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Angel Island provides a compelling setting for a modern Ballet. Then, we discover a museum without walls. And, an East Palo Alto poet on her Louisiana Creole roots.
On today's show, we hear from a poet who honors her Louisiana Creole heritage in her new book, a playwright who works with a theatre company that presents plays from women and gender non-conforming artists over 40, and a drag parody of 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.'
A two-time Grammy Award winning American Roots musician and an 8th generation Louisiana Creole performer who leads the Zydeco Experience Band with accordion and vocals as they take their audiences on a multi-cultural tour of the world. The band creates a hypnotic mix of zydeco-roots-reggae-folk-soul-gospel and New Orleans jazz that is carefully crafted to lift spirits and force bodies onto the dance floor. Their zydeco music has been featured in the historic Disney film, The Princess and the Frog in collaboration with legendary songwriter Randy Newman and has been written up in Rolling Stone and Billboard Magazine. Terrance has recorded with Paul Simon, Art Neville, Dennis Quaid, the Meters, Marcia Ball and Dr. John. He toured with Los Lobos, the late Robert Palmer, Dave Matthews Band and even shared the stage with Steve Wonder. Simien has deep Creole roots and continues to redefine his genre and elevate his cultures visibility by touring to more than 40+ countries and performed over 9000 concerts. He created an outreach educational program called Creole for Kidz about the History of Zydeco for K-12 and college students that has helped raise the cultural IQ of 250,000 students, parents, teachers and administrators around the globe.
607. Part 2 of our conversation with Rain Prud'homme-Cranford (Rain C. Goméz) & her friends D. G. Barthe and Andrew Jolivette visit this week. Louisiana Creole Peoplehood is the book they collaborated on. “Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.” Rain works within Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous Studies — literature; ecology; gender, two-spirit, and sexuality; Métis; Louisiana Creole; Red/Black Rhetorics; and critical mixed race. Now available: Liberty in Louisiana: A Comedy. The oldest play about Louisiana, author James Workman wrote it as a celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Now it is back in print for the first time in 220 years. Order your copy today! This week in Louisiana history. January 4, 1830 Louisiana State government moved to Donaldsonville from New Orleans This week in New Orleans history. When the city of New Orleans was struck by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the bakery's ventilation system, an exterior wall, and the roof were damaged. Production of Hubig's pies was halted and did not start again until more than four months later, January 4, 2006, after the neighborhood had clean water, reliable electricity, and sufficient gas pressure. Hubig's pies increased slightly in cost since the storm, and the variety of flavors offered has changed. About 30,000 hand-sized pies are made a day to be delivered on the next day. This year they're adding King Cake during Mardi Gras season. This week in Louisiana. Funky Uptown Krewe Jan. 6, 2025 The Twelfth Night fun continues on the streetcar route with the Funky Uptown Krewe following Phunny Phorty Phellows. This year's theme will be “Studio 504.” funkyuptownkrewe.com Put on your disco best & come out on the route to catch DJ Mannie Fresh! He's been riding with us since 2019 (go DJ, that's our DJ!), the ONLY DJ bringing the beats LIVE FROM INSIDE THE ST CHARLES STREETCAR to the people of NOLA, ready to kick off Carnival season! The Kings of Brass are back again with a Carnivaltastic set to start the night off at Bouree before we board our Soul Streetcar to toss YOU our signature hand-decorated vinyl record throws! Finally, BIG THANKS to Fat Harry's for hosting us for post-ride libations & celebrations! Catch one of our treasured vinyl record throws- pop up anywhere on the route (map below) after 7pm on Monday Jan. 6, 2025! Postcards from Louisiana. Medicare String Band in Natchitoches. Listen on Apple Podcasts. Listen on audible. Listen on Spotify. Listen on TuneIn. Listen on iHeartRadio. The Louisiana Anthology Home Page. Like us on Facebook.
606. Part 1 of Rain Prud'homme-Cranford (Rain C. Goméz) & her friends D. G. Barthe and Andrew Jolivette's visit to our porch this week. Louisiana Creole Peoplehood is the book they collaborated on. “Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.” Rain works within Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous Studies — literature; ecology; gender, two-spirit, and sexuality; Métis; Louisiana Creole; Red/Black Rhetorics; and critical mixed race. Now available: Liberty in Louisiana: A Comedy. The oldest play about Louisiana, author James Workman wrote it as a celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Now it is back in print for the first time in 220 years. Order your copy today! This week in Louisiana history. December 29, 1898. Monument to Public School benefactor John McDonogh dedicated in New Orleans. This week in New Orleans history. 28 December, 1948. Joseph "Ziggy" Modeliste (born December, 28 1948 also known as Zigaboo) is an American drummer best known as a founding member of the funk group The Meters. He also cofounded The Wild Tchoupitoulas and has worked extensively with other musicians, notably Keith Richards, Robert Palmer, and Dr. John. This week in Louisiana. Dick Clark Rockin' New Year's Eve Jackson Square New Orleans, LA Website Every year, Dick Clark Rockin' New Year's Eve production hosts its official Central Time Zone party in New Orleans near the historic JAX Brewery starting at 9 p.m. The show will be coordinated with parties in New York and Los Angeles, and will feature a musical lineup and special guests. The fleur-de-lis drop-off at JAX Brewery will be live-cast. Postcards from Louisiana. Phillip Manuel and the Michael Pellera Trio perform at Snug Harbor. Listen on Apple Podcasts. Listen on audible. Listen on Spotify. Listen on TuneIn. Listen on iHeartRadio. The Louisiana Anthology Home Page. Like us on Facebook.
Clayton Rasche is a first-generation Louisianan who adores his home state. He joins Garrett on this episode of the Forgotten America podcast to share about the incredibly rich culture of Louisiana. The Pelican State has deep French roots which can be seen in everything from the architecture to the political system to the food. We learn a little bit about the differences between Cajun and Creole culture and about the variety of small and large cities to explore. If you enjoy music, soulful food, and nature, you'll love this exploration of Louisiana through Clayton's eyes. Additional Resources Grand Isle, Louisiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Isle,_Louisiana Louisiana State Symbols https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/louisiana/state-nickname/pelican-state Zydeco music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zydeco Buckwheat Zydeco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckwheat_Zydeco Lana Del Rey & her husband: https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a62103404/who-is-lana-del-rey-boyfriend-jeremy-dufrene/ Parishes instead of Counties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parishes_in_Louisiana Cajun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajuns Creole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people Some history and differences between Cajun & Creole culture and meaning: https://www.hnoc.org/publications/first-draft/whats-difference-between-cajun-and-creole-or-there-one Mandeville, Louisiana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandeville,_Louisiana True Detective: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2790174/ Liz's Where Ya At Diner: https://lizswhereyatdiner.com/ Baton Rouge: https://www.visitbatonrouge.com/listing/louisiana-state-capitol/238/ Tiki Bar in New Orleans: https://latitude29nola.com/ Beach Bum Berry's Latitude 29: https://latitude29nola.com/ Follow Clayton on Social Media Instagram @claytonrasche Facebook /claytonrasche/ Garrett Ballengee, Host President & CEO - @gballeng Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy Amanda Kieffer, Executive Producer Vice President of Communications & Strategy - @akieffer13 Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy Nate Phipps, Editor & Producer - @Aviv5753 Follow: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram Support: Donate, Newsletter
601. Part 1 of our conversation with Cherry Levin about her research into Antebellum weddings in Louisiana Creole plantations. She wrote a dissertation at LSU entitled, “Wedding Belles and Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings in Fact, Fiction and Folklore.” “Along with rites of passage marking birth and death, wedding rituals played an important role in ordering social life on antebellum Louisiana plantations, not only for elite white families but also for the enslaved. Autobiographical accounts of plantation weddings written by Louisiana women yield considerable insights on the importance of weddings for Louisiana plantation women before and especially during the Civil War. Moreover, information contained within the Louisiana Writers' Project narratives reveal various types of wedding ritual used to unite the enslaved on Louisiana plantations despite laws and codes that prohibited slave unions. In contrast to these historical accounts, plantation weddings in the fictional imagination reveal that the figure of the bride reflects careful authorial negotiation of racialized and gendered ideologies.” (Levin). “A distinguished graduate of the Association of Bridal Consultants' Professional Development Program, Cherry has planned and coordinated over two hundred weddings throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the Wine Country and Lake Tahoe. She has also planned weddings in San Luis Obispo, Texas and locations throughout southeastern Louisiana from Baton Rouge to New Orleans” (Retrospect Images). Now available: Liberty in Louisiana: A Comedy. The oldest play about Louisiana, author James Workman wrote it as a celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Now it is back in print for the first time in 220 years. Order your copy today! This week in Louisiana history. November 24, 1721. First census of New Orleans taken This week in New Orleans history. November 23, 1955. Mary Loretta Landrieu was born in Arlington, Virginia on November 23, 1955, the daughter of Moon Landrieu and the sister of Mitch Landrieu. She was raised in New Orleans and attended Ursuline Academy. She graduated from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1977. She eventually became a United States Senator. This week in Louisiana. Now Open For 2024 Season! Dark Woods Adventure Park 4343 University Pkwy Natchitoches, LA 71457 Website Adventure awaits at Dark Woods Adventure Park in Natchitoches. This family-friendly outdoor park features a variety of activities and attractions to enjoy, including Lost Treasure Mining Company, Louisiana's only outdoor gem and fossil mining attraction, delicious food, and the new Bear Factory at Dark Woods. With a mini-golf course in development and scheduled opening soon, this park will surely be a hit with visitors of all ages! Additionally, special seasonal events like Happy Easter Hop Along, Dark Woods Haunted Attraction, and Dark Woods Christmas, retail shops, an ice cream shop, and great food make Dark Woods Adventure Park a popular destination for a day of exploration and adventure from March to December. Whether you're looking for a day of fun or a weekend getaway, Dark Woods Adventure Park is sure to have something for everyone! Postcards from Louisiana. Aislinn Kerchaert writes and reads the poem, “Thanksgiving in New Orleans.” Listen on Apple Podcasts. Listen on audible. Listen on Spotify. Listen on TuneIn. Listen on iHeartRadio. The Louisiana Anthology Home Page. Like us on Facebook.
