Podcasts about cause you

The day is soon coming when all of our earthly life will seem like a distant breath, though certainly today has plenty of blessings, and also concerns. Our hearts our prone to wander, and cling fast to earthly attachments which only distract us from the riches we already have received in Christ. Scripture echoes itself throughout the old and new testament, and this beautiful chapter of Isaiah is a good example of  "great things" restated. Chad lays this out for us in ways that is sure to encourage us along our journey. Izzi Ray beautifully sings "And In That Day".  Show Notes: Support 1517 Podcast Network 1517 Podcasts 1517 on Youtube 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 Events Schedule 1517 Academy - Free Theological Education What's New from 1517: The Impossible Prize: A Theology of Addiction by Donavan Riley Ditching the Checklist by Mark Mattes Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation, Book 1 of 2 by Amy Mantravadi More from the hosts: Chad Bird   Lyrics to "And In That Day" And in that day I will say  Praise the Lord And in that day I will sing The song of Your word   Though You were angry Still you entered my soul Drew up the waters And made me whole   Chorus: My good Shepherd My salvation I will not be afraid I will not be afraid My Good Shepherd I belong to You Body and soul Forever Body and soul   And in that day, I'll3   want for nought No need to fear Cause You are my strength You are the light Holy and pure     Though You were angry Still you entered my soul Drew up the waters And made me whole   Chorus: Good Shepherd My salvation I will not be afraid I will not be afraid Good Shepherd I belong to You Body and soul Forever     Bridge: I will sing your song in the night of sorrows My loving guide Every step of the way I will not be afraid Good Shepherd I belong to You

Hey guys, it's Debbie Nigro — and today, I want to introduce you to someone whose spirit will stick with you long after you finish reading this. Meet John Chiorando — a brilliant businessman, devoted family man, and philanthropist — and yes, the self-proclaimed “Coconut Commander” behind the fast-growing beverage brand Once Upon a Coconut. But it's not just about the coconuts. It's about "Greatitude." Not a typo. It's the name of John's new book — a powerful message born from unimaginable heartbreak: the loss of his beautiful daughter, Nina, to a rare form of terminal cancer called Leptomeningeal Disease.   A Book Born From Heartache — and Healing John didn't plan to write a book. But when his young son once complained about not getting enough Christmas presents, something clicked. He realized how much of today's culture is focused on what we lack, rather than what we have. So he wrote Greatitude, a message-driven book that gently shifts our lens toward appreciation, especially for life's simplest joys — like a cup of coffee, a walk on the beach, or time with someone we love. Then Nina got sick. And suddenly, what started as a lesson in thankfulness became a tribute to her courage — and a platform for purpose.   As John shared on the show: “My colleague told me, ‘You didn't write this book. Your daughter did.'” And you know what? She did.   100% of Book Proceeds Go to Charity Every single dollar from the purchase of Greatitude goes to one of two causes close to John's heart: Nina Strong Foundation for rare cancer research Down Syndrome Foundation (another personal connection in his family)   And as a thank-you? You get a free case of Once Upon a Coconut when you buy the book. (Love that part!) Grab it at Greatitude.org   Once Upon a Coconut: Coconut Water With a Cause You've probably seen the bright, playful cans of Once Upon a Coconut on shelves — I spotted it in a DeCicco's here in New York and literally stopped in my tracks. It's more than delicious (hello, coconut + chocolate?!), it's also doing good: Plant-based, non-GMO, full of electrolytes Ethically sourced from Vietnam And here's the biggie: 10% of all profits go to charity.   As John says: “Giving is our best ingredient.” Even Shark Tank's Daymond John and NFL stars like Rob Gronkowski and Ronnie Stanley are investors. But it's the mission that's the real magnet.   Fastest-Growing Coconut Water Brand in America From Whole Foods to Walmart to Target — Once Upon a Coconut is popping up everywhere. And it's not just good business — it's good energy.   As John says: “We call it nature's Gatorade.” Cheers to that!   Final Sips of Inspiration Talking with John was a reminder that life is fragile, beautiful, and worthy of deep appreciation — even in the face of heartbreak... in spite of it all. If you want to feel better, do better, and drink something better… Pick up a copy of Greatitude. Sip some coconut water with purpose. And maybe, just maybe, start seeing the world through a lens of Greatitude too. With heart, Debbie BUY THE BOOK + GET YOUR FREE CASE OF COCONUT WATER! GO TO GREATITUDE.org Enjoy meeting John Choriando and enjoy the podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show      

Topics: Philippians 2:12, Work Out Your Salvation, Fear and Trembling, Philippians 2:13, Philippians 2:1-18, Work for Your Salvation, God Who Works In You, To Will and To Act to Fulfill His Good Purpose, Encouraging Philippians to Love One Another, Philippians Written Approx AD 60, Paul Was Imprisoned by Rome, Express Christ Amongst Themselves in Greek Community, Work God Out Through Your Hands Feet and Mouth, Bear Fruit of the Spirit, Faith Without Works Is Dead, James 2:26, It Is By Grace Through Faith You're Saved Not Of Yourself, Ephesians 2:8-9, Made Alive In Christ, It Is By Grace You Were Saved, Ephesians 2:5, Because of God's Great Love for Us, If It's Based on Grace it Cannot Be Based on Works, Romans 11:6, To the One Who Does Not Work But Believes, Romans 4:5, Working to Stay Saved Means You're Working For Something You Didn't Work for to Begin With, When Did James Write His Letter?, Who Did James Write His Letter to?, One of First Epistles Written, To the 12 Tribes, Council of Jerusalem, Acts 15, “Decision” to Allow Gentiles to Believe, James Pushing in Parts of the Law, Peter Opposed James, James Is “Someone Else's Mail”, Leave In Bible But Read the Same as Sermon on the Mount, Belief is Good but You Need Works to Complete It is Anti-Christ, Paul Wrote Ephesians, Romans, and Galatians to Combat What James Wrote, James Listed as Part of the Party of Circumcision in Galatians, James Called Believing Pharisee in Acts, Appeared as Angel of Light to Corinthians, Lawless One Might be James, Law Not For the Righteous, Early Church Had to Mature Out of Law Observance Just Like Us, Hebrews 8:13, Changed Behavior Does Not Work Out Salvation, Unbelievers Change Their Behavior All the Time, Unbelievers Go to Church Believing They Are Working Out Salvation, Jesus Said Carry Your Cross, Nobody Carried a Cross, Simon of Cyrene, Only Jesus Carried Cross, Impossible Statements Meant to get Listener to Trust Him Instead, With Man This is Impossible but All Things Are possible With God, Some Apostles Died on Cross by Man, Not By God, Jesus Said He Came to Give Life Not Death, Cost of Being a Disciple, Luke 14, Count the Cost, You Can't Afford It, Trust The Delegation Party Instead, Jesus is the Delegation Party, Living In Sin, Sinning Doesn't Cause You to Live in Sin, You Live in Sin if you Live in Adam, You Live in Righteousness if You Live in Christ, Living In Christ and Sinning, Living in Adam and Sinning, Romans 6:2, How Can We Who've Died to Sin Live in It?, Rhetorical Question, How Can We Who've Trusted in Jesus Go to Hell?, Not a Possibility, Sinning Less is Not the Goal, One Sin Would Require Death, Romans 6:23, Jesus Won't Die Again, “How Can We?”, We Can't, We've Died to Sin and Been Set Free From It, Romans 6:6-7, Old Self Was Crucified, You're Sinning While You Live In Christ Not Living in Sin, Context of Philippians 2, In Your Relationships With One Another Have Same Mindset as Jesus Christ, Philippians 2:5, Fear and Trembling is Reverence and Awe, You Have the God of the Universe in You, Not Fear and Trembling Based on Punishment Because Jesus Was Already PunishedSupport the showSign up for Matt's free daily devotional! https://mattmcmillen.com/newsletter

