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money -- and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who've fallen on hard times -- often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now of course that's not to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything -- it's very clear that Atlantic continued (and continues) to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the Foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation as anything else, but it's still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off... Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field, She died in 2006.  

  Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast. One I haven’t talked about before is Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Defaa. The information on “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” comes in part from Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, but a word of caution — it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he’s a bit of an edgelord who’ll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh.  Much of the information I’ve used comes from interviews with Ruth Brown and Ahmet Ertegun in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Ruth Brown also wrote an autobiography. And there are many good compilations of Brown’s R&B work — this one has most of the important records on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript While I’ve often made the point that fifties rhythm and blues is not the same thing as “the blues” as most people now think of it, there was still an obvious connection (as you’d expect from the name if nothing else) and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts with a song that couldn’t have been more blues inspired. For the story of “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country-blues picker who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation — he was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount Records, notoriously the label with the worst sound quality in the 20s and thirties (which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something). One of his songs was “One Dime Blues”, which is a very typical example of his style: [excerpt “One Dime Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson] See what I mean both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality? That song was later picked up by another great blind bluesman, Blind Willie McTell. McTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved and try to turn them into something they’re not. A substantial proportion of McTell’s recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax, for the Library of Congress, but if you listen to those recordings you can hear the Lomaxes persuading McTell to play music that’s very different from the songs he normally played — while he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform traditional folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another Leadbelly (a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the twelve-string guitar). He said he didn’t know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren’t in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realise about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it — and it’s something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There’s a reason why I call this podcast “A History of Rock Music…” rather than “THE History of Rock Music…” — the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing, when they were collecting their recordings, was taking sophisticated entertainers, who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds, and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes *thought* was typical black music, rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got McTell to perform songs he knew, like “The Boll Weevil” and “Amazing Grace”, because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than having him perform his own material. To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience — imagine you’re a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You’ve been playing the clubs for several years, you’ve got a repertoire of songs you’ve written which the audiences love. You get your big break with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly like “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. You probably could perform those, but you’d be wondering why they wouldn’t let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a *lot* of black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw as unsophisticated. It’s something we’ll see particularly in the late fifties as musicians travel from the US to the UK, and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn’t want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos — they thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that’s what he gave those audiences. But McTell’s version of “One Dime Blues”, retitled “Last Dime Blues”, wasn’t like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit: [excerpt: “Last Dime Blues” by Blind Willie McTell] And that line we just heard, “Mama, don’t treat your daughter mean”, inspired one of the most important records in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was seventeen — she’d wanted to become a singer, and she eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept even though the marriage didn’t last long. She quickly joined Lucky Millinder’s band, as so many early R&B stars we’ve discussed did, but that too didn’t last long. Millinder’s band, at the time, had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night performing live with them, and apparently went down well with the audience, but that was all she was meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas on to the stage… and Millinder said “I hired a singer, not a waitress — you’re fired. And besides, you don’t sing well anyway”. She was fired that day, and she had no money — Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she’d had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything she owed him money. She had no way to make her way home from Washington. She was stuck. But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Calloway, Cab’s sister, who was running a club at the time. Well, I say Blanche Calloway was Cab’s sister, and that’s probably how most people today would think of her if they thought of her at all, but it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother. Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother’s career, and she’d recorded songs like this: [excerpt “Just a Crazy Song”: Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys] That was recorded several months *before* her brother’s breakout hit “Minnie The Moocher”, which popularised the “Hi de hi, ho de ho” chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn’t the first person to sing that song – Bill “Bojangles” Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style – but she’s clearly the one who gave Cab the idea. She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise all-male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early thirties. And that wasn’t her only achievement by any means — in later years she became prominent in the Democratic Party and as a civil rights activist, she started Afram, a cosmetic company that made makeup for black women and was one of the most popular brand names of the seventies, and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida, in 1958. But while her band was popular in the thirties, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the Mafia, who controlled live music in the thirties, decided that there wasn’t room for two bands led by a Calloway, and put their weight behind her brother, leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi, she used a public toilet that was designated whites-only, and while she was in jail for that one of the band members ran off with all the band’s money and so she couldn’t afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for a job. Calloway said that the club didn’t really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown’s plight — and impressed enough by her talent — that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she’d earned her fare home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure — he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom — a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown’s performance — impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her. Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We’ve talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race — and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on — but that was certainly true of Ahmet Ertegun. Ertegun was considered white by the then-prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default. He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Ahmet had ostensibly been studying Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop. He and his brother Neshui had over fifteen thousand jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Ahmet decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist, and took on Herb Abramson, one of the dentist’s proteges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic’s first few records — while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren’t especially successful, but then in 1949 they released “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” by Sticks McGhee: [excerpt “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] That record is another of those which people refer to as “the first rock and roll record”, and it was pure good luck for Atlantic — McGhee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier, for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different — before McGhee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing spo-de-o-dee he’d sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adults-only section on iTunes; while instead of singing “mop mop” he’d sung “goddam”. Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertegun knew McGhee’s brother, the more famous blues musician Brownie McGhee, and called him up to get in touch with Sticks. They got Sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success,and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, and many more musicians we’ve talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks McGhee never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things — firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly that if she was going to record for them, she’d have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing to something more… spo-de-o-dee. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Calloway, who had become her manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning twenty-one in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn’t meant to be a session for her, it was just a way to ease her back into her career — Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon’s band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then Ahmet Ertegun decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown, just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson — who would produce most of Brown’s early records — listed a handful of songs that she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgan’s “So Long”. The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer — one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, among others — stopped the session and said “Wait a minute. Let’s go back and do this right. The kid can *sing*!” And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test or, at best, as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for Cavalcade of Music, was instead released as a single, by “Ruth Brown as heard with Eddie Condon’s NBC Television Orchestra” “So Long” became a hit, and the followup “Teardrops From My Eyes” was a bigger hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts and staying there for eleven weeks. “Teardrops From My Eyes” was an uptempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked — she thought of herself primarily as a torch singer — but it can’t be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn’t what she’d have been singing by choice: [excerpt: Ruth Brown “Teardrops From My Eyes”] While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown’s recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertegun had always advocated — to take black musicians who played or sang the more “sophisticated” (I don’t know if you can hear those air quotes, but they’re there…) styles and to get them instead to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of “Teardrops From My Eyes”, this required a lot of work — Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toombs, the song’s writer, and working out the arrangement — and this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio or songs that had been honed by months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic’s ethos — making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren’t the best instrumentalists — the idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. “Teardrops From My Eyes” became a million seller — Atlantic’s first. Or at least, it was promoted as having sold a million copies — Herb Abramson would later claim that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then, he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate – if the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they’d want a million copies’ worth of royalties. But Brown’s biggest hit was her third number one, “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number twenty-three. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but twenty years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn’t do a show without playing it and that when she said her name people would ask “the Ruth Brown who sings ‘Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean’?” The song also made a difference to Brown because it meant she had to join the musicians’ union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn’t have to be union members. But “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. [excerpt: “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, Ruth Brown] Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lance wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly “Last Dime Blues”, and contained a line which they heard as “Mama, he treats your daughter mean”. Brown didn’t want to record the song originally — the way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues — but Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of “Teardrops From My Eyes”, turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song’s influence, for example, in “Work With Me Annie” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later: [Excerpt: “Work With Me Annie”, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters] But Brown always claimed that the reason for the song’s greater success than her other records was down to that tambourine — or more precisely because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the sixties, though she never became one of the most well-known artists — in the seventies she used to talk about adults telling their children “she was our Aretha Franklin”, and this was probably true. Certainly she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the fifties, and was popular enough that for a while Atlantic Records became known as “the house that Ruth Brown built”, but like many of the pioneers of the rock and roll era, she was largely (though far from completely) erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has prehistory start in 1954 with Elvis and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid fifties, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them, but it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed, but as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and their hit rate — at least for those who didn’t write their own material — got lower. So by the early sixties, Ruth Brown was something of a has-been. But she got a second wind from the late seventies onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again — not a pop star as she had been in her first career, but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV. And she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records — like most independent labels of the fifties, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed by the eighties it was a major label itself — it had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn’t just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money — and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who’ve fallen on hard times — often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now of course that’s not to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything — it’s very clear that Atlantic continued (and continues) to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the Foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation as anything else, but it’s still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off… Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field, She died in 2006.  