296 - "There was a soldier -- a mere boy --lying with his face to the sky. Around his neck hung a gold chain and locket." Tuck in for the tender, rediscovered work of the most frequently read author of Louisiana Creole.
Salikoko S. MufweneMondes francophones (2023-2024)Collège de FranceAnnée 2023-2024Colloque - Thomas Klingler : La trajectoire du créole de Louisiane vue sous l'angle de l'écologie des languesIntervenant(s)Thomas KlinglerAssociate Professor, Tulane UniversityRésuméNé de contacts entre langues et cultures nord-américaines, caribéennes, africaines et européennes, le créole de Louisiane est le produit par excellence d'hybridation et de syncrétisme. À travers l'examen de quelques traits structuraux et lexicaux de cette langue, tels l'expression de l'aspect progressif en ap(é) et le terme culinaire couche-couche, mets de farine de maïs servi avec du lait, du lait aigre, ou du café, je propose de montrer comment le cadre analytique de l'écologie des langues développé par S. Mufwene permet de mieux comprendre le processus d'hybridation qui a donné lieu à la langue créole de Louisiane ainsi qu'à la culture créole qu'elle véhicule.Thomas KlinglerThomas Klingler est Associate Professor of French and Linguistics à l'université Tulane (La Nouvelle-Orléans). Ses recherches portent sur le français hors de France et les créoles français, en particulier le français et le créole de Louisiane. Il est l'auteur d'une monographie sur la langue créole de la paroisse civile de la Pointe Coupée, en Louisiane, et coauteur du Dictionary of Louisiana Creole (1998) et du Dictionary of Louisiana French: as Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and Native American Communities (2010). Il collabore actuellement avec Albert Valdman et Kevin Rottet sur le Dictionnaire étymologique, historique et comparé du français de Louisiane.
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541. We talk to Audrey Gibson about her book, Tempêtes et Éclairs, a collection of Louisiana French poetry by Adolphe Duhart. "'Duhart, a Louisiana Creole who wrote poetry in French for the first Black daily newspaper in the United States. Duhart, who lived in New Orleans, was also a teacher in the 1850s and fought in the Civil War. All of Duhart's poetry was meant to inspire, elevate, and humanize those for whom he wrote,' explained Dr. Dana Kress, professor of French at Centenary and editor in chief of Les Éditions Tintamarre. 'Some of his poems are about family, and his public had sometimes never seen families like their own celebrated in verse in writing. Others are powerful social commentaries such as the poem about Lincoln's assassination, published on April 25,1865, in New Orleans; these works elicit a powerful emotional response but also stand as a monument to Duhart's courage for daring to speak out publicly in a major Confederate city.'" “'I approached Dr. Kress during my first year at Centenary and asked him for ideas on how to get involved in research,” recalled Gibson. “He told me about Adolphe Duhart, a prolific Afro-Creole writer from New Orleans, whose poetry had never been fully collected into a book. He said that this could be a great project for me to work on'" (Centenary). Les Éditions Tintamarre is not only producing a great collection of lost French language Louisiana literature, the project is training the next generation of scholars who will study that literature. This week in Louisiana history. September 22 1972 Nat'l record for most drunken driving arrests, 43 in 8 hours, by New Orleans police This week in New Orleans history. This week in Louisiana. La Fete Des Vieux Temps 4484 Highway 1 Raceland, LA 70394 Phone: 985-637-2166 Danny Mayet Email: dmayetlsfa3@gmail.com October 6 - 8, 2023 Called the "Festival of Old Times" this event features a celebration of music, dancing, & Cajun food. Called the "Festival of Old Times" this event features a celebration of music, dancing, Cajun food, and arts & crafts show. This long standing event is a local favorite and showcases the true authentic Cajun culture of Lafourche Parish. Postcards from Louisiana. Rug Cutters at the Favela Chic Bar on Frenchmen. Listen on Google Play. Listen on Spotify. Listen on TuneIn. The Louisiana Anthology Home Page. Like us on Facebook.
During her career in television news, Myra created Emmy Award winning special reports and investigations and told stories of true crime. But her love of traditional and cozy mysteries motivated her to write the Sarah Doucette Jean-Louis Mystery series. The stories are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and give a nod to Myra's childhood, growing up in the progressive Berkeley, California with conventional Louisiana Creole parents.The U.C. Berkeley Bancroft library has included Myra's mysteries in their local authors collection. Myra has appeared on Geraldo Rivera's true crime show, “Murder in the Family,” which tells the stories of celebrities who have been victimized by crime. She has also appeared in segments of the TV One crime series, “For My Man,” a reality show about women who commit crimes for the men in their lives.Myra credits Sisters in Crime and its chapters with providing the tools and environment for women to hone their writing skills, and to enter a supportive crime writing community.Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/MyrasCreoleMysteries/Instagram www.instagram.com/myra_jolivetWebsite https://myrajolivet.com/*****************Sisters in Crime was founded in 1986 to promote the ongoing advancement, recognition and professional development of women crime writers. Through advocacy, programming and leadership, SinC empowers and supports all crime writers regardless of genre or place on their career trajectory.www.SistersinCrime.orgInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/sincnational/Twitter: https://twitter.com/SINCnationalFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/sistersincrimeThe SinC Writers' Podcast is produced by Julian Crocamo https://www.juliancrocamo.com/
Stephanie [00:00:16]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to people that have written unique, amazing, and in this case, super fun books about food. I'm here with Judith Chishon, and she is a friend of a friend sister, which is fun to talk with her, too. Susie Mindrum is her sister, who's a good friend of our families and has been so kind to me and my stepmom. So it's fun to talk with you, Judith. She reached out and said, Would you ever want to talk to my sister? She has this funny book called “Romaine Wasn't Built in a Day”.Judith [00:00:53]:Sister in law.Stephanie [00:00:54]:Okay. Sister in law. It's amazing.Judith [00:00:58]:Yeah.Stephanie [00:00:59]:So do we call you? Is it an entomologist? The person who studies the nature of words?Judith [00:01:08]:Yeah. Etymologist no, n otherwise people might think it pertains to bugs.Stephanie [00:01:16]:Yes, that's right. So etymology is the derivative of words.Judith [00:01:22]:Yeah, right.Stephanie [00:01:24]:How did you think of putting this book together? Because why don't you describe it in your own words? Okay.Judith [00:01:31]:A somewhat short answer as to how it came about. I specialized in Old English and Middle English in graduate school, and as a professor, I had the great good fortune to teach history of the language, which, of course, included many discussions about the immense vocabulary of English and where all those words came from. And over the course of many, many years, I had amassed a huge pile of notes about interesting word histories. And then when the Pandemic hit, I put them all together into a book.Stephanie [00:02:17]:Isn't it amazing how many books were spawned by the pandemic?Judith [00:02:22]:Yes, really, it is.Stephanie [00:02:26]:And do you have a personal love of food or why this focus specifically on food words?Judith [00:02:33]:Yeah. Well, that's a good question. Yes. I love food. I am very interested in the history of food. I taught a course once long ago on food and literature, and often even in other courses, talked about the role that literature, that food played in a book. But the first love, I guess, was words. Even as a kid, I mean, all kids love to play with words, rhyming and punning and doing Dr. Susan kinds of things. And if I can indulge in one anecdote that's popping into my head right now about a love of language, even as a kid, I don't know how old I was maybe seven, eight, something like that. We were sitting around the table at my grandmother and grandfather's house, and he was holding forth with an anecdote, the punchline to, which was in Norwegian. And everybody burst out laughing, probably including me, though I didn't understand what he had said. I had a few words of Norwegian, that was it. But it really stands out in my head that a kind of moment of paying attention to the medium, perhaps, rather than the message that it was funny for everybody, maybe because literally what he said, but also because he said it in another language. We call that code switching now, and I wouldn't have articulated the whole business the way I am now, but it was a fun moment of awareness of I'm going to call it the ludic quality of language meaning the playfulness and all the things that we can do with language. Like tell jokes.Stephanie [00:04:39]:Yeah. And the lyricism of it. Right.Judith [00:04:42]:Yes. And I was a dictionary reader even at a young age. I don't know why exactly.Stephanie [00:04:50]:It makes me laugh that you just said that, like we're all dictionary readers. You read the dictionary as a young kid.Judith [00:04:58]:Yeah. I remember looking up words and making marks in the book. And I love the word pugnacious. Who knows why?Stephanie [00:05:09]:Right.Judith [00:05:10]:And naughty words were sometimes in there. Although I admit I was using a very old punk and wagon's dictionary, which did not have very many naughty words. Yeah. I've just always really loved digging around in the dictionary.Stephanie [00:05:28]:Have you by chance read and I think the book is called The Book of Words. It's about the writing of the dictionary from the female perspective.Judith [00:05:39]:Well, I've read a number of books like that. Is it the one by Corey Stamford? Word by word?Stephanie [00:05:48]:Maybe. Oh, I just read it, and I'm sorry that I don't know the name of the author. I will try and find it.Judith [00:05:57]:Okay. I've got it sitting here in this big pile of books.Stephanie [00:06:03]:Yeah. It was basically just this idea of how the dictionary came to be and how they chronicled