Topics: Co-Crucifixion, Co-Burial, Co-Resurrection, Romans 6:3-11, Colossians 2:20, Colossians 3:1, Raised Up With Christ, Ephesians 2:5, You Were Dead in Your Sins God Made You Alive With Christ, Ephesians 1:13, Sealed with the Spirit, Power of the Blood of Jesus, Romans 5:9, Saved From Wrath Through His Blood, Hebrews 9:22, Shedding of Blood, Forgiveness of Sin, Complete Forgiveness, Past Present and Future, Hebrews 10:10, 1 Corinthians 6:11, Complete Sanctification, Only Blood of Jesus Sanctifies, Holy Through His Own Blood, Hebrews 13:12, Completion of Old Covenant, Matthew 5:17, Have Not Come to Abolish the Law and Prophets But to Fulfill Them, It is Finished, John 19:30, Nailed it to the Cross, Colossians 2:14, Ephesians 2:14-15, Abolished the Law in His Flesh, He Himself Is Our Peace, Hebrews 10:9, He Set Aside the First to Establish the Second, Hebrews 8:13, He Made the First Covenant Obsolete, Weak and Useless, The Old Covenant is the Law, Covenant-Mixture Theology, Mark 2:21-23, New Wine in Old Wineskins, New Patch of Clothing on Old Garment,  Law is the Ultrasound and Jesus is the Actual Baby, Our New Identity and What We Want, 2 Corinthians 5:17, You Are in Christ and You're a New Creation, The Old Has Gone and the New is Here, 2 Peter 1:4, Partaker in Divine Nature, Call Christians Sinners and Tell Them Not to Sin, Ezekiel 36:26-27, New Heart, New Spirit, Put My Spirit in You, Cause You to Walk in My Ways, Ignored Grace, Ignored Jesus, Acts 20:24, Gospel of Grace, Hebrews 2:9, By the Grace of God Jesus Tasted Death for You, Be Careful with Grace, Too Much Grace is Too Much Jesus, Grace is Everything, Vilified Grace, Called Grace Hyper, Bible Describes Grace as Hyper, Super-Abounding, Titus 2:11-12, Grace of God Teaches Us, Jesus Is Grace, What Grace Will Do, Grace Will Wash Feet, Grace Will Serve You, Grace Will Commit His Life to You, Grace Brings Dead People to Life, Grace Eats Meals With Those Who Betray Him, Grace Forgives Those Who Kill Him, Grace Will Cook You Breakfast After You Deny Him Three Times and Abandon Him, Grace Keeps No Records of Your Wrongs, Grace Will Never Leave You or Forsake You, Grace Understands You, Grace is Life Support the showSign up for Matt's free daily devotional! https://mattmcmillen.com/newsletter

Opening Song: Like a Tree (Psalm 1) (https://open.spotify.com/track/0OcOwAmxOT0kpWs1mfUcXE?si=fa0bca4cba544777)by Caroline Cobb Smith Lyrics: Blessed is the one who loves Your word Your ways are his delight Knows that he needs it eat sleeps and breathes it Thinkin' on it day and night But sad for the one who walks away Sits down with all the scoffers Building his kingdom calling it freedom Chasing after what the world offers I want to be like a tree by the river (Tree by the river) Oh plant me down by the deep deep water (Deep deep water) When the sun gets hot my leaves won't wither (Leaves won't wither) Oh plant me down like a tree by the river Oh plant me down by Your deep deep water I want to be like a mighty oak Roots growing strong and deep When the wind blows the roots gonna hold ‘Cause You're holding on to me Yeah You're holding on to me yeah Plant me plant me plant me by the river Wash me wash me wash me with Your water I want to be like a tree by the river (Tree by the river) Oh plant me down by the deep deep water When the sun gets hot my leaves won't wither (Leaves won't wither) Oh plant me down like a tree by the river Oh plant me down by Your deep deep water Let's go to the river Let's go to the water Passage: Blessed is the man[a] who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2 but his delight is in the law[b] of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. 4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; 6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Musical Reflection: “Be Thou My Vision,” old Irish folk tune Reflection Notes: The hymn commonly known as “Be Thou My Vision” is set to the tune SLANE, which is an old Irish folk tune. It samples both major and minor tonalities, with a perfect balance between the two. Prayer: We beseech you, O Lord, to purify our consciences by your daily visitation; that when your Son our Lord comes, he may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. -The Gelasian Sacramentary

This season we're throwing in some oldies but goodies for Series Sunday and the first up is the DrakeFrank 2018 classic Cause You're My Boy. We're talking sweet stories, hilarious moments, and all of the p-talk. Comment, like & subscribe on YouTube FOLLOW US IF YOU ALSO WANTED TO BE A NET IDOL: IG: @letstalkBL Twitter: @letstalkBL TikTok: @letstalkBL

Improvised Lyrics: “Ooh, ooh, oooh gratitude, oh, I pour out to you, my gratitude. Gratitude, oh oh gratitude, I pour out to you, oh yeah. Let my thanks be a song, yeah, let my thanks be a song, let my thanks be a song of gratitude, yeah. Gratitude, I pour out gratitude. I have so much thanks for you. I've gotta pour out my gratitude. Yes, I thank you for being my rescue. Oh you ride across the heavens to come and rescue me. Oh, yeah, oh, oh, ooh. Well You have many names and you keep revealing them to me. Not just something you say but the things that You do for me. Oh, You are El Shaddai, You are God Most High, Yahweh Elohim, Jesus Christ is for me. Oh, and I elevate, You are God so great. You are lifted high, forever You will be in my eyes. Oh here's my gratitude, yeah, poured out to You. Oh my gratitude lavished on You, yeah. Oh an offering is what I love to bring. I pour out to You, I pour out to You, yeah. Hallelujah! You're my hallelujah! You're my hallelujah! You are Faithful and True, yeah there's none like You. God most high, to You I cry out with my gratitude, yeah. Here's my gratitude, all poured out to You, oh yeah. (Ooh…) Something in the name, yeah, something in Your name. With every name You reveal, another part of me gets healed, cause You are the wholeness in me. The God of my design, yeah. God most high, You fully made me. And You return me to the perfection that You made. And all of Your heart that You gave. ‘Cause You reveal your name and another part of me is restored. Oh, and gratitude, here's my gratitude, so much thanks for You, Yahweh. You're the Rapha who heals. You're the Rapha who heals. You turn the bitter into sweet. Yeah You've healed all of me. You're the Jireh who provides. You're the Pappa, my supply. I trust in you, and You're open hand. You are my inheritance. You are the God who sees. You are my destiny, everything I need. Oh, there's so much in the name, yeah. Yeah, there's so much in Your name. Oh, and I give You my thanks for Your names. Ooh, oh yeah. Oh yeah, gratitude. Ooh, yeah, ooh. The God who's present here with me. A trinity of three: Papa, Jesus, El Shaddai–Holy Spirit–You're all God Most High. And my gratitude I give to all of You. Because You give all to me. Oh, all I need. I pour out my thankful. I pour out my grateful. I open my jar and pour it out far, all of my love for You. Hallelujah, Faithful and True. I'm so grateful for you. I'm so thankful. It's a never-ending song of my life to sing, this offering of grateful to You.“

Topics: Love Jesus, False Conversion, Fear or Hypocrisy, God's Love Poured into our Hearts, Romans 5:5, Incorruptible Love, Undying Love, Ephesians 6:24, If God Were Your Father, John 8:24, Children of God, John 1:12-13, Cause You to Walk in My Ways, Ezekiel 36:27, If You Don't Love the Lord, 1 Corinthians 16:22If you want a deeper look at this topic here's a free chapter from one of my books!https://mattmcmillenministries.com/stop-trying-so-hard-to-be-a-christian/Support the show