Welcome back! We've got a fresh new season for you, to begin this Thursday, December 6th, and we want to tell you a little about it. Plus: Today is the Old Town School's 61st anniversary! In celebration, we bring you a special rebroadcast of "60 Years of Folk, Part 1: Come for to Sing" from last season's audio documentary, all about the people, principles and forces that led to the creation of the school back in 1957. Featuring archival recordings from Pete Seeger, Studs Terkel, and the school's co-founders, as well as oral history interviews collected in collaboration with StoryCorps. Original recordings featured in this episode (in order of occurrence): - “Blues on Big Bill Broonzy guitar” performed by Chris Walz live at 4544 N Lincoln Ave, 6/17/2011 - StoryCorps interview of Jane Stracke by Mareva Lindo, 6/5/2017 - “Wandering,” performed by Win Stracke, Old Town School Compendium, circa 1965 - “The Trees Are All Ivied” performed by Win Stracke, Win Stracke Live with Studs Terkel, 3/19/1982 - “Ballad of the Boll Weevil” performed by Win Stracke, Old Town School Compendium, circa 1965 - StoryCorps conversation between Ron Cohen & Bob Riesman, 5/20/2017 - Studs Terkel interview by Paul Tyler, Old Town School 35th anniversary interviews, 1992 - Win Stracke interview by Studs Terkel, Win Stracke Live with Studs Terkel, 3/19/1982 - “In the Evening” performed by Frank Hamilton live at 333 W North Ave, 4/15/1962 - Frank Hamilton interviews by Mareva Lindo, 7/27/2015 and 2/12/2016 - “Old Blue” performed by Guy Carawan live at the Armstrong home, 8/13/1978 - “Nine Hundred Miles” from Old Town School Compendium, circa 1965 - “Roll the Union On,” performed by Pete Seeger live at People's Church, 5/17/1986 - Pete Seeger interview by Paul Tyler, Old Town School 35th anniversary interviews, 1992 - StoryCorps conversation between Lance Greening & Rick Veras, 5/8/2017 - Dawn Greening interview by Paul Tyler, Old Town School 35th anniversary interviews, 1992 - “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round,” performed by Odetta live at 4544 N Lincoln Ave, 10/30/2004 - “Methodist Pie” performed by Win Stracke live at 333 W North Ave, 4/15/1962 - “Vranjanka (Serbia)” performed by Valucha deCastro and Frank Hamilton live at 333 W North Ave, 4/15/1962 - “Witch Upon A Hill” performed by Ted Johnson live at 333 W North Ave, 10/10/1964 - StoryCorps conversation between Ted Johnson and Marcia Johnson, 3/22/2017 - “Glory of Love” performed by Big Bill Broonzy live at Circle Pines Center, circa 1950s References and recommended reading: - Chicago Folk: Images of the Sixties Music Scene by Ronald D. Cohen & Bob Riesman - Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 by Ronald D. Cohen