and cataloged the words. And it was fiction.Judith [00:06:15]:It was fiction.Stephanie [00:06:17]:It was but I think it was based in historical fiction, and it was just something go ahead.Judith [00:06:25]:No, that sounds fantastic.Stephanie [00:06:27]:Yeah. It was just something I had never really thought about. Here's the name of it. It is called lost words. I'm going to find it. Sorry. I just think you would really like it. And it was absolutely very beautifully written. The Dictionary of Lost Words is what it was called. And it was written by a woman named Pip Williams. K. Okay. Pip Williams. And the idea was they sort of chronicled this historical fiction of the creating of the dictionary. But also what was unique about the book was this idea that women had their own language and women of the aristocracy, their language was different than women that were working in the homes or were working in the markets and were lower caste women, as it were. So she became enamored with chronicling and cataloging the words that women use that didn't make it into the original dictionaries.Judith [00:07:35]:Interesting. Well, I definitely want to read it. And she was talking about English, or was she talking worldwide?Stephanie [00:07:43]:It was in England, and it was the Oxford Dictionary compilation.Judith [00:07:49]:Okay, so it's a story about The OED.Stephanie [00:07:51]:Correct.Judith [00:07:53]:Okay. Yes.Stephanie [00:07:54]:I think you'd like it.Judith [00:07:55]:Yeah, I read the Madman story about the OED, but I haven't read this one specifically. Do you know if she has a lot of food words?Stephanie [00:08:06]:There is some, but it's not a lot that I could pick up because I think I would have recalled that. And when we were talking about preparing for this book, you were talking about the funny. We talked about rhubarb in particular because I'm obsessed with rhubarb. What is the origination of the word rhubarb?Judith [00:08:27]:It comes from a Greek word that means, well, the vegetable. But it means barbarous, too. So it's a foreign thing. That word foreign. And barbarous is in there. That's the barb part of rhubarb, which seems to me kind of fun and funny.Stephanie [00:08:47]:Yeah.Judith [00:08:49]:So I'm curious about your obsession with it. Food so often, of course, has emotional associations. And my association with rhubarb is a very positive one. Not only because my husband likes to make rhubarb pie and I love rhubarb pie, but it makes me think of my grandmother and her backyard in Northfield, Minnesota and a big rhubarb patch and the admonition that we should not ever even think about eating those leaves.Stephanie [00:09:26]:Yeah. Because they're poisonous.Judith [00:09:27]:Poisonous. And you'll die. But in spite of that, I mean, that only made it all more thrilling.Stephanie [00:09:34]:I think what I am fascinated by with rhubarb is that it's sort of this ugly looking weed in a lot of respects, and then it's not. If you just pull a stalk and eat it without a ton of sugar, it's not awesome. And then when you cut the leaves off and you boil that down or you cook it in a pastry and you add sugar, you make something completely transformative out of what is, in a lot of sense, zoeed I think that's what appeals to me, yes.Judith [00:10:03]:Well, wow. That is the magic, the transformation, right. That we can eat that stuff, but then it has to be cooked. Yeah. And when I think of rhubarb, I think of recipes that promise this transformation. I just love recipes, though I am not a recipe writer. I mean, I'm certainly not a cookbook writer. So I'm full of admiration for anybody who has written books with lots of recipes in them and all that that entails. But I just love the idea that you can have a list of rules and ingredients that promise transformation and something tasty and wonderful. And I think of it, too, in another way that's maybe kind of odd. I think of recipe cards that I have in my little old recipe card thingy holder, and I think of the handwriting that's on them. So in some cases, it's my mother's very neat handwriting. The Palmer method, that was not long ago. And in other cases, it's my grandmother's handwriting, the one who had rhubarb in the backyard. And hers tended to be shorter. I mean, she wouldn't give well, this doesn't account for the length of the recipe, but she wouldn't give a precise number for the oven setting. She would say hot oven or the precise measurement of, I don't know, flour is just scant. And somehow I liked that, that they were kind of abbreviated because she assumed you knew what to do.Stephanie [00:11:52]:Yeah. That's so funny, because in a lot of the recipes that my grandma left behind when I was writing a cookbook, trying to decipher what scamped was or what simmer, and just thinking about okay, like, a gas oven operates different than an electric oven. And so much of cooking can be intuitive. And I'm pretty good about intuiting, but I try to write it for my sister, who, if you don't say, ten minutes at 425 and test it with a toothpick, and if there's crumbs on there, keep going. She just has no idea. She has no intuition at all when it comes to cooking.Judith [00:12:34]:Yeah, well, I'm a little bit more in that category.Stephanie [00:12:38]:Yeah. And you have to spell it all out when we talk about some of the words in your book. What are some of your three to five favorite food words that you covered?Judith [00:12:50]:Okay, let me think for a minute, because those words change as to which is the favorite. At the moment, I am thinking of the word barbecue because I don't know a bunch of reasons. It comes from the Caribbean Arowakan word that means a frame that has many uses, but one of them is for roasting food. But there's a common theory about what barbecue means, that it comes from the French for barb, a cou, meaning beard to tail, presumably referring to the way you would spit the pig. Not a very pleasant idea.Stephanie [00:13:40]:Yes, you'd spirit from tip to tail.Judith [00:13:42]:Right. But there isn't any evidence for that, whereas there is evidence for this derivation from the Arawakan language. And to me, I just like to remember both. I'm very interested in false etymologies, or if you don't want to call them that, stories about words, because they suggest something interesting, too. I mean, in this case, it's a clever idea. It's based only on sound similarity. Sounds, of course, are incredibly important in trying to figure out the etymology, but that's not enough. And for dictionaries, there has to be written evidence, too. So I like the word barbecue. I like the word zydeco. I've been thinking about that a lot. The music from southern Louisiana. It's the Louisiana Creole pronunciation of lasarico, the French words for beans. The beans. And it apparently comes from a song title written by Clifton Sheny. And the title, or anyway, it's a line in the song, is something like Lazarico, pronounced zydaco son Pasale are not salted. I don't know what that means. I've dug around trying to get translations and explanations, and somebody said it means it's when you're serving just the beans and there's no meat or something.Stephanie [00:15:19]:Yeah, potentially, like a salt pork is missing.Judith [00:15:23]:Yeah. So I think that's fun. Zydeco means beans. That music. And I associate the word, then with the instruments, some of which are stringed instruments. I think of them as green beans.Stephanie [00:15:36]:Then I think about the actual artist named Buckwheat Zydeco, who sings zydeco.Judith [00:15:41]:Okay. I have to look.Stephanie [00:15:43]:Yeah, he's pretty great. He's from Orlando.Judith [00:15:47]:First name?Stephanie [00:15:48]:Yeah. He's just a great musician.Judith [00:15:52]:Okay. Thank you for that. And I like the word marathon because it's a toponym. The race named after a place in Greece where there was a famous marathon. And I like it because it has food hidden in the word. I mean, hidden to us, if we don't know Greek, it means fennel. In Greek, maratho. So it's food connected and toponym. That's interesting. Named after a place. Yeah.Stephanie [00:16:20]:What is a toponym? I've never heard of that term before.Judith [00:16:24]:A word that's named after a place. Okay. And there are also lots of eponyms words named after people, like, say, sandwich, which is a famous one, of course. Sandwich, just to confuse the issue, is also a place. Yes. And there's no evidence, really, that he did what he supposedly did, which was right. Hold a big sandwich, put all the meat and stuff between two pieces of bread, and hold it while he gambled with the other hand. So, in this case, it's a story. It's not the actual etymology. Nevertheless, it's clear that the word goes back to his name, his title. So, yeah, it's a word named after a person. I like words that have food hidden in them, too, like, seersucker, which comes from the Persian. That means milk and sugar.Stephanie [00:17:26]:Okay. And originally were suckers made with milk?Judith [00:17:33]:No, I think it's a pure coincidence that it sounds like sucker. Okay. It's from the Parisian, and I'd have to look up the precise words and pardon my inability to pronounce them, but it's like sugar and sugar. I mean, it's a word that means that means sugar, but in this case, it refers to the look of the material. Those words just got mushed together. Sucker. And the material looks like an alternating pattern of colors and maybe ones that have little bumps up and then the flat one, because Searsucker has those little material.Stephanie [00:18:24]:How long did it take you to research romaine wasn't built in a day, or were these just from the notes, and you had them all handy?Judith [00:18:32]:It's both. I did have notes for virtually all these words, but I checked them all. So it took day and night for a little more than a year, which seems to me pretty fast, but it was like day and night, and there's so much more I wanted to write, but I had a word limit.Stephanie [00:18:52]:Yes. Okay. One other question for you. You mentioned early on that you have taught classes about food literature and food books. Can you share with us, like, three of your favorite pieces of food literature or food books?Judith [00:19:09]:Okay, so this is just off the top of my head. I might have a longer and better answer if I thought about it. But I love The Odyssey for the references to food, much of which is all about being pious and giving food to the gods. They are constantly stopping to have what we would call a barbecue.Stephanie [00:19:35]:Sure.Judith [00:19:35]:It sounds as if they eat nothing but cow meat.Stephanie [00:19:40]:Yeah.Judith [00:19:41]:But it's all about piety and being civilized. And on the other hand, creatures they encounter, we might say people they encounter who don't do this. But somehow, invert the whole process of being host and guest, they are marked then as uncivilized. Like Polyphemus, who eats his guests.Stephanie [00:20:07]:Right.Judith [00:20:10]:And so many of the Greek myths that are just so fantastic about food and their use of food. But also, of course, The Canterbury Tales, because I love Chaucer.Stephanie [00:20:23]:Sure.Judith [00:20:23]:So in The Canterbury Tales, food is part of the original impetus for talking. They are about to set out on a journey, these nine and 20 in a compenia, these pilgrims. And at the end of it, there will be a meal, which is their reward, or it's especially a reward for the person who tells the best tale. So it's a competition and a thing that draws you on. And the thought of eating that makes you talk. Of course, they never do get to that meal. Yeah, that's a different story. What else? Well, I love the food in Tom Jones, that famous scene between him and the woman he's what, maybe for a second, thought to be the son of. And it's famous in its film version, the original film version, where she's eating oysters in seductive way and lots of 20th century literature. Can I think of even one? Salman Rushdie's book, Midnight's Children has fantastic interesting uses of food like pickles. And so that after a while you question, what does it mean to be pickled? Yeah, so many books.Stephanie [00:21:54]:I love it. Well, I never have thought about that book in that way. So I like that you got me to think about that. Your book has had a lot of interest. I was looking just at your reviews on Amazon and people are really loving it. It is. Romaine wasn't built in a day, and it's by Judith Chishon. And I'm impressed. I think it's really a fun book. And I love talking to you and thinking about all the things like COVID was such a weird time for so many of us, but also so prolific in the creative aspects.Judith [00:22:31]:Yes. When you had to be shut off from the world, at least somewhat. Yeah.Stephanie [00:22:38]:We found other things to do with our time. So do you think you have another book in you?Judith [00:22:45]:Yes, I feel like I have a bunch. I have many unfinished books, and I can't even say what's on the horizon. I have to hurry up and decide.Stephanie [00:22:59]:I understand. Well, it's been fun to talk to you. Thanks for spending time with me today. Talking about Romaine wasn't built in a day. It's real sweet.Judith [00:23:08]:Thank you. Thanks, Judith.Stephanie [00:23:10]:We'll talk soon.Judith [00:23:11]:Okay, bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe
Stephanie [00:00:16]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to people that have written unique, amazing, and in this case, super fun books about food. I'm here with Judith Chishon, and she is a friend of a friend sister, which is fun to talk with her, too. Susie Mindrum is her sister, who's a good friend of our families and has been so kind to me and my stepmom. So it's fun to talk with you, Judith. She reached out and said, Would you ever want to talk to my sister? She has this funny book called “Romaine Wasn't Built in a Day”.Judith [00:00:53]:Sister in law.Stephanie [00:00:54]:Okay. Sister in law. It's amazing.Judith [00:00:58]:Yeah.Stephanie [00:00:59]:So do we call you? Is it an entomologist? The person who studies the nature of words?Judith [00:01:08]:Yeah. Etymologist no, n otherwise people might think it pertains to bugs.Stephanie [00:01:16]:Yes, that's right. So etymology is the derivative of words.Judith [00:01:22]:Yeah, right.Stephanie [00:01:24]:How did you think of putting this book together? Because why don't you describe it in your own words? Okay.Judith [00:01:31]:A somewhat short answer as to how it came about. I specialized in Old English and Middle English in graduate school, and as a professor, I had the great good fortune to teach history of the language, which, of course, included many discussions about the immense vocabulary of English and where all those words came from. And over the course of many, many years, I had amassed a huge pile of notes about interesting word histories. And then when the Pandemic hit, I put them all together into a book.Stephanie [00:02:17]:Isn't it amazing how many books were spawned by the pandemic?Judith [00:02:22]:Yes, really, it is.Stephanie [00:02:26]:And do you have a personal love of food or why this focus specifically on food words?Judith [00:02:33]:Yeah. Well, that's a good question. Yes. I love food. I am very interested in the history of food. I taught a course once long ago on food and literature, and often even in other courses, talked about the role that literature, that food played in a book. But the first love, I guess, was words. Even as a kid, I mean, all kids love to play with words, rhyming and punning and doing Dr. Susan kinds of things. And if I can indulge in one anecdote that's popping into my head right now about a love of language, even as a kid, I don't know how old I was maybe seven, eight, something like that. We were sitting around the table at my grandmother and grandfather's house, and he was holding forth with an anecdote, the punchline to, which was in Norwegian. And everybody burst out laughing, probably including me, though I didn't understand what he had said. I had a few words of Norwegian, that was it. But it really stands out in my head that a kind of moment of paying attention to the medium, perhaps, rather than the message that it was funny for everybody, maybe because literally what he said, but also because he said it in another language. We call that code switching now, and I wouldn't have articulated the whole business the way I am now, but it was a fun moment of awareness of I'm going to call it the ludic quality of language meaning the playfulness and all the things that we can do with language. Like tell jokes.Stephanie [00:04:39]:Yeah. And the lyricism of it. Right.Judith [00:04:42]:Yes. And I was a dictionary reader even at a young age. I don't know why exactly.Stephanie [00:04:50]:It makes me laugh that you just said that, like we're all dictionary readers. You read the dictionary as a young kid.Judith [00:04:58]:Yeah. I remember looking up words and making marks in the book. And I love the word pugnacious. Who knows why?Stephanie [00:05:09]:Right.Judith [00:05:10]:And naughty words were sometimes in there. Although I admit I was using a very old punk and wagon's dictionary, which did not have very many naughty words. Yeah. I've just always really loved digging around in the dictionary.Stephanie [00:05:28]:Have you by chance read and I think the book is called The Book of Words. It's about the writing of the dictionary from the female perspective.Judith [00:05:39]:Well, I've read a number of books like that. Is it the one by Corey Stamford? Word by word?Stephanie [00:05:48]:Maybe. Oh, I just read it, and I'm sorry that I don't know the name of the author. I will try and find it.Judith [00:05:57]:Okay. I've got it sitting here in this big pile of books.Stephanie [00:06:03]:Yeah. It was basically just this idea of how the dictionary came to be and how they chronicled and cataloged the words. And it was fiction.Judith [00:06:15]:It was fiction.Stephanie [00:06:17]:It was but I think it was based in historical fiction, and it was just something go ahead.Judith [00:06:25]:No, that sounds fantastic.Stephanie [00:06:27]:Yeah. It was just something I had never really thought about. Here's the name of it. It is called lost words. I'm going to find it. Sorry. I just think you would really like it. And it was absolutely very beautifully written. The Dictionary of Lost Words is what it was called. And it was written by a woman named Pip Williams. K. Okay. Pip Williams. And the idea was they sort of chronicled this historical fiction of the creating of the dictionary. But also what was unique about the book was this idea that women had their own language and women of the aristocracy, their language was different than women that were working in the homes or were working in the markets and were lower caste women, as it were. So she became enamored with chronicling and cataloging the words that women use that didn't make it into the original dictionaries.Judith [00:07:35]:Interesting. Well, I definitely want to read it. And she was talking about English, or was she talking worldwide?Stephanie [00:07:43]:It was in England, and it was the Oxford Dictionary compilation.Judith [00:07:49]:Okay, so it's a story about The OED.Stephanie [00:07:51]:Correct.Judith [00:07:53]:Okay. Yes.Stephanie [00:07:54]:I think you'd like it.Judith [00:07:55]:Yeah, I read the Madman story about the OED, but I haven't read this one specifically. Do you know if she has a lot of food words?Stephanie [00:08:06]:There is some, but it's not a lot that I could pick up because I think I would have recalled that. And when we were talking about preparing for this book, you were talking about the funny. We talked about rhubarb in particular because I'm obsessed with rhubarb. What is the origination of the word rhubarb?Judith [00:08:27]:It comes from a Greek word that means, well, the vegetable. But it means barbarous, too. So it's a foreign thing. That word foreign. And barbarous is in there. That's the barb part of rhubarb, which seems to me kind of fun and funny.Stephanie [00:08:47]:Yeah.Judith [00:08:49]:So I'm curious about your obsession with it. Food so often, of course, has emotional associations. And my association with rhubarb is a very positive one. Not only because my husband likes to make rhubarb pie and I love rhubarb pie, but it makes me think of my grandmother and her backyard in Northfield, Minnesota and a big rhubarb patch and the admonition that we should not ever even think about eating those leaves.Stephanie [00:09:26]:Yeah. Because they're poisonous.Judith [00:09:27]:Poisonous. And you'll die. But in spite of that, I mean, that only made it all more thrilling.Stephanie [00:09:34]:I think what I am fascinated by with rhubarb is that it's sort of this ugly looking weed in a lot of respects, and then it's not. If you just pull a stalk and eat it without a ton of sugar, it's not awesome. And then when you cut the leaves off and you boil that down or you cook it in a pastry and you add sugar, you make something completely transformative out of