I'm Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Sometimes God uses little scraps of words to speak mountains of truth. I think that's what's happening in the song “In Awe” by Hollyn. If my sources are correct, this song wasn't written in the usual way. The singer Hollyn was literally put into a vocal booth in a sound studio and told to just sing. She said, “I didn't have any words at first, so I took my time, closed my eyes, and for a solid hour thanked God for what He'd been doing in my life.” And out came the song “In Awe.” James 4:8 says that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us. It sounds like that's what Hollyn did in creating this song, and that is definitely what I feel whenever I hear it, like I'm drawing near to God and He is drawing near to me. And the lyrics say that. The song opens with these words: Can't speak, So close I can feel You breathe, You're so holy and worthy, You know where I've been. Can't move, So close to You I'm see-through, No, not innocent like You, Oh God, I'm sorry. It reminds me of Isaiah chapter 6 where the prophet Isaiah sees the Lord, high and exalted, and Isaiah's reaction is to realize his own sinfulness in the light of the holy God. In the song “In Awe,” the singer is drawing into the presence of God and begins to feel the weight of His holiness, and listen to that line again: You're so holy and worthy, You know where I've been. God knows where you've been, my friend. He knows where I've been. He knows EVERYWHERE we've been. He knows any shame, any sin, any hurt, any anger and bitterness. He knows where we've been, and it's an awesome and terrible thought. The song continues: So close to You I'm see-through. God sees it all, including any dark places. There is no hiding before the living God, and listen to the singer's response to the presence of God: I'm not innocent like You. Oh, my friend, we are not innocent, and we stand in stark contrast to the high and exalted, holy and worthy almighty God. No wonder Isaiah, the mighty prophet of God, cried out in agony, “Woe unto me. I am ruined.” We are see-through in His presence. He knows where we've been. He knows it all. The singer almost whimpers in God's presence, and the song goes on: No, not innocent like You, Oh God, I'm sorry. What else can be said? What else can we say but, “Oh God, I am so, so sorry.” But oh my friend, listen to this Bible verse. Psalm 34:18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. Yes, our hearts break for our sin in the presence of God, but as soon as they break, He rushes in. The song continues: I'm living in awe, You don't need me at all, But You couldn't love me more. Oh man, let that sink in. God, You don't need me at all…but You couldn't love me more.” First John 3:1. What great love the Father has LAVISHED on us, that we should be called His children. The song continues: Your love is overwhelming, Your love is overwhelming, It's only You and me here. Your love is overwhelming, Your love is overwhelming, I can hardly breathe here. I'm living in awe, ‘Cause You don't need me at all, But You couldn't love me more, You couldn't love me more, You couldn't love me more. Hallelujah. Praise God. Thank You, Father, for the love You have lavished on us, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our sin, in spite of where we've been, but You couldn't love us more, and we bow in Your holy presence and we love you back. We love You back. We love You back. Amen. May God bless you today. I'm Doug Apple.

In our last episode we discussed Psalm 98 about the power of singing and music in worship. God has created this universe, and created music to be a powerful expression of beauty, goodness, truth, and transcendence. Music is grounded in who God is. So you will never be able to worship God as fully as he intends without learning to worship through music and singing. It is embedded with God's power to effect immediate change in our lives. This episode is the audio of a Facebook live recording our A Bigger Life team did recently with singing and discussion around Psalm 16. In a sense it was a live recording session for A Bigger Life. We intended it to be an episode that you can save and can come back to from time to time to help you worship through music and singing. King of My Heart:  By: Steffany Gretzinger & Bethel Music   Let the King of my heart Be the mountain where I run The fountain I drink from Oh, He is my song Let the King of my heart Be the shadow where I hide The ransom for my life Oh, He is my song   'Cause You are good You are good, oh oh (Repeat)   And let the King of my heart Be the wind inside my sails The anchor in the waves Oh oh, He is my song Let the King of my heart Be the fire inside my veins The echo of my days Oh oh, He is my song   Let the King of my heart Be the wind inside my sails The anchor in the waves Oh oh, He is my song Let the King of my heart Be the fire inside my veins The echo of my days Oh, He is my song   'Cause You are good You are good, oh oh (Repeat)   You're never gonna let You're never gonna let me down And You're never gonna let You're never gonna let me down (Repeat)     Oh 'cause You are good You are good, oh oh 'Cause You are good You are good, oh oh 'Cause You are good You are good, oh oh Psalm 16 ESV 1 Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.  2 I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.”  Great Are You Lord By: All Sons & Daughters   You give life, You are love You bring light to the darkness You give hope, You restore Every heart that is broken And great are You, Lord   It's Your breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise We pour out our praise It's Your breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise to You only   You give life, You are love You bring light to the darkness You give hope, You restore  Every heart that is broken Great are You, Lord   It's Your breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise We pour out our praise It's Your breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise to You only (Repeat)   And all the earth will shout Your praise Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing Great are You, Lord And all the earth will shout Your praise Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing Great are You, Lord   And all the earth will shout Your praise Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing Great are You, Lord   It's Your breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise We pour out our praise It's Your breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise to You only (Repeat)   Psalm 16 ESV 8 I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.  9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure.  Heart Is Glad By: Crossing Music with Aaron Strumpel   I have set the Lord always before me Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken I have set the Lord always before me; Because He is at my right hand I will not be shaken   Keep me safe, my God;  I have come to You,  I have come to You for refuge.  Keep me safe, my God;  I have come to You, I have come to You for refuge   Is it any wonder that my heart is glad?  Is it any wonder that my heart is glad? I rejoice.    You alone, O God,...

GROW  Greatness Reached over Oppression through Wisdom Ball of Confusion that is on Fire with eviland hate; But God!  Hold on to #God like God is the Ball and You are the King and Queen of the  Basketball Court!Cause You are

GROW. Greatness Reached over Oppression through Wisdom Evil has no Power over You,             Except what You allow It.Hold on to #God like God is the Ball and You are the King and Queen of the  Basketball Court!Cause You are

The Flames Wouldn’t Burn; You Spawn Rebirth (Parody of Broke Me First by Tate McRae)Original written by: Blake Harnage, Tate McRae, & Victoria ZaroLyrics: You spawn rebirth,Obviously you want me to open up when I’m talking to You, Sweet Well.To talk to you, my Creator, refreshes my soul and self.With Your unlimited blessings, ask and we shall receive. You changed my perspective on everyone, everywhere, and eveything. You grow me; it’s transformitive. When I’m running in the wrong way, You switch up my direction.Life’s messy, but You’re bliss.You’re celebrated in every season.Now Biblically, You protected Daniel from attacks.The lion’s didn’t stand a chance against his courage.Jonah and Noah, You saved from aquatic deaths.Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from fire’s curse.The flames wouldn’t burn,Cause You spawn rebirth.Hard to swallow, the truth of Mary’s child,For Joseph, an angel had to confirm.That he needed to raise Jesus as his own,Regardless of the boy’s royal birth.And Sarah had Issac despite Abraham’s questions, and her elder age.And because of her prayer, Esther and her people were rescued by her King. You grow me, it’s transformitive. When I’m running in the wrong way, You switch up my direction.Life’s messy, but You’re bliss.You’re celebrated in every season.Now Biblically, You protected Daniel from attacks.The lion’s didn’t stand a chance against his courage.Jonah and Noah, You saved from aquatic deaths. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from fire’s curse. The flames wouldn’t burn.Cause You spawn rebirth.How did You form creation?How do You personify perfection? Put Rahab and her family under protection!How do you become salvation? Now Biblically, You protected Daniel from attacks.The lion’s didn’t stand a chance against his courage.Jonah and Noah, You saved from aquatic deaths.Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from fire’s curse.The flames wouldn’t burn,Cause You spawn rebirth.You spawn rebirth.You spawn rebirth.Creator of Earth!Written by Melissa Smith (AKA Melzy of Wonderland on Youtube ; Mel’s Music on Spreaker & Facebook)

Many people instead of living their lives of dreams, are living the life of fears. Instead of playing the game, they are in the fear of getting strike out. Stop! You got to Believe In Yourself! Cause You are , what you believe yourself to be! INSTAGRAM - @WHRUTS. YOUTUBE - @WHRUTS

Ezekiel 36:26-27: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My […] The post “I Will Put My Spirit Within & Cause You to Walk in My Statutes” Ez. 36:27 appeared first on Wonder & Reality.