Our first guest from Arkansas is on the show today. Devon Lucal from Arkansas-Monticello will go through narrowing down your career path, social media, and whatever a Boll Weevil is. As always, you can find us on social media @sportsinfocast.

Sixty years ago, in the holiday season of 1957, Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music first opened its doors. This Thanksgiving Day, The Archives celebrates the 60th anniversary with a six-part documentary on the school's history, through the voices and songs of the people who were there. This first episode tells the remarkable story of how Win Stracke, Frank Hamilton, Dawn Greening and Gertrude Soltker came together to found the Old Town School--featuring archival music and recordings from Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger, and the founders themselves, as well as many of the people who participated in our oral history project with StoryCorps this past year. Go to oldtownschool.org/StoryCorps to hear more of the stories we gathered, and to learn more about this ongoing partnership. Original recordings featured in this episode (in order of occurrence): - “Glory of Love” performed by Big Bill Broonzy live at Circle Pines Center, circa 1950s - StoryCorps conversation between Ron Cohen & Bob Riesman, 5/20/2017 - “Blues on Big Bill Broonzy guitar” performed by Chris Walz live at 4544 N Lincoln Ave, 6/17/2011 - StoryCorps interview of Jane Stracke by Mareva Lindo, 6/5/2017 - “Wandering,” performed by Win Stracke, Old Town School Compendium, circa 1965 - “The Trees Are All Ivied” performed by Win Stracke, Win Stracke Live with Studs Terkel, 3/19/1982 - “Ballad of the Boll Weevil” performed by Win Stracke, Old Town School Compendium, circa 1965 - Studs Terkel interview by Paul Tyler, Old Town School 35th anniversary interviews, 1992 - Win Stracke interview by Studs Terkel, Win Stracke Live with Studs Terkel, 3/19/1982 - “In the Evening” performed by Frank Hamilton live at 333 W North Ave, 4/15/1962 - Frank Hamilton interviews by Mareva Lindo, 7/27/2015 and 2/12/2016 - “Old Blue” performed by Guy Carawan live at the Armstrong home, 8/13/1978 - “Nine Hundred Miles” from Old Town School Compendium, circa 1965 - “Roll the Union On,” performed by Pete Seeger live at People's Church, 5/17/1986 - Pete Seeger interview by Paul Tyler, Old Town School 35th anniversary interviews, 1992 - StoryCorps conversation between Lance Greening & Rick Veras, 5/8/2017 - Dawn Greening interview by Paul Tyler, Old Town School 35th anniversary interviews, 1992 - “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round,” performed by Odetta live at 4544 N Lincoln Ave, 10/30/2004 - “Methodist Pie” performed by Win Stracke live at 333 W North Ave, 4/15/1962 - “Vranjanka (Serbia)” performed by Valucha deCastro and Frank Hamilton live at 333 W North Ave, 4/15/1962 - “Witch Upon A Hill” performed by Ted Johnson live at 333 W North Ave, 10/10/1964 - StoryCorps conversation between Ted Johnson and Marcia Johnson, 3/22/2017 References and recommended reading: - Chicago Folk: Images of the Sixties Music Scene by Ronald D. Cohen & Bob Riesman - Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 by Ronald D. Cohen