what is, in a lot of sense, zoeed I think that's what appeals to me, yes.Judith [00:10:03]:Well, wow. That is the magic, the transformation, right. That we can eat that stuff, but then it has to be cooked. Yeah. And when I think of rhubarb, I think of recipes that promise this transformation. I just love recipes, though I am not a recipe writer. I mean, I'm certainly not a cookbook writer. So I'm full of admiration for anybody who has written books with lots of recipes in them and all that that entails. But I just love the idea that you can have a list of rules and ingredients that promise transformation and something tasty and wonderful. And I think of it, too, in another way that's maybe kind of odd. I think of recipe cards that I have in my little old recipe card thingy holder, and I think of the handwriting that's on them. So in some cases, it's my mother's very neat handwriting. The Palmer method, that was not long ago. And in other cases, it's my grandmother's handwriting, the one who had rhubarb in the backyard. And hers tended to be shorter. I mean, she wouldn't give well, this doesn't account for the length of the recipe, but she wouldn't give a precise number for the oven setting. She would say hot oven or the precise measurement of, I don't know, flour is just scant. And somehow I liked that, that they were kind of abbreviated because she assumed you knew what to do.Stephanie [00:11:52]:Yeah. That's so funny, because in a lot of the recipes that my grandma left behind when I was writing a cookbook, trying to decipher what scamped was or what simmer, and just thinking about okay, like, a gas oven operates different than an electric oven. And so much of cooking can be intuitive. And I'm pretty good about intuiting, but I try to write it for my sister, who, if you don't say, ten minutes at 425 and test it with a toothpick, and if there's crumbs on there, keep going. She just has no idea. She has no intuition at all when it comes to cooking.Judith [00:12:34]:Yeah, well, I'm a little bit more in that category.Stephanie [00:12:38]:Yeah. And you have to spell it all out when we talk about some of the words in your book. What are some of your three to five favorite food words that you covered?Judith [00:12:50]:Okay, let me think for a minute, because those words change as to which is the favorite. At the moment, I am thinking of the word barbecue because I don't know a bunch of reasons. It comes from the Caribbean Arowakan word that means a frame that has many uses, but one of them is for roasting food. But there's a common theory about what barbecue means, that it comes from the French for barb, a cou, meaning beard to tail, presumably referring to the way you would spit the pig. Not a very pleasant idea.Stephanie [00:13:40]:Yes, you'd spirit from tip to tail.Judith [00:13:42]:Right. But there isn't any evidence for that, whereas there is evidence for this derivation from the Arawakan language. And to me, I just like to remember both. I'm very interested in false etymologies, or if you don't want to call them that, stories about words, because they suggest something interesting, too. I mean, in this case, it's a clever idea. It's based only on sound similarity. Sounds, of course, are incredibly important in trying to figure out the etymology, but that's not enough. And for dictionaries, there has to be written evidence, too. So I like the word barbecue. I like the word zydeco. I've been thinking about that a lot. The music from southern Louisiana. It's the Louisiana Creole pronunciation of lasarico, the French words for beans. The beans. And it apparently comes from a song title written by Clifton Sheny. And the title, or anyway, it's a line in the song, is something like Lazarico, pronounced zydaco son Pasale are not salted. I don't know what that means. I've dug around trying to get translations and explanations, and somebody said it means it's when you're serving just the beans and there's no meat or something.Stephanie [00:15:19]:Yeah, potentially, like a salt pork is missing.Judith [00:15:23]:Yeah. So I think that's fun. Zydeco means beans. That music. And I associate the word, then with the instruments, some of which are stringed instruments. I think of them as green beans.Stephanie [00:15:36]:Then I think about the actual artist named Buckwheat Zydeco, who sings zydeco.Judith [00:15:41]:Okay. I have to look.Stephanie [00:15:43]:Yeah, he's pretty great. He's from Orlando.Judith [00:15:47]:First name?Stephanie [00:15:48]:Yeah. He's just a great musician.Judith [00:15:52]:Okay. Thank you for that. And I like the word marathon because it's a toponym. The race named after a place in Greece where there was a famous marathon. And I like it because it has food hidden in the word. I mean, hidden to us, if we don't know Greek, it means fennel. In Greek, maratho. So it's food connected and toponym. That's interesting. Named after a place. Yeah.Stephanie [00:16:20]:What is a toponym? I've never heard of that term before.Judith [00:16:24]:A word that's named after a place. Okay. And there are also lots of eponyms words named after people, like, say, sandwich, which is a famous one, of course. Sandwich, just to confuse the issue, is also a place. Yes. And there's no evidence, really, that he did what he supposedly did, which was right. Hold a big sandwich, put all the meat and stuff between two pieces of bread, and hold it while he gambled with the other hand. So, in this case, it's a story. It's not the actual etymology. Nevertheless, it's clear that the word goes back to his name, his title. So, yeah, it's a word named after a person. I like words that have food hidden in them, too, like, seersucker, which comes from the Persian. That means milk and sugar.Stephanie [00:17:26]:Okay. And originally were suckers made with milk?Judith [00:17:33]:No, I think it's a pure coincidence that it sounds like sucker. Okay. It's from the Parisian, and I'd have to look up the precise words and pardon my inability to pronounce them, but it's like sugar and sugar. I mean, it's a word that means that means sugar, but in this case, it refers to the look of the material. Those words just got mushed together. Sucker. And the material looks like an alternating pattern of colors and maybe ones that have little bumps up and then the flat one, because Searsucker has those little material.Stephanie [00:18:24]:How long did it take you to research romaine wasn't built in a day, or were these just from the notes, and you had them all handy?Judith [00:18:32]:It's both. I did have notes for virtually all these words, but I checked them all. So it took day and night for a little more than a year, which seems to me pretty fast, but it was like day and night, and there's so much more I wanted to write, but I had a word limit.Stephanie [00:18:52]:Yes. Okay. One other question for you. You mentioned early on that you have taught classes about food literature and food books. Can you share with us, like, three of your favorite pieces of food literature or food books?Judith [00:19:09]:Okay, so this is just off the top of my head. I might have a longer and better answer if I thought about it. But I love The Odyssey for the references to food, much of which is all about being pious and giving food to the gods. They are constantly stopping to have what we would call a barbecue.Stephanie [00:19:35]:Sure.Judith [00:19:35]:It sounds as if they eat nothing but cow meat.Stephanie [00:19:40]:Yeah.Judith [00:19:41]:But it's all about piety and being civilized. And on the other hand, creatures they encounter, we might say people they encounter who don't do this. But somehow, invert the whole process of being host and guest, they are marked then as uncivilized. Like Polyphemus, who eats his guests.Stephanie [00:20:07]:Right.Judith [00:20:10]:And so many of the Greek myths that are just so fantastic about food and their use of food. But also, of course, The Canterbury Tales, because I love Chaucer.Stephanie [00:20:23]:Sure.Judith [00:20:23]:So in The Canterbury Tales, food is part of the original impetus for talking. They are about to set out on a journey, these nine and 20 in a compenia, these pilgrims. And at the end of it, there will be a meal, which is their reward, or it's especially a reward for the person who tells the best tale. So it's a competition and a thing that draws you on. And the thought of eating that makes you talk. Of course, they never do get to that meal. Yeah, that's a different story. What else? Well, I love the food in Tom Jones, that famous scene between him and the woman he's what, maybe for a second, thought to be the son of. And it's famous in its film version, the original film version, where she's eating oysters in seductive way and lots of 20th century literature. Can I think of even one? Salman Rushdie's book, Midnight's Children has fantastic interesting uses of food like pickles. And so that after a while you question, what does it mean to be pickled? Yeah, so many books.Stephanie [00:21:54]:I love it. Well, I never have thought about that book in that way. So I like that you got me to think about that. Your book has had a lot of interest. I was looking just at your reviews on Amazon and people are really loving it. It is. Romaine wasn't built in a day, and it's by Judith Chishon. And I'm impressed. I think it's really a fun book. And I love talking to you and thinking about all the things like COVID was such a weird time for so many of us, but also so prolific in the creative aspects.Judith [00:22:31]:Yes. When you had to be shut off from the world, at least somewhat. Yeah.Stephanie [00:22:38]:We found other things to do with our time. So do you think you have another book in you?Judith [00:22:45]:Yes, I feel like I have a bunch. I have many unfinished books, and I can't even say what's on the horizon. I have to hurry up and decide.Stephanie [00:22:59]:I understand. Well, it's been fun to talk to you. Thanks for spending time with me today. Talking about Romaine wasn't built in a day. It's real sweet.Judith [00:23:08]:Thank you. Thanks, Judith.Stephanie [00:23:10]:We'll talk soon.Judith [00:23:11]:Okay, bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe
Be Green With Amy - Plant Based Nutrition, Weight Loss, Cooking, Traveling and more!
Learn how to prepare delicious, plant based Creole Gumbo with Sharme Ridley! Hear Sharme's Healing Story and Watch More of Her Recipes Gumbo Recipe Sharme's Bio and Contact Below Watch Full Episode Here
Be Green With Amy - Plant Based Nutrition, Weight Loss, Cooking, Traveling and more!