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “That’s All Right Mama” by Elvis Presley. 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. Elvis’ 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis’ five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as “Bear Cat” and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I’ve relied on three books here more than any others. The first is “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. which I’ve recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick — Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books — they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips’ ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I’m sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I’m coming from, but I’m aware that this will be some people’s first episode. There’s a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh’Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people’s music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show… The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music — and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn’t have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He’d hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of “My Kind of Carrying On” by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn’t sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say “Cause You’re Always On My Mind” by Wiley Barkdull, or “Twice the Loving” by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up — the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he’d started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he’d initially realised, he’d decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he’d have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as “Rocket 88”, the record he’d leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin’ Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he’d ever recorded. Howlin’ Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam’s studio before he’d started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he’d recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he’d been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties — if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We’ve already seen this with “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like “Caldonia”. And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to “Hound Dog”. There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin’ Tonight” — “Mr Hound Dog’s in Town” [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog’s In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase “hound dog”, you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips’ view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips’ telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and “wrote” “Bear Cat”. Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of “Hound Dog”, and there’s not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips’ experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips’ new record label, Sun. [excerpt of “Bear Cat” by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became — “Bear Cat” eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else’s song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he’d had a solid hit with “Bear Cat”, and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn’t buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that — if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people’s music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they’d start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys — Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been — he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro — and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips’ intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips’ assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who’d come in to the studio, she thought she’d found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that’s how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music’s history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who “discovered” Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker’s side. However, even there, it’s hard to see from Elvis’ original recording — versions of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that’s what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn’t have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn’t know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He’d hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block — Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they’d all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn’t really part of the group. He’d thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things — he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn’t cause any fires when he worked on people’s wiring. He didn’t have many friends — and no close friends at all — and many of those he did have didn’t even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source — the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He’d go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King — young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky’s on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn’t someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either — rather, he was someone who didn’t fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn’t own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He’d hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing — and specifically what is known euphemistically as “Southern Gospel”, but which really means “white Gospel”. And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That’s a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it — and it’s also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that’s the gospel music we’re talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there’s another gospel music as well — “Southern Gospel” or “quartet gospel”. That music is — or at least was at the time we’re talking about — almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren’t attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it’s performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, the Blackwood Brothers] That’s the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that’s a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson’s version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley’s favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them — but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He’d take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn’t have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself — Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he’d been working with. In their cases it was because they’d been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips’ case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else’s. He didn’t know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin’ Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips’ book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn’t try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty’s. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn’t impressed… or at least, he *thought* he wasn’t impressed. But at the same time… there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn’t quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on “That’s All Right Mama”, a song originally recorded by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over — he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song “That’s All Right Mama” was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson’s classic “Black Snake Moan”: [excerpt: “Black Snake Moan”, Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in “If I Get Lucky”. He then came up with the melody for what became “That’s All Right”, but recorded it with different lyrics as “Mean Ol’ Frisco Blues”: [excerpt: “Mean Old Frisco Blues”, Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to “That’s All Right”, and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: “Dirt Road Blues”, Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded “That’s All Right Mama” itself: [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama”, Arthur Crudup] Crudup’s records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That’s All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn’t follow that template. Elvis’ version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music — it’s taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black’s slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup’s version. It still doesn’t, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for “a white man who could sing like a black one”, he hadn’t found it. Listening now, it’s definitely a “rock and roll” record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a “hillbilly” record. [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley’s singing which is different from most of the country music at the time — there’s a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it’s what’s needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre — Bill Monroe’s bluegrass song “Blue Moon of Kentucky”: [excerpt: Bill Monroe “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they’d reworked “That’s All Right Mama”. There’s nothing to these tracks but Elvis’ strummed acoustic, Black’s clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore’s rudimentary electric guitar fills — and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips’ echo. Phillips had a simple system he’d rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he’d done it. The room he was recording in didn’t have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn’t use just one tape recorder — though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember — he used two. He didn’t do multitracking like Les Paul — rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on “Blue Moon of Kentucky” it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe’s bluegrass music — a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn’t be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis’ mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn’t tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis’ race – most people had assumed, since Phillips’ show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands — at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I’ve seen claims, though I don’t know how true they are, that Crudup’s total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band’s first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley’s stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we’ve mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed — he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic — and even when he wasn’t, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn’t keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it’s hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we’ll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "That's All Right Mama" by Elvis Presley. 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. Elvis' 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis' five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as "Bear Cat" and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I've relied on three books here more than any others. The first is "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. which I've recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books -- they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips' ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I'm sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I'm coming from, but I'm aware that this will be some people's first episode. There's a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh'Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people's music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show... The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music -- and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn't have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He'd hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of "My Kind of Carrying On" by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn't sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say "Cause You're Always On My Mind" by Wiley Barkdull, or "Twice the Loving" by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up -- the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he'd started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he'd initially realised, he'd decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he'd have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as "Rocket 88", the record he'd leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin' Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he'd ever recorded. Howlin' Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam's studio before he'd started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he'd recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he'd been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties -- if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We've already seen this with "Good Rockin' Tonight", where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like "Caldonia". And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to "Hound Dog". There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin' Tonight” -- "Mr Hound Dog's in Town" [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog's In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase "hound dog", you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips' view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips' telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and "wrote" "Bear Cat". Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of "Hound Dog", and there's not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips' experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips' new record label, Sun. [excerpt of "Bear Cat" by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became -- "Bear Cat" eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else's song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he'd had a solid hit with "Bear Cat", and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn't buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that -- if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people's music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they'd start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys -- Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been -- he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro -- and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips' intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips' assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who'd come in to the studio, she thought she'd found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that's how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music's history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who "discovered" Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker's side. However, even there, it's hard to see from Elvis' original recording -- versions of "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that's what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn't have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn't know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He'd hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they'd all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn't really part of the group. He'd thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things -- he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn't cause any fires when he worked on people's wiring. He didn't have many friends -- and no close friends at all -- and many of those he did have didn't even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source -- the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He'd go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King -- young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky's on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn't someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either -- rather, he was someone who didn't fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn't own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He'd hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing -- and specifically what is known euphemistically as "Southern Gospel", but which really means "white Gospel". And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That's a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it -- and it's also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that's the gospel music we're talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there's another gospel music as well -- "Southern Gospel" or "quartet gospel". That music is -- or at least was at the time we're talking about -- almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren't attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it's performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", the Blackwood Brothers] That's the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that's a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson's version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley's favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them -- but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He'd take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn't have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself -- Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he'd been working with. In their cases it was because they'd been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips' case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else's. He didn't know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin' Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips' book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn't try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty's. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn't impressed... or at least, he *thought* he wasn't impressed. But at the same time... there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn't quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on "That's All Right Mama", a song originally recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over -- he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song "That's All Right Mama" was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson's classic "Black Snake Moan": [excerpt: "Black Snake Moan", Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in "If I Get Lucky". He then came up with the melody for what became "That's All Right", but recorded it with different lyrics as "Mean Ol' Frisco Blues": [excerpt: "Mean Old Frisco Blues", Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to "That's All Right", and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: "Dirt Road Blues", Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded "That's All Right Mama" itself: [excerpt "That's All Right Mama", Arthur Crudup] Crudup's records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That's All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn't follow that template. Elvis' version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music -- it's taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black's slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup's version. It still doesn't, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for "a white man who could sing like a black one", he hadn't found it. Listening now, it's definitely a "rock and roll" record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a "hillbilly" record. [excerpt “That's All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley's singing which is different from most of the country music at the time -- there's a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it's what's needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre -- Bill Monroe's bluegrass song "Blue Moon of Kentucky": [excerpt: Bill Monroe "Blue Moon of Kentucky"] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they'd reworked "That's All Right Mama". There's nothing to these tracks but Elvis' strummed acoustic, Black's clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore's rudimentary electric guitar fills -- and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips' echo. Phillips had a simple system he'd rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he'd done it. The room he was recording in didn't have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn't use just one tape recorder -- though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember -- he used two. He didn't do multitracking like Les Paul -- rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe's bluegrass music -- a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn't be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis' mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn't tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis' race – most people had assumed, since Phillips' show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands -- at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I've seen claims, though I don't know how true they are, that Crudup's total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band's first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley's stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we've mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed -- he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic -- and even when he wasn't, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn't keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it's hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we'll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

Quite often, when we are nervous speaking in front of a group, we do innocent-sounding things to help us be less nervous. However, many of the things that people do to reduce public speaking fear actually CAUSE PUBLIC SPEAKING FEAR. Below are seven of the biggest things that people do to reduce stage fright that is actually more likely to make you nervous. If you feel nervous when you deliver presentations, make sure that you are not doing these things. In fact, if you eliminate these “crutches”, you will likely feel more comfortable right away.1) Writing Your Presentation Word-for-Word2) Designing Your PowerPoint Slideshow First3) Relying on Notes4) Asking for Critiques from Friends/Coworkers5) Practicing Alone6) Videoing Your Presentation and Reviewing It Alone7) Cognitive DissonanceFor full podcast notes, visit 7 Presentation Habits that Cause You to Become a More Nervous Speaker