In an updated version of his sermon “The Bowl of Peanuts,” Eric Ludy re-examines King Cotton, the Boll Weevil, and George Washington Carver to talk about Biblically solving impossible dilemmas in the world and our lives. Too often in the church we are confused about works verses faith—but this sermon gives clarity to how the Christian life is to function properly in light of God’s grace working within the believer’s life as we live by the work of faith and not the work of law.

In an updated version of his sermon “The Bowl of Peanuts,” Eric Ludy re-examines King Cotton, the Boll Weevil, and George Washington Carver to talk about Biblically solving impossible dilemmas in the world and our lives. Too often in the church we are confused about works verses faith—but this sermon gives clarity to how the Christian life is to function properly in light of God’s grace working within the believer’s life as we live by the work of faith and not the work of law.

In an updated version of his sermon “The Bowl of Peanuts,” Eric Ludy re-examines King Cotton, the Boll Weevil, and George Washington Carver to talk about Biblically solving impossible dilemmas in the world and our lives. Too often in the church we are confused about works verses faith—but this sermon gives clarity to how the Christian life is to function properly in light of God’s grace working within the believer’s life as we live by the work of faith and not the work of law.

Kathleen Sidenblad discusses her career through Silicon Valley, from engineer at Systems Control Inc in 1976 to VP of Engineering today. For more about Kathy, check out this Storehouse interview.   

(0:00:55) Blu Rays: (Exodus: Gods and Kings), (0:00:55) Coming Attractions: [Nothing Attractive Found], (0:01:20) Box Office: live action Cinderella takes home the prince, and Insurgent surges ahead, (0:02:15) TV Talk: I, Zombie is promising, Walking Dead gets domestic, The Flash killed the time travel fun, SHIELD gets split apart... again, , (0:44:50) Darren: Birthday, Blanca, Hamilton again, finished The Three Body Problem and started Rare by friend-of-the-show Keith!, (1:03:05) Tripp: Boll Weevil monument road trip, new Star Wars novels, Bloodline (Netflix), (1:13:05) Shaun: Just some comics (Ms. Marvel, Thor: GOT v3, Fables v19, IDW Doctor Who), Constantine catch up, attempt at Kimmy Schmidt, (1:30:25) Trey: Huntsville, a little more Transfomers, Yahoo Screen sucks, (1:41:00) Spider-Man comes home

Show Notes : http://enchantedbysewing.blogspot.com. This month I’m taking a leaf out of the book of some of the podcasts and columnists I enjoy, who run a themed quiz during the winter holidays. I’ve always enjoyed taking these kinds of mini tests,  and feeling like a smarty pants when I’m  able to answer their questions. I also get a kick out of trying to wow my family with my knowledge of trivia on various subjects. They are rarely impressed. My own, Enchanted by Sewing holiday quiz is focused around four fabrics that work well for sewing, wearing and enjoying here in California’s temperate San Francisco Bay Area. So pull up a few bolts of your favorite stuff, plop down on top, and let’s get started. And don’t forget to keep score! During the audio quiz... you will be ranking four fabrics in terms of their strength. At that time, I sing you a little fabric themed tune. Since cotton is one of the fabrics in the quiz, I thought you might enjoy my updated version of the old "Boll Weevil" song. The lyrics I adapted are in the show notes http://enchantedbysewing.blogspot.com

(0:01:50) Darren made the Storm God angry, (0:11:35) Shaun read more comics, (0:24:20) Trey read Locke & Key and various other Hastings finds, (0:33:40) Tripp started reading The Walking Dead, and also read the first Locke & Key story, (0:49:45) The Walking Dead continues to amaze, (1:09:40) Blu Rays: (The Amazing Spider-Man), (1:11:30) Coming Attractions: (Skyfall), (1:29:25) Box Office: (Disney wrecks it), (2:08:30) What Would Darren Read, (2:24:05) Trey's Pullbox: (Action Comics...Defenders...Detective Comics...Dial H...Earth Two...Manhattan Projects...Swamp Thing)

A public lecture by James Giesen of Mississippi State University, about the research in his book, "Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South"

A public lecture by James Giesen of Mississippi State University, about the research in his book, "Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South"

Performers include: Lightnin Hopkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey, Leadbelly, Henry Thomas, Texas Alexander and T-Bone Walker. Songs include: West Texas Blues, Let Your Light Shine, The Boll Weevil. T-Bone Blues and One Dime Blues.