Overcoming a host of health issues after adopting a plant-based diet, Sharme inspires others to follow a whole food, plant-based (WFPB) lifestyle! Creole recipe demos too! Watch Full Interview! Atomic Habits Hot logic lunchbox Creole Seasoning Available Salt Free Sharme's recipes, contact info and bio below:
The Awakening is an American classic, first published in 1899. The novel's focus is the inner life of Edna Pontellier, a 29 year-old a married woman and mother of two boys, whose husband Léonce is a New Orleans businessman of Louisiana Creole heritage. The book's notoriety derives from Edna's refusal to accept the role that American society of the late 19th century has allocated to her. After the controversy that greeted it on publication, The Awakening sank from view until it was rediscovered by a new generation of readers after the Louisiana State University Press published Chopin's collected works in 1969. Now acclaimed as a feminist classic – it was published in the UK in 1978 by The Women's Press and is now both a Penguin and an Oxford classic, a Canongate Canon, and one of the most popular university set texts in America. We're joined by the Irish American writer Timothy O'Grady and publisher Rachael Kerr to find out why. This episode also finds Andy revelling in Beware of the Bull, a new biography of the incomparable Yorkshire singer-songwriter Jake Thackray (Scratching Shed), while John enjoys Louise Willder's Blurb Your Enthusiasm, the product of her twenty-five years as a copywriter at Penguin. Timings: 04:57 Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder 11:00 Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray by Paul Thompson and John Watterson 18:59 The Awakening by Kate Chopin * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/backlisted
(Airdate 10/27/22) I am a Mexican American with Louisiana Creole heritage, born and raised in Inglewood, California! In 1995, during my sophomore year of high school, I joined a Violence Prevention Program called Peace Colors and was an at-risk youth. I worked as a Program Manager for the City of Los Angeles Gang Reduction Youth Development Department for Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa. Currently, I am an entrepreneur. Not to mention CEO and Founder of The Phoenix Rising Coalition. https://www.rainaforinglewood.com/
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south
Well your News Roundup episode comes a day early this week as I won't be able to record it Thursday, but there's still plenty to report on and a lot happening this weekend and beyond, including things happening tonight (Thursday, July 7), so be sure to listen soon! Also don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Facebook for the show before this month is over so you can be entered into a drawing to win free Discover Dayton Podcast merch! Show transcript: Hello and welcome to the Discover Dayton Podcast, the show that's all about the Gem City's past, present, and future. My name is Arch Grieve and I'm your host, and today is actually Thursday, July 7, 2022, which means that your news roundup is coming a day early this week as I won't be able to get it posted tomorrow. But, there's still plenty that happened last week, including drama unfolding at the Montgomery County Board of Elections, rent that's too damn high, and early voting starting already for fall elections, so be sure to listen for those stories as well as stuff to do this weekend all coming up in just a moment. And now for last week's news: Some partisan drama on the Montgomery County Board of Elections as Republican Jeff Rezabek calls for the resignation of his Democrat counterpart Sarah Greathouse. Rezabek argues that the Board should not have accepted the write-in candidacy of LeRonda Jackson since it was filed after the February deadline set by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Jackson filed suit with the Ohio Supreme Court, who ruled that LaRose improperly imposed the deadline and allowed Jackson's candidacy, which was certified along party lines. Rezabek is now calling for Greathouse's resignation, claiming she betrayed him and the integrity of the Board of Elections. Board Democrats including Greathouse have countered that not accepting Jackson's candidacy would have opened the Board of Elections up to legal liability. Greathouse says the only mistake she made was in not informing her Republican counterpart of her decision. Jackson will be the Democrat on the ballot for the 39th House District this August. Thursday, July 28th, the Montgomery County Treasurer's Office will be at the Northwest Branch Library giving a financial literacy class for anyone interested. The class will focus on the basics of spending money responsibly and banking. The program will be from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. More information can be found at daytonmetrolibrary.org/programs. Rent is going way up across the nation, and unfortunately the Dayton area is no different. Many renters are seeing increases greater than what were specified in their leases, up to 9 or 10%. This continues a trend of rent outpacing salary increases virtually everywhere as we also see the worst inflation numbers in about four decades. Rents nationwide rose about 11% in 2021, and Dayton saw similar numbers. Studio apartment rents rose 20%, and one-bedroom rents rose 12%. According to the Greater Dayton Apartment association, market rents typically go up about 3-4% each year, but increases of 7-8% have been more typical recently. Contributing factors include inflation, supply chain issues, and labor shortages. Some Dayton residents have even reported rent increases up to 78%, usually with only one month's notice. The GDAA also notes lack of affordable rental units as an issue in the area, especially after the tornadoes in 2019 destroyed many such properties, many of which have not yet been rebuilt. The active shooter response training offered by Dayton Police is in high demand lately, the department says. The training is based on the FBI's “Run Hide Fight” model and has been around for several years, but the increase in active shooter incidents has prompted many organizations in the Miami Valley to undergo it. Since Columbine in 1999, police response times to such incidents have gone down significantly, but there are usually still a few crucial minutes where civilians are alone with the shooter where knowing how to respond could save lives. The basic premise is run if you can, hide if you have to, fight as a last resort. Anyone interested in this training can contact Dayton Police at DPD_DLEE@daytonohio.gov. Dayton Police are considering implementing automatic license plate readers in the area, a move that has many concerned. The technology is designed to help officers identify vehicles associated with criminal activity, but critics have long pointed out the invasion of privacy they involve. The cost effectiveness of plate readers has also been called into question. The city is taking public comments until June 13th, and is holding a public hearing on the 20th. You can e-mail your comments to regina.blackshear@daytonohio.gov. And, if you'd like to listen to a deep-dive into police reform efforts in Dayton, be sure to check out the last two episodes on this show where I talk with local activist Julio Mateo about his involvement in police reform for the past several years. The Dayton Public School District will be running their summer meals program through JUly 29th. Children aged 18 and under are eligible to receive breakfast, lunch, and a snack at a variety of locations across the Miami Valley. DPS is sponsoring the program in partnership with the Ohio Department of Education. To find meal sites near you, call the USDA National Hunger Hotline at 866-348-6479 weekdays between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Early voting for the Ohio gubernatorial, house, and senate primaries began yesterday, Wednesday, July 6th. The primary opens completely on August 2nd, but you can cast your vote early in person at various locations in the area. The Montgomery County Board of Elections say they expect a very low turnout for the mostly uncontested races, but that doesn't change the amount of work it'll take to hold the election. Statehouse primaries were originally planned for May of this year, but the Ohio Redistricting Commission failed to redraw district maps that the state Supreme Court agreed with. A federal court ordered that the primaries be held in August with the existing maps, and they be re-drawn in 2024. Some Montgomery County polling places have changed, namely a few churches, so some voters will be getting mail notifying them of their new polling places. Though there are no contested primaries in Montgomery County, it's still worth getting involved and voting whenever possible. Well someone from Dayton will be visiting the White House next week as local Oregon District shooting survivor Dion Green visits President Biden to recognize the passing of the first legislation in 30 years to deal with gun safety. Green's father, Derrick Fudge, was killed in the Oregon District shooting back in 2019, and through the help of donations, Green has traveled since then to communities that are affected by gun violence to help the families who are dealing with trauma in the aftermath of those shootings. You can learn more about the foundation at www.fudgefoundation.org. Montgomery County unveiled a new system recently called the Overdose Surge Alert, which is a text notifcation system that you can opt into by texting your 5 digit zip code to (937) 582-8667 that alerts you whenever there are higher than average numbers of overdoses in the area. So far this year already there have been 133 overdoses in Montgomery County alone. And finally this week Ohio made headlines for all the wrong reasons as a 10-year old rape victim was forced to cross state lines and seek an abortion in Indiana, where it's still legal (for now) for her to do so. The victim was six weeks and three days pregnant, meaning she was three days past when it was legal for her to obtain an abortion. It would also mean that it was still legal for her to obtain an abortion at the time of her victimization. Dewine weighed in on the story recently by calling the situation a “tragedy,” but did not take any responsibility for the fact that he played an outsized role in making it illegal for 10-year-old rape victims to seek an abortion in Ohio. If you'd like to follow a local Dayton organization that is working to make abortion legal again, check out @end40days on Instagram. There, you'll find out about upcoming protests. They also suggest that, since the right to privacy of so many people are being taken away, you may as well call up Governor Dewine and give him all of the details about your periods, so I encourage you to do that as well, and you can reach him at 614-466-3555. All right, that's it for last week's news, we move now to upcoming events, and before we do, here's a quick word from Libby Ballengee, former co-host of the Gem City Podcast about dayton937.com, which is where I go to find all of the events that I tell you about on this show! Copy from Dayton937.com: (Libby Ballengee reading) Hello Discover Dayton fans! Thank you so much for listening to local podcasts, this is your friend Liubby Ballengee, former co-host of the Gem City Podcast. I always love people who are reaching out, supporting community, and looking for ways to support artists, businesses, that are trying to make this city more vibrant. And Discover Dayton Podcast is one of them. Also I've been working on Dayton937.com. It is an online magazine where you can find out all kinds of fun events for kids, young adults, music fans, art lovers, foodies… so we also have a printed version we have been putting around town for the past year. They are bright green. They are free. There's a list of where you can pick those up at dayton937.com. You can also see a digital PDF version of this event guide and it's just a summary of some of the great events that are happening around town. So we hope you are able to go and support these events and businesses and make the most of working and playing in the Miami Valley. Thanks so much everyone! And many thanks to Libby for that message. And now here's what's happening this weekend and beyond: Well tonight at Levitt Pavillion you can see Mike Mains and The Branches perform a free show from 7-9pm. The pop-rock Michigan band has been around for 10 years now and it promises to be a great show. Friday the 8th The Tillers are bringing folk music to the Levitt Pavilion starting at 7 p.m. The Cincinnati folk foursome will be playing their modern storytelling music for a free show that is open to all. Before you see The Tillers though you can stop over at the Yellow Cab Tavern for their Food Truck Rally, which goes from 5-9pm. They'll have at least 10 food trucks joining them, so you won't want to miss it! Also on Friday you can see a performance at Black Box Improv Theater of a show called Low Hanging Fruit. Tickets are just $15 and the show goes from 8-10pm. Also new at Black Box is that they now sell alcohol, so you don't have to bring your own drinks! On Saturday the 9th the Dayton Society of Artists is holding a nude figure drawing session at 9:30 a.m. at the High Street Gallery. The gallery is located at 48 High Street and there is a $5 modeling fee. Also on the 9th, starting at 11 a.m. will be the 2nd annual Dayton Black Pride event at McIntosh Park on Edwin C. Moses. The event is open to the public and will feature food, vendors, and live entertainment. If you're into the Dayton Pro Wrestling scene, there will be a ceremony recognizing the stars of the past, present, and future of the circuit on July 9th at noon in the IUE CWA Hall on Woodman Drive. Food will be available and there will be two live pro wrestling events. The Levitt Pavilion will also have music on Saturday the 9th, when two-time Grammy winner Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience will perform a free show. The Louisiana Creole roots and jazz artist will be performing starting at 7 p.m. After that, you'll have time to make it to Blind Bob's at 10 p.m. to see The Gem City Get Down, Dayton's favorite local hip hop party. The show will feature three artists and costs $5 to get in, with all proceeds going to the Polar Bear Book Swap. The 170th Montgomery County Fair opens on July 10th at 8 a.m. and will be running all week. All your favorite events from years past will be there, including petting zoos, food and vendors, a dog show, circus, and tons more. Admission is $10 and you can see a full schedule of activities on montcofair.com. On July 10th there will be a standing protest for reproductive rights at Bomberger park on Keowee. The plan is to start at noon and fan out from the park, protesting until around 3 p.m. Finally on the 14th the Levitt will host Luke Winslow-King's unique blend of delta blues, folk, and roots rock and roll at 7p.m. As always for the Pavilion, admission is free and open to the public. All right that's it for this week's episode. Many thanks to Johanna Maria Kauflin for researching stories and events for this week's news roundup, and a special thanks as well to all of my Patreon supporters: Dustin Waters, Jennifer Riggsby, Valerie Smith, Pattie Heard, and Randy Brooks. Find out more about becoming a show patron and learn about all of the cool benefits you'll receive by visiting discoverdaytonpodcast.com. Also as a reminder now through the end of July you can be entered into a drawing to win any free merch you'd like from the show's merch store by simply leaving a Facebook or Apple Podcast review for the show, so be sure to do that now! Thanks so much for listening, and stay funky, Dayton.