See Transcription of this recording below pic. The first episode feature two kidney recipients.  Rodney Fleming, a retired Fire Captain from downstate Illinois and his sister Danell Fleming Kreher, an RN (Registered Nurse).  I first met this family in the winter of 2009/10 through a website called Matching Donors.   Transcription PodcastDX Kidney Transplant Episode 1.mp3   Jean Marie [00:00:16] Hello and welcome to podcast DX. This show that brings you interviews with people just like you whose lives were forever changed by a diagnosis.  Lita [00:00:26] I'm Lita,.  Ron [00:00:27] I'm Ron.  Jean Marie [00:00:28] And I'm Jean Marie.  Lita [00:00:29] Collectively we are the hosts of podcast dx. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Always ask the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider for any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment. And before undertaking any new health care regimen never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. I am here with Darnell and Rodney and  they're  siblings. Whom have both received kidney donations at least once.  Lita [00:01:13] Hello and thank you for being on our show.  Danell & Rod [00:01:16] Thank you.  Rod [00:01:16] Glad you're here.  Lita [00:01:18]  How long has it been since your transplants Danell years was a long time Right?.  Danell [00:01:23] Mine was in early April. I will be coming up on 17 years.  Lita [00:01:29] 17 years.  Lita [00:01:30] And you only had the one? Ok,  Danell [00:01:31] And only half one.  Lita [00:01:32] . OK. And Rodney?  Rod [00:01:34] My first transplant was in nineteen ninety four.  Lita [00:01:38] OK.  Rod [00:01:39] Second one was in 2010. Was that right?  Danell [00:01:46] Do you remember Lita?  Lita [00:01:47] No I don't actually. I don't. So 94' was the first one...  Rod [00:01:53]  No. 2014.  Lita [00:01:55] OK. All right. So. What what caused the first one to fail?  Rod [00:01:59] Well it's Darnell and my brother and I and Dad it's all the same "All Ports".  Lita [00:02:06] OK.  Rod [00:02:07] All Ports.  Lita [00:02:08] That's a.   [00:02:08] Yes it's an immune problem. Your body attacks your kidney.  Lita [00:02:13] OK.  Rod [00:02:13] Like some people  have a problem with that their body attacking their heart. Lita [00:02:17] Sure.  Rod [00:02:17] Our is our kidney.  Lita [00:02:19] OK so. Is there any new stem cell therapy or anything that can help you, like,  alleviate this so that your kidneys are....  Rod [00:02:29] Well I wouldn't work on us anyway. You might get to work on somebody whose kidney isn't already shot.  Lita [00:02:37] OK. OK  Rod [00:02:38] But there's no bringing ours back.  Lita [00:02:40] OK.  Danell [00:02:41] Yeah, But I don't know about the, like the stem cell. I don't know. That's a good question.  Lita [00:02:47] I'm just.  Danell [00:02:48] Doing research into that to see, I mean you know they're using it for a lot of things now.  Lita [00:02:53] Right.  Rod [00:02:53] Well the stem cell research now I think is mainly trying to grow.  Lita [00:02:58] New ones?  Rod [00:02:59] New ones,.  Danell [00:02:59] Yeah.  Rod [00:03:00] But you know you can't you can't. Bring a rock back. Lita [00:03:03] No. But I'm just concerned that from, you know, like the first one that you got. Failed because your body is still attacked it. Right? The All Ports attacked it?  Rod [00:03:11] Essentially. Well I'm not so sure it was that so much as just transplanted kidneys don't last forever.  Lita [00:03:21] OK.  Danell [00:03:22] I got like a, 10 year,.  Lita [00:03:24] Warranty?  Rod [00:03:24] well,.  Danell [00:03:25] Well for that's the average,.  Rod [00:03:27] For average. Correct. And mine lasted ten years.  Lita [00:03:30] OK.  Danell [00:03:30] Almost to the month.  Rod [00:03:32] Yeah.  Lita [00:03:32] And Danell, yours has been 17 years?  Danell [00:03:35] Yes I've been 17.  Lita [00:03:37] Where did you get the deluxe model?  Danell [00:03:38] I think I might have! (laughter)  Rod [00:03:39] Well I think hers was a better match than mine was mine was. Just a mediocre match hers and my brothers are both have pretty good matches.  Lita [00:03:48] OK.  Danell [00:03:48] Yeah they told me that mine was as good of a match as that one my kids had given it to me, so.  Lita [00:03:53] OK. OK.  Lita [00:03:54] So yes, so that that's probably important too.  Danell [00:03:58] Yeah.  Lita [00:03:59] And the the last one that you got from me that one also failed.  Rod [00:04:05] Yeah.   [00:04:05] So now. Youre back on Dialysis?  Rod [00:04:07] Yeah, That one didn't last very long at all. I think with all the antibodies that I had from the first one it makes it more difficult to match the second one. And also Barnes did not put me on prednisone the second time around which I think had a lot to do with killing it.  Lita [00:04:28] Wow.! They didn't.?  Rod [00:04:30] No, they don't believe in prednisone,.  Danell [00:04:32] They don't do it, So my brother, that had his out in Idaho which has just been about five years for him. It's never never done the prednisone thing..  Lita [00:04:41] Hmmm, Well I know Gina just had her liver and she was on prednisone  for probably 60 days.  Danell [00:04:49] Really?  Rod [00:04:49] Well I was on when they put my first one in I was on massive doses of prednisone but eventually got me down,.  Lita [00:04:57] weaned you down.  Rod [00:04:57] To a maintenance dose. And I had that the whole time I had my first kidney.  Lita [00:05:03] I don't know if Gina's taking it still or not but I know in the beginning she took.  Danell [00:05:06] . Yeah.  Lita [00:05:07] A lot.  Danell [00:05:07] And they might have with Scott too (Scott is their brother in Idaho). But I know that really we can back from the long term use,  Rod [00:05:12] When I got the second kidney, of course they didn't put me on prednisone. And after a few months it started dying off. While, while it was deteriorating, I was put on prednisone for a totally nother reason. Lita [00:05:31] . OK.  Rod [00:05:33] And it almost stopped the deterioration of the kidney. But at that point I was about 90 percent shot already.  Lita [00:05:42] OK.  Rod [00:05:43] I am convinced. If they had put me on the prednisone initianally. Your kidney would have lasted me a lot longer.  Lita [00:05:50] Okay.  Rod [00:05:50] Because once I got on the prednisone the deterioration almost stopped.  Lita [00:05:56] But it was too late.  Rod [00:05:57] It was too late. Plus,.  Lita [00:05:59] Did you mention that to them? Like you know...  Rod [00:06:00] Well after is too late.  Lita [00:06:01] No. but I mean,.  Rod [00:06:01] But if I  didn't realize what was going on.  Lita [00:06:04] Yeah. And I'm just thinking for future people you know like maybe they should change their ways,.  Rod [00:06:07] yeah, well, tell them that, they don't want...  Lita [00:06:10] I know but, I mean, part of, part of education in the medical community I think is feedback from the patients so that they know what works what doesn't work.  Rod [00:06:20] What ended up happening then I had to have heart surgery.  Lita [00:06:26] Oh right,.  Rod [00:06:26] And of course they had to have the MRI's with contrast, which is a big no no for.  Lita [00:06:33] That kills the kidneys,.  Rod [00:06:34] Kidney Patients but at that point they had to do it and that finished the kidney off.  Lita [00:06:40] Sure. ok,  Danell [00:06:41] Did you, You had gone back on dialysis but you were still having some benefits of your kidney.  Rod [00:06:48] Yeah. I was still putting out.  Danell [00:06:50] We are convinced it was because he had gotten on that prednisone while.  Rod [00:06:52] I was still putting out a good bit of urine.  Danell [00:06:57] It lasted whai?  Maybe about a year?  Rod [00:06:58] Maybe yeah,.  Danell [00:06:59] Just before you had to have your heart surgery.  Rod [00:07:01] Yeah. Finished it off.  Danell [00:07:03] Yeah. Even though he had lost a lot of the benefit from your kidney it still you know we continue to have some.  Rod [00:07:09] Oh I was still putting out about eight hundred milliliters a day, which I  wasn't having to watch my fluid anywhere near like I do now.  Lita [00:07:18] OK,  How often do you go for dialysis now?  Rod [00:07:22] Three times a week.  Lita [00:07:24] oh, ok, What. What symptoms made you realize, I know it's a long time ago when you first realize that you had problems but what symptoms were there that made you think I've got a problem with my kidney.  Rod [00:07:38] None. My, our father had kidney failure.  Lita [00:07:43] OK,.  Rod [00:07:43] So in the process of they were trying to fight figure out why I had high blood pressure. I found out my kidney was already 25 percent shot 10 years before. They failed.  Lita [00:08:01] OK.  Rod [00:08:01] Completely.  Lita [00:08:01] So most you most many of these symptoms.  Rod [00:08:03] No. Most people do not realize what's going on until it's too late.  Lita [00:08:10] Hmm, So you're a little like high blood pressure a hidden thing right.  Rod [00:08:12] Your body compensates and people don't realize it's going, a lot of people, when they if they find out they have kidney failure when they're in the hospital. Because they get you get flu like symptoms they get feeling just totally run down. That's when they find out. I knew for 10 years ahead of time it was coming.  Lita [00:08:35] Because of your dad.  Rod [00:08:36] Because my dad.  Danell [00:08:37] Right.  Lita [00:08:37] And when your dad was diagnosed they found out that it was a genetic problem. Correct?  Rod [00:08:44] No.  Danell [00:08:45] Actually they didn't find out because dad was. He was just diagnosed with kidney failure.  Lita [00:08:50] OK.  Danell [00:08:50] They thought it was all brought on by hardening of the arteries.  Lita [00:08:53] OK.  Danell [00:08:53] Then Rodney when they had diagnosed him again just kidney failure. When. When I started showing signs. The doctor we all had the same nephrologists.  Lita [00:09:04] Right,.  Danell [00:09:04] You know he's like... hmmmm?  Lita [00:09:05] yeah yeah.  Danell [00:09:07] So actually I went and got the biopsy that diagnosis with the All Ports.  Lita [00:09:12] OK. And what is all ports Exactly?  Danell [00:09:14] It's a slow. It's an auto immune but it's just basically a slow deterioration of the glomeruli of the kidney, which is just basically the body.  Lita [00:09:22] The filter .  Danell [00:09:23] Yeah,.  Lita [00:09:23] OK.  Danell [00:09:24] Yeah it's a filtering system of the kidney, and there's you know.  Lita [00:09:27] They haven't come up with a cure for that.  Danell [00:09:30] That's one of the things that happens.  Lita [00:09:32] and all of your, You have one brother?  Danell [00:09:36] Mhmm.  Lita [00:09:36] Besides Rodney? and he has it as well.  Danell [00:09:38] Right, He has. Yes.  Lita [00:09:39] And he's had a transplant.  Rod [00:09:40] He's had a transplant.  Danell [00:09:42] He had a living donor transplant.  Rod [00:09:44] He was eleven years younger than me. So. Plus I, it progressed fairly rapidly. For me I went,. I went on dialysis when I was fortytwo. They made it closer to 50.  Lita [00:09:58] OK.  Rod [00:09:59] Our father was 50.  Danell [00:10:01] Yeah.  Lita [00:10:05] So umm, just to let the listening audience know, umm, possible symptoms are decreased urine output. Fluid retention swelling in your legs ankles and feet drowsiness shortness of breath fatigue confusion nausea and in severe cases seizures or coma and chest pressure that's probably from the fluid.  Rod [00:10:31] Well like I said, most..  Lita [00:10:33] You didn't have, you just felt flu ish.  Rod [00:10:35] Most people do not realize that's going on until the last minute.  Lita [00:10:41] OK.ok,.  Rod [00:10:41] They. They get flu like symptoms. They feel like crap and they go into hospital and they. Well your kidneys have quit.  Lita [00:10:49] So then what relief do they have? At that point.  Rod [00:10:52] Emergency dialysis.  Lita [00:10:54] OK. So once you have the dialysis does that take care of the symptoms.  Rod [00:11:01] Largely.  Danell [00:11:03] Which is really kind of what happened with my dad. He just you know. Started getting very ill. I don't remember what symptoms he had. But then at that point they just have. I don't know. you know,They. Checked. His kidney functioning was all and decrease the numbers. Lab numbers were elevated. We actually took him down to. Houston to a hospital down in Houston and that's where they figured out what was going on and basically he was just in kidney failure. So they did emergency dialysis they put a graft in his arm but they can't you can't use that for a while. It has to...  Rod [00:11:46] Emergency dialysis. They put a port in your central vein in your chest and they use that, that's meant to be temporary. They don't like to use them long term. Because too much risk of infection.  Lita [00:12:01] Sure sure. Anything close to the heart is. That what. Well you got your heart eventually?  Rod [00:12:05] No. No. I just. Just another {unable to transcribe}.  Lita [00:12:12] That will be a podcast in the future.(laughter) OK. One thing that we like to discuss with the patients that we're we're interviewing is caregiving in the home. After the procedure and equipment that might have helped you to recover after the procedure. Now as a kidney donor I know that you know, there were some things that assisted me on my recovery but and on the receiving end what. What did you guys do to to help you get over the hump when you got home from the hospital?  Rod [00:12:50] I initially started doing peritoneal dialysis that as most people think of hemodialysis where they directly clean the blood peritoneal, they put a port in my abdomen, you put fluid in your abdomen, it dwells, it draws the poison, the chemicals off and you change the flood periodically. I did that for years.  Lita [00:13:24] oh, Now, Is that when you say the fluid goes in is it into a vein or is it just a cavity?  Rod [00:13:30] It goes into the abdominal cavity and it by osmosis it draws the stuff off. OK. The toxins and the fluid off in your body.  Lita [00:13:41] OK.  Rod [00:13:41] I did that all together eight years.  Lita [00:13:45] OK. And is that the one that you do at home? Rod [00:13:48] That's what I do at home. Yeah.  Lita [00:13:49] So you. From what I remember you hooked yourself up to a machine at night and you just let it run.  Rod [00:13:56] Yes initially the first year and a half for my first transplant I did it manually and hung a bag of dialysate, it ran it into my abdomen, put it in leave it in here about three or four hours drain that bag out. Put another bag again. I do that three or four times a day.  Lita [00:14:18] And this is something that you could handle yourself. They trained you and you didn't have any problem doing this at home.  Rod [00:14:23] Right.  Lita [00:14:24] Because it sounds very.  Danell [00:14:27] It was,.  Lita [00:14:28] Technical. Yeah it sounds scary, It sounds...  Rod [00:14:31] I after the I lost the first transplanted kidney, I end up doing what is called a cycler, where the machine does that for you. But I was on I had to be on that nearly 11 hours every night and course you can't go anywhere until it is done.  Lita [00:14:54] OK.  Rod [00:14:54] Well after six years of that my second transplant, lost the second transplant, I started doing it.  Lita [00:15:03] Sure.  Rod [00:15:03] I never slept well. Now it works better for other people. It didn't, I was tired doing it, all the work that goes with it. All the supplies. It's a constant job. This with hemodialysis I can go to Matt.(?). Go to the dialysis unit three times a week. They run me for three and a half hours. I'm done, done for two days. You don't have to mess with it anymore.  