Kausi 7: Jakso 6 – Madame Delphine LaLaurie, New Orleansissa vaikuttanut nainen, jäi historiaan orjuudessa eläneen palvelusväkensä kiduttamisesta 1830-luvulla. Tapahtumien kulku jäi kuitenkin osittain hämärän peittoon, mutta varmaa on se, että LaLaurien kartanossa huhtikuun kymmenentenä päivänä vuonna 1834 paljastuivat taloon kätketyt salaisuudet.Huomioithan, että podcast ei sovi lapsille tai herkille kuulijoille.www.murhananatomia.fimusiikki: Niko Korteniemialkuperäinen teema: anonyymi muusikkoLähteet:Katy Frances Morlas; La madame et la mademoiselle: Creole Women in Louisiana, 1718-1865; B.A., Louisiana State University, 2003; May 2005https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-savage-mistress-mad-madame-lalaurie-b94ef9019f0ahttps://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-louisiana-slaveowner-who-even-appalled-other-slaveowners/90051/https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031708/http://www.nola.com/lalaurie/archives/fire2.htmlhttps://www.historicmysteries.com/madame-lalaurie-female-serial-killer/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_peoplehttps://64parishes.org/entry/slavery-in-french-colonial-louisianahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Louisiana See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Kate Chopin - The Awakening - Episode 1 - Meet The Author, Discover Local Color And Feminism! I'm Christy Shriver, and we're here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. And I'm Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love lit Podcast. This episode we begin a journey to a very unique American location to discuss a very American author. Kate Chopin, was born in St Louis but her heritage is more associated with Louisiana than with Missouri as she is from an originally American people group, the Louisianan Creole's. Christy, I know, you lived a part of your life in Louisiana, and your dad's family is from Louisiana. As we discuss Kate Chopin and her unusual and ill-received novel The Awakening, I think a great place to start our discussion, especially for those who may not be familiar with American geography, is with the Pelican State itself. What makes Louisiana so unusual than the rest of the United States, and why does that matter when we read a book like The Awakening. Well, there are so many things that people think of when the think of Louisiana- Louisianan distinctive include Mardi Gras, crawfish bowls, jazz music, bayous, The French Quarter of New Orleans and its beignets. The list is cultural distinctives is long. But, just for a general reference, Louisiana is part of the American South. Now, it might seem that the states that constitute the South are kind of all the same- and in some respects that's true. Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, and the rest of them, … after all, they all succeeded from the Union during the Civil War, they all had slaves, they all have had to one degree or another racial tension over the last two hundred years, and, of course, to bring it to modern-day, they all are deeply entrenched in a tradition of American football, barbeque, shot guns, sweet tea, the Bible and a general admiration of good manners that include addressing each other as mr. mrs, yes mam and no sir. Ha! Yes, that IS the South. I remember moving down here and being frustrated that I could never find anywhere that served tea without sugar- and when they say sweet tea down here- I'm talking one step away from maple syrup. I like it!!! People do and feel strongly about it. In fact a lot of people have a lot have strong feelings about this part of the United States. Some love the South; others hate it. It's a part of the United States that is historical, by American standards, although laughably young compared to other parts of the world, and controversial- to this very day. Yes, yet having said that, once you move here, it doesn't take you long to realize that The South is not one cohesive unit. Every state is very different. Florida was colonized by the Spanish- and has strong ties to places such as Cuba to this day. Virginia was the seat of government and is still central to the heart of American politics. The horse-racing people of Kentucky are very different from their cotton-growing neighbors in Mississippi. There are many many cultural distinctives that are both old and deep. Which brings us to the great state of Louisiana- Louisiana, especially South Louisiana, in some ways has more in common with the Caribbean islands than it does with other parts of the United States. My daddy was born in Spring Hill, Louisiana and raised in Bastrop Louisiana which are in North Louisiana- far from the coast but the people of north Louisiana share many commonalities with their Cajun and Creole brothers. I have early memories of magnolia trees, cypress trees, bayous, shrimp gumbo, and, of my Uncle Lanny taking us in the middle of the night out with his hound dogs to go coon hunting- as in racoon hunting. So, for the record, these are things you don't see in other parts of the United States. Indeed, they don't have bayous and gumbo anywhere else- and although they do have racoons in other places and likely hunt and eat them, I don't know. The whole government of Louisiana is different and its visible. They have parishes instead of counties. The law is based on French law, not British law which affects everything. It is predominantly Catholic not Protestant, hence Mardi Gras, which is what they call Carnival in Brazil but which we don't celebrate in other part of the US. But what interests us for this book is the ethnic origins of the people indigenous to the region. The rural part of the state has been dominated by a group we call Cajuns. Cajuns are Roman Catholic French Canadians, or at least their descendents were. They were run out of the Captured French Colony called Acadia in North Eastern Canada- it's actually be termed “the Acadian diaspora”. Acadia was in the maritime provinces up on the Atlantic side, near the US state of Maine. That part of Canada was very British hence the obvious antagonism. Well, The word Acadians kind of morphed into Cajuns over the years. That's one people group. But we also have another distinctively Louisianan people group called the Louisiana Creoles. This group of people ethnically are entirely different group than the Cajuns but also speak French. Our author today, Kate Chopin was a creole, and she wrote about Lousianan Creole people. Garry, before we introduce the Mrs. Chopin, local color and her influencial work, The Awakening, let's learn just a little about these remarkable people. Who are the Creoles of Louisiana? Well, let me preface by saying, as Kate Chopin would be the first to admit, history is always messy- people marry, intermarry, languages get confused and muddled, so when we talk about distinctives, we are talking about generalities, and if you want take to talk about Creole people the first word that must come to mind is multi-cultural. There are creole peoples all over the Caribbean. Haiti is the first country that comes to mind, so we need to be careful as we speak in generalities. But the first generality you will notice of the Louisianan Creole people shows up in the first chapter of Chopin's book, and that is that they also speak the French language, except for the Louisiana Creoles that can mean two different actual languages. Today, and the latest stat, I saw was from May of 2020, 1,281,300 identified French as their native tongue- that would be Colonial French, standard French and the speakers of would include both people groups the Cajuns and the Louisianan Creoles. But what is even more interesting than that is that the language Louisiana Creole is its own distinctive indigenous language, and is not the same as Haitian Creole or Hawaiian Creole or any other form of Creole where you might hear that word. Meaning, Louisianan Creole although having origins in the French language is not French at all but its own distinct language. This is confusing because the Cajuns speak a dialect of French that sounds different than the French from France or Quebec, but it's still French and French speakers can understand what they are saying even if it sounds different than the way they might pronounce things. That's different. Creole is French-based, but has African influences and is literally its own language and French speakers cannot understand it. Today it's an endangered language, only about 10,000 people speak it, but it is still alive. Yeah, that wasn't something I understood as a teenager living in Louisiana. I thought Cajun- Creole all meant Lousianan. Since we lived in North Louisiana, I never met anyone personally who spoke Lousiana Creole. All the Creole's I came into contact, including Mrs. Devereaux, my French teacher spoke traditional French, which is what they do in Chopin's book too, btw. Of course, Cajuns and Creole people have a lot in common in terms of religion and even in taste in cuisine, but where they differ tremendously is in ethnicity and also in social class. The Cajuns are white and from Canada but often rural and historically lower-middle class. The Creole's are not white, but culturally a part of the urban elite, the ruling class. They are the first multi-cultural people group on the American continent and deserve a special status for that reason. Explain that, because that's really interesting. Today, to be multi-cultural is cool, but 100 years ago when ethnic groups did not intermingle, and being a multi-cultural group that was upper class seems like a huge anomaly. Although I will say the word “creole” tips you off to the multi-cultural element. It actually comes from the Portuguese word “crioulo” and the word itself means people who were created. And again, I do want to point out that this is kind of a very big simplification of a couple of hundred years of history, but in short, the criolos were people who were born in the new World- but mostly of mixed heritage. Gentlemen farmers, primarily French and Spanish came over to the new world. A lot of them came by way of the Caribbean after the slave revolt in Haiti. They had relationships and often even second families with local people here. Many were Black slaves, others were native Americans, lots were mulattos who also came from the Caribbean. Unlike mixed raced people from Mississippi or Alabama, Creoles were not slaves. They were free people. They were educated. They spoke French and many rose to high positions of politics, arts and culture. They were the elite, many were slaveholders. Now, I will say, that most chose to speak Colonial French over Louisiana Creole as they got more educated, also over time as we got closer to the Civil War era being mixed race in and of itself got pretty complicated with the black/white caste-system of the South, which is another story in and of itself. And as a result, you had creoles who were identifying as white and others who didn't- Chopin's family were white creoles. But regardless of all that, but in the 1850s and through the life of Chopin, until today, Creoles are a separate people group that identify themselves as such. They are a proud group of people who worship together, connect socially together, and often build communities around each other. They have societal behaviors and customs that set them apart, and we learn by looking at life through Edna Pontellier's eyes, have a culture that can difficult for an outsider to penetrate, if you marry an insider. And so enters, Mrs. Kate Chopin, born in 1851 to a mother who was Creole and a father who was a Irish, both Catholic. She was not born in Louisisana, but in the great midwestern city of St. Louis. St Louis, at the time had a rather large Creole population by virtue of being a city on the Mississippi river- which runs from New Orleans miles north. Her mom's family was old, distinguished and part of what has been termed the “Creole Aristocracy”. Kate grew up speaking French as a first language, and as many Creole women was raised to be very independent by three generations of women in the household. She received an exceptional education, was interested in what they called “the woman question”. This will give you an indication of