Lita [00:15:31] So it's like an oil change.{laughter}.  Rod [00:15:33] Pretty much yes pretty much.  Danell [00:15:36] But as far as like after the surgery I actually I did very well. I mean I was only forty seven. I was I was active,. {lost audio}  Rod [00:15:48] Are you ready?.  Lita [00:15:48] Yeah go right ahead.  Rod [00:15:50] When you get your transplant it's like you have an immense amount of energy for a good year. After my first transplant I was just Energizer bunny. I was working two jobs, taking care of my kids, and sleep in about five hours a night. God, I had just an immense amount of energy. That's, you start to come back to normal after a while but your body has become so used to having no energy.  Lita [00:16:24] OK.  Rod [00:16:24] Once this happens you just feel great.  Lita [00:16:31] ok.  Rod [00:16:31] you feel, really great.  Danell [00:16:35] I know talking about symptoms before,  It just all comes along so gradually that you don't realize you're feeling bad.  Rod [00:16:45] Yeah.  Danell [00:16:46] And then that you're tired.  Lita [00:16:50] It's draining.  Rod [00:16:51] Well that's it, after your, after your transplant and you feel so great. Then you realize how terrible you were.  Lita [00:16:58] You were before,.  Danell [00:16:59] Right.  Rod [00:16:59] Right.  Danell [00:16:59] And I also noticed things like my hair thickening back up after the transplant my nails getting hard after the transplant. Things that had started deteriorating maybe just over such a long period of time you just didn't notice it. Yeah. Afterwards you know after his first one, and then with mine, as far as recovery at home and action was very easy. I went back to work after five weeks and I'm a surgica nurse. So you know really very active and intense. You know. But we were both healthy. You know going into wealthy going into young and we had so many dialysis patients are on dialysis because they are diabetic.  Lita [00:17:42] OK.  Rod [00:17:43] And so they're fighting they're fighting that complication also. We didn't have that.  Lita [00:17:48] OK. So if someone had diabetes on top of the kidney failure.  Rod [00:17:53] oh yeah,.  Lita [00:17:53] They've got just another hurdle. That they've got to jump over  Danell [00:17:56] Right, right.  Lita [00:17:56] In order to heal.  Danell [00:17:58] Yes. Much more difficult in the healing process,  Rod [00:17:59] About actually .  Rod [00:18:01] About 30 percent of dialysis patients are there because they are diabetic.  Lita [00:18:06] OK. OK.  Rod [00:18:08] I worked for 10 years as a fireman on one kidney. Did great.  Lita [00:18:14] OK well one kidney working well I can tell you does, OK.  Rod [00:18:19]  Oh yeah yeah.  Lita [00:18:22] I've got no complaints  Danell [00:18:25] We're not the only ones getting by with one kidney  Rod [00:18:26] Unless you think you want to be a marathoner I don't think you would notice the difference.  Lita [00:18:30] Yeah I would never do that,.  Rod [00:18:31] It would just be a slower recovery.  Lita [00:18:35] OK.  Rod [00:18:36] Cause You'd wear yourself out. But like I said as a fireman I didn't notice it.  Lita [00:18:42] OK. Are you worried Danell, that you might be up for another one soon?.  Danell [00:18:46] You know I was around 10 years because basically Rodney like I said lost year at 10 years almost to the month. But you know it's 17 now. My last doctor's visit down was down at Barnes, and I've just been doing so well they're like you know which I had been going there just once a year for several years. And they're like that come back for two years now I still get I get my blood drawn every other month and it all gets into Barnes. So they you know they're watching that closely but you know they're like to come back for two years you're doing great. Because I have not once had any concerns about rejection that they're like you know you can put this on.  Rod [00:19:32] Well and the better the better your match the fewer drugs you have to take.  Lita [00:19:37] OK. OK.  Danell [00:19:38] And mine also was I had a cadaver donor and she was a same age I was.  Lita [00:19:48] OK.  Danell [00:19:48] So you know basically I've got you know it's not like I { un-able to transcribe}.  Lita [00:19:53] Yes it grows with you, right. OK. I wanted to discuss a little bit about the the different regions that you can apply for when you're getting a, an Organ, and I know that Rodney your daughter posted an ad on Matching Donors dot com for the second one in order to actually expand your reach when you were looking for a donor.  Rod [00:20:22] Well it is when you get on the list you're waiting for them to find you a donor Matching Donors dot com, dot com as a way for you to find your own donor.  Lita [00:20:35] You're like advertising.  Rod [00:20:36] Essentially. Yeah.  Danell & Rod [00:20:37]  Right. right  Danell [00:20:39] Yeah. We put a, you know, told all about Rod you know his his life as a fireman.  Lita [00:20:47] Yeah actually I remember. I mean you know my memory is pretty crap,  {laughter} but I actually still remember how strongly the emotions hit me when I read your ad.  Danell [00:21:01] Awwe  Lita [00:21:02] That I said "why wouldn't somebody have given this guy one already, for crying out loud. Get him on the phone."  Rod [00:21:10] Well of course we never put this forth before you when you're on the list. You're waiting for someone to die.  Lita [00:21:18] Right.  Rod [00:21:19] It's not a question of. I'll give you mine.  Lita [00:21:23] Right. But the matching donors allows living.  Danell [00:21:27] Right.  Lita [00:21:28] Donors to donate a part of a liver or a whole kidney.  Rod [00:21:32] And of course my daughter was fantastic. She did all of that. I did nothing. She talked to different various people about me. At least two of them hinted around about being compensated which technically is illegal in this country.  Lita [00:21:51] Right. Right.  Rod [00:21:52] So she told them "Forget it". But she found you, or you found me.  Lita [00:21:58] Yeah. I found the ad and I was,  and it was, it was convenient that you were in Illinois. There wasn't a lot of transportation involved. You know I can imagine that some people that are are looking nationwide it might be a little bit more difficult.  Rod [00:22:15] Sure,.  Lita [00:22:15] If you have to commute or whatever. But ours was perfect. How long were you on dialysis the first time before you got to the.  Rod [00:22:25] Before the first transplant I was on dialysis for a year and a half. They found me a cadaver. OK after the first transplant failed I was on dialysis for six years before I got together with you. That one only lasted 10 months. Right now I've been on dialysis about another six years.  Lita [00:22:50] OK. And Danielle how long were you on dialysis before I act.  Danell [00:22:54] Oh I never had to go on for hours. Oh OK. Was that on the transplant list because now they will put you on it before you get on dialysis. Back when Rodney first started you had to actually be on dialysis before they would put you on. Yes. OK. I I think they figured out hey if we can get him going before the dialysis so I put on a list and told that I would have to be on dialysis within a year and actually it was four months.  Rod [00:23:24] She was getting at the point she was getting pretty rundown.  Lita [00:23:28] So it was it was like getting close to where you would.  Rod [00:23:30] Yeah. It was real close.  Danell [00:23:32] There four months is just really even the doctors were like "you were on that list. how long?". Like four months.  Lita [00:23:38] Right.  Danell [00:23:38] I had a rare blood type and I think well some real rare but I was Rh negative. So I think that could have gone either way. Sure it could have kept me on the list longer or.  Lita [00:23:50] If nobody else can take it right.  Danell [00:23:52] . Give me that one kidney that no one else could take. So yes I was blessed in that it was only four months.  Lita [00:24:00] Have there been any dietary changes to either of you since the transplants have you had to do anything,.  Rod [00:24:06] Well once you've had a transplant. No. If you're on dialysis it's extreme.  Lita [00:24:14] As far as sodium right?  Rod [00:24:15] Sodium. The main thing is phosphorous and potassium.  Lita [00:24:20] OK.  Rod [00:24:21] Dialysis does not rate remove phosphorus and it doesn't do a very good job removing potassium.  Lita [00:24:29] OK. Are those good or bad?  Rod [00:24:32] Well they're.... You know.  Danell [00:24:33] They're bad, if they {un-able to translate}.  Lita [00:24:34] Oh OK. So the levels to be high. Right. And your kidney normally takes care of those.  Rod [00:24:39] Correct.  Lita [00:24:39] OK I see.  Rod [00:24:40] The phosphorus level if you've got an excess of phosphorus it settles in your feet and I have neuropathy in my feet because that has destroyed the peripheral nerve endings in my feet. So it's more difficult for me to walk potassium that gets out of whack. It messes up your heart. That can be real serious.  Lita [00:25:08] Sure. But they keep an eye on it.  Rod [00:25:10] And then they keep an eye on it.  Lita [00:25:11] And medication to adjust levels or the.  Rod [00:25:14] . Well that's why take massive amounts of phosphorus binders when I eat the potassium the dialysis will remove it. To some extent but I've got to stay away from my potassium fluids.  Lita [00:25:29] Sounds like you guys have to turn into nutritionists in order to stay healthy as I.  Danell [00:25:36] Basically eat just like you can. We each have one kidney one good working kidney. So I mean you know you have to be intelligent about it it's just as much as you would in it you know hey what do you want in your body. But yeah. That's the great thing.  Lita [00:25:51] Well that's good.  Rod [00:25:52]  Like I can eat whatever I want.  Rod [00:25:54] Oh yeah I know when I had my first transplant I I would not. You do not know you're working on one kidney.  Lita [00:26:05] You mean you don't feel that.  Rod [00:26:07] I don't feel. And you're really no dietary limitations because of it.  Lita [00:26:13] Because the kidney's working well.  Rod [00:26:14] Right.  Lita [00:26:16] Are there any support groups or organizations that have been of assistance for either of you?  Rod [00:26:22] No,.  Danell [00:26:23] That we kind of chose not to. I mean basically that guy right there was our support group.  Rod [00:26:28] That's true.  Lita [00:26:29] Well  luckily you had each other and you kind of get experience. Also with your dad going through it up before.  Danell [00:26:34] We've been through a lot,.  Lita [00:26:35] And you being a nurse I'm sure that helped.  Danell [00:26:36] Yeah. Yeah. There are you know support groups out there. OK. And the hospital would recommend them. Right. I'm sure Barnes and even at one point asked if I would consider you know kind of being a mentor. But that's a you know from central Illinois it's like a two and a half hour drive. So it really wasn't feasible for me to do it.  Lita [00:26:57] Sure.  Danell [00:26:57] but. Yes.  Lita [00:26:59] And how about through dialysis facility do you notice that anybody there that might need you know like encouragement or advice or  Rod [00:27:10] I dont know,.  Lita [00:27:10] Not really advice but support as they're going.  Rod [00:27:12] Oh there probably is I'd like to Danell said, they they have people that you can do that with. I'm not a joiner. {laughter}.  Lita [00:27:19] Okay.  Rod [00:27:19] Leave me alone. {laughter}  Lita [00:27:20] Okay.  How about medical equipment supplies or other tools that you've found particularly helpful when dealing with kidney disease.  Rod [00:27:33] No, other than, Like I said the peritoneal dialysis was a big burden. But I like I. That's why I like prefer the hemodialysis now because I can go to the unit get it done leave it. All I have to do is watch my diet.  Lita [00:27:56] OK.  Rod [00:27:56] And my fluids.  Danell [00:27:57] We'r,e after this second one and that kind of started going downhill. And we're different things that you know at one point he had to use a walker and he got to the cane.  Rod [00:28:09] Well that was. I greatly blame the nephrologist I had at the time I kept asking him why is this happening. And he had no answer or he wouldn't give me one.  Danell [00:28:24] And you're talking about your being so bad.  Rod [00:28:26] Yeah. I was almost to the point of being in a wheelchair.  Lita [00:28:29] OK.  Rod [00:28:30] And when Darnell helped me we get got a neurologist. Twenty seconds he told me what was going on.  Lita [00:28:40] OK.  Rod [00:28:40] So I adjusted my diet and they got considerably better. Oh all right. But I am. I still have a problem walking.  Lita [00:28:49] OK.  Danell [00:28:51] We have a.. He has a shower chair/ stool now that helps him a lot in the shower, because his legs are still weak to a point.  Lita [00:29:01] Wobbly?  Danell [00:29:01] I think I think I {un-able to translate} at one point I brought it back so that I could have it.  Lita [00:29:07] OK.  Danell [00:29:07] . You know just because of you know after this surgery you're just you know you're tired. You have major surgery.  Lita [00:29:13] Sure sure.  I, I know that they also make like almost like support bars that go in the toilet area that can help you get up and down do you need anything like that?.  Rod [00:29:25] Of course I do. I do not. I don't sit in the tub, it's too hard for me to get up.  Lita [00:29:29] OK. You just shower?.  Rod [00:29:30] Stand. So although I do sit on that stool she is talking about in the shower but I don't get down in the tub.  Lita [00:29:38] How about a handheld shower that you can be removed from.  Rod [00:29:41] No.  Lita [00:29:41] Have you ever tried one of those that you attach afterwards?  Danell [00:29:44] I actually have one.  Lita [00:29:45] . Do you. .  Danell [00:29:46] You know there again it's like, I'm not, you know incapacitated in any way but yeah I'll let you know as being a nurse and having worked in nursing homes for you know back years ago. Yeah. Things like that are awesome.  Lita [00:30:02] OK great. Great. Well I want to thank you both for all of that information. You probably wouldn't realize how much it means to people to hear the stories of people that have already gone through it. So let's say someone just gets diagnosed and they don't know what to expect. "God I had a kidney disease. What on earth am I up to next". And this way they can hear the podcast they can hear your stories and they can have a little bit of sense of relief say well these two they've gotten through it pretty well and I can certainly get through it and they gave me a couple of Hints and advice and I know what to look for. And it really is helpful so I really want to thank you and I appreciate you taking the time to do this with us today.  Rod [00:30:51] You're welcome.  Rod [00:30:51] We appreciate everything that you've done.  Lita [00:30:54] Oh well it's been an honor.  Rod [00:30:56] Well I've I felt bad that I lost your kidney as much for you as for me. You did. You made that sacrifice and I wasn't able to keep it.  Lita [00:31:06] what? It was not your fault.  Rod [00:31:08] Well this is true but I still felt bad about it.  Lita [00:31:10] Don't worry about it. It's okay. I am going to cut this off now.  Lita [00:31:15] If you have any questions or comments related to today's show you can contact us at podcast D X at Yahoo dot com through our Web site where you can link to our Facebook page and also see more information as we build our site. Please go to podcast D X dot com.  Ron [00:31:36] And for our listeners you have a moment please give us a five star review on item podcast.    

A shot in the arm, a people going in circles, and a man who keeps getting in the way of his own potential: these are the elements of an important message that will set you on, or back on, the path to your Divinely ordained greatness. The title is: GET READY ‘CAUSE YOU’VE GOT SOMEWHERE TO GO. Listen well and leave a comment. If you can’t get the audio on your device, visit the main podcast page at http://revandersongraves.podomatic.com/ The podcast is on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anderson-graves-podcast/id918990482 ---Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development. Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO); and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD). Subscribe to my personal blog www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com . Email atgravestwo2@aol.com Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves Click here to support this ministry with a donation. Or go to andersontgraves.blogspot.com and click on the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar. Support by check or money order may be mailed to Miles Chapel CME Church P O Box 132 Fairfield, AL 35064 #Awordtothewise,#mileschapelfairfield, exodus, moses,God, Jesus, Israel,peter, destiny,destination,promised,vaccine,shot,immunity,vaccination,preparation,Corinthians,ready, #peoplegetready, #getready

Be still my heart and know, You are God alone Stop thinking so much, And just let go Be still my soul and rest, Humbly I confess In my weakness, Your strength is perfect For You alone are God, There will be no other And You have won my heart, more than any other So I will give it all, ‘Cause You gave it all for me “Bless the Lord,” Oh my soul cries out All that is within me praise “Bless the Lord,” Oh my soul cries out All that is within me praise BE STILL, BETHEL MUSIC

--{ Cult Techniques which Enfeeble, Now Used on the Sheeple: "The Awakening Process can Cause You to Sink, Realizing the Controllers Know All You Think, They're Enabled by Knowing All You Hold Dear, They Created You, All Thought They Steer, Your Pastimes, Conversations, Perturbations, Are the Same as Your Friends, All Your Relations, With Upgraded Morals, You're Sure to Accept Naked Scans and Groping, Pretence to Detect, Rape, Child Molestation, You are Desensitized By Programming Movies Absorbed via Eyes, Embedded, Imprinted within Your Brain, So Entertaining, Yet You Felt No Pain, Externally Informed, You Feel Some Vitality, To Engage by Prompts into Debased Morality" © Alan Watt }-- Government in the Business of Altering Your Behaviour - Total Information Network for Predictable "Proper" Society - Leaders and Tribal Emblems for the Peasantry - Ongoing Revolution, Guided Progression - Psychology of Mass Manipulation - Techniques Used to get Consent of the Governed and Public Acceptance - US Federal Reserve's "Emergency Aid" (Gifts) to International Banks. The REAL Law of the Land, Crown Land - Communitarianism - Farming is "Too Important to be Left to Farmers", Total Control by Agri-Businesses - System Totalitarian in Structure - "Tenant" on Land Titles (Not "Owner") - Common Land - Prohibitions on Gathering Firewood - Old Values Replaced by Values given by the State, Set "Defaults" - Control over Water and Food to Control Life - Nutrient Trading (Taxes) - New School for Social Research group. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Dec. 7, 2010 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)