how progressive her family actually was, now brace yourself because this is scandalous….on a trip to New Orleans at the ripe age of 18, Kate learned to smoke. Oh my, did she smoke behind the high school gym or in the bathroom stalls? Ha! Who even knows, but we do know that at age 19 she married the love of her life, another Creole, Oscar Chopin. Kate and Oscar were very compatible and the years she was married to him have been described as nothing but really happy by all of her biographers that I'm familiar with. They lived in New Orleans at first and then to Natchitoches parish in the central Louisiana where he owned and operated a general store. They were married for 12 years, and- this small fact wipes me out- they had five sons and two daughters. Ha! That confirms all the Catholic stereotypes of large families. I know right, that's just a lot…and their lives were, by all accounts, going well until…there's always an until… Oscar suffered the fate of a lot of people around the world even to this day, who live in hot climates. He caught malaria, and suddenly died. And there Kate was, alone in the middle of the interior of Louisiana, with this store and all these kids. She ran it herself for over a year, but then decided to do what lots of us would do in that situation…she moved back to the hometown of her childhood, St. Louis so she could be near her mother- I didn't mention it before but her father had died in a terrible railroad accident when she was a young child and her brother had died in the Civil War- so basically all of the men that had meant anything to her at all, had all died. One of Kate's daughters had this to say about that later on when she was an adult talking about her mom, “When I speak of my mother's keen sense of humor and of her habit of looking on the amusing side of everything, I don't want to give the impression of her being joyous, for she was on the contrary rather a sad nature…I think the tragic death of her father early in her life, of her much beloved brothers, the loss of her young husband and her mother, left a stamp of sadness on her which was never lost.” Goodness, that Is a lot of sadness. Well, it is and it took a toll. When she got back to St. Louis, Dr. Kolbenheyer, their obgyn and a family friend talked her into studying some French writers for the sake of mental health, specifically Maupassant and Zola and take up writing. She took that advice ..…so at age 38 a widow with six living children, Chopin began her writing career. A career, sadly that was only going to last five years. It started great, and she was super popular, but then….she wrote a scandalous book and was cancelled, and I mean totally cancelled. Five years after the publication of this candalous book that today we call The Awakening, she had a stroke and died. At the time of her death, Kate Chopin as a writer, was virtually unknown and uncelebrated. What do you mean by cancelled? That sounds like a crazy story for a mommy writer. True, and it is. When she started writing, she was super popular. This kind of reminds me a little of Shirley Jackson, honestly. She wrote short things for magazines for money. What made her work popular, at least in part, was because writing about a subculture of America that people found interesting. Although she was living in St. Louis, her stories were set in Louisiana amongst the Creole people- and people loved it. This movement in American literature where authors focus on a specific region or people group has been called “Local Color”, and her ability to showcase the local color of the Creole people led her to success. Subcultures are so fascinating to me and I'm always amazed at how many different subcultures there are- and I'm not talking about just ethnically. There are endless subcultures on this earth, and most of the time we don't even know what we're looking at. Oh, for sure. I think of guitar players as their own subculture- they speak their own language, have their own passions, I wouldn't be surprised if they have their own foods. HA! Do I sense a bit of mockery? But you are right, we do have a little bit of a subculture, but if you think guitarists are a subculture, what do you think of my cousin Sherry who is neck deep into Harley Davidson culture and goes to Sturgis, South Dakota every year. True, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who participate in that subculture all over the world And of course, we're talking about hobbies which are not the same as actual ethnic subcultures in any location, understanding and just seeing behind the fence of someone else' experience is the fun. The idea of living life vicariously through the stories, so to speak, of people who are so radically differently is one of the things I most love about reading. In the real sense of the term “local color” though, this was an actual movement after the Civil War. Authors were using settings from different parts of the country and it made the writing feel romantic for people unfamiliar with the setting while actually being fundamentally realistic- I know that's a paradox, but if you think about it it makes sense. They were works that could only be written from inside the culture by someone who was a part of it- that's what made them realistic. Chopin was considered a local color author because she was Creole writing about the world of Louisiana Creoles. Well, apparently it was well received. She got stories printed first in regional publications but then in national publications. “The Story of an Hour” which was the only story I had ever read of hers, and I didn't know this, was published in Vogue in 1894. Very impressive, Houghton Mifflin, the publisher that to this day publishes quite a bit of high school literature textbooks actually published a collection of her stories, titled it Bayou Folk. So, just in the title, you can tell they are playing up her Louisiana connection. And that book was a success. Chopin, who kept notes on how well all of her works were doing, wrote that she had seen 100 press notices about the book. It was written up in both The Atlantic and the New York Times. People loved how she used local dialects. They found the stories and I quote “charning and pleasant.” She was even asked to write an essay on writing for the literary journal Critic- which I found really insightful. Well, of course, all of these things sound like a woman bound for monetary and critical success- stardom of her day. And so her trajectory kept ascending. She was published in the Saturday Evening Post. Of course that was a big deal. Everything was moving in the right direction….until.. The Awakening. The Awakening was too much and she crashed immediately and hard. You know, when I read these reviews from 1899, it's so interesting how strongly they reacted. Let me read a few, her local paper, The St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat wrote this, “It is not a healthy book….if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson the fact is not apparent.” The Chicago Times Herald wrote, “It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction. This is not a pleasant story.” Here's another one, “its disagreeable glimpses of sensuality are repellent.” She was not prepared for this. She did not expect it. She was expecting people to see it as the American version of some of the things she had been reading in French that had been published in France. Her treatment of sexuality is what really got her, and maybe if her protagonist had been male she could have gotten away with it. Actually, I'm pretty sure, she would have gotten away with it, there are other authors who did. But discussing how women felt about sexuality- and let me say- in case you haven't read the book- this is not a harlequin romance. She doesn't talk about hot steamy passion in descriptive tones. She is very polished and shows deference to the WAY things were expressed in her day. The problem was not in how she was treating sexual content- the problem was that she WAS discussing how women felt about sexuality and this just was too realistic. People weren't and maybe we still aren't, ready to be vulnerable about how we feel about intimacy. You know, I tell students all the time that in American politics, sexual issues have always been used as a wedge issue to define people's position as good or bad people. That has not changed in the American political scene in 200 years and is something our European and Asian friends have mocked us about for just as long. We are a people committed to moralizing, even to this day. For a long time, it was cloaked in religion, but now, hyperbolic moralizing, although not done in the name of a faith is still a favorite American pastime. Well, honestly, I guess that's also been true for the arts as well. But honestly, greatr art is never moralizing. And Chopin knew that. Furthermore, if anyone had read that essay Chopin printed about her writing that I referenced, they would have seen that Chopin, by design, does NOT moralize in hers. She does not condemn or judge. She has no interest in telling us how we should or shouldn't behave. She sees the role of the artist, and clearly stated as much, and the role of fiction as in demonstrating how we genuinely ARE as human beings. It is a role of showcasing the human experience. It is meant to help us understand ourselves. What she does in her writing by using a culture that is unfamiliar to us, is allow us a safer space from which we can pull back the veil that IS our experience, so we can see ourselves. Let me quote her from that essay and here she's talking about the Creole people of Louisiana, “Among these people are to be found an earnestness in the acquirement and dissemination of book-learning, a clinging to the past and conventional standards, an almost Creolean sensitiveness to criticism and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for, the value of the highest art forms. There is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana, nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it.” Well, regardless of how she wanted to come across, apparently, she struck a nerve people didn't want struck. The Awakening unsettled America. The book was published in April of 1899, by August critics were destroying it, and again I'll use the reviewers words, it had been deemed “morbid and unwholesome” and was reproached on a national stage. She was scorned publicly. When she submitted a new short story to the Atlantic “Ti Demon” in November after the publication of The Awakening it was returned and rejected. Her own publisher, the one who had published the controversial book decided to “shorten is list of authors”- and they dropped her. Of course to be fair, they claimed that decision had nothing to do with the problems with the reception of The Awakening. I'm sure that it didn't. Chopin was obviously crushed. She would only write seven more stories over the next five years. In 1904 when she died of a stroke, she was basically a forgotten writer. And likely would have remained forgotten until, ironically the French discovered the novel in 1952. A writer by the name of Cyrille Arnavon translated it into French under the title Edna with a 22 page introduction essay called it a neglected masterpiece. What he liked about it had nothing to do with “local color” or creole people or anything Americana. He saw in it what we see in it today- psychological analysis. So fascinating, this is the 1950s; this is exactly the time period psychology is shifting from Freudian interpretations of Chopin's' day into behaviorism and eventually to humanistic psychology. Why does this matter? With Freud everything is secret and we're ruled by unseen forces we don't understand without psychoanalysis. Chopin's book came out when this was how we were looking at the world. After him came Skinner's behaviorism which said everything can be reduced to rewards and punishments. Humanistic psychology is this third way of looking at things. It's extremely empathetic. Names like Karl Rogers were looking at life with the idea that it's just plain difficult to be a human, and we need to understand this complexity. They would like books that are not all black/white thinking or moralistic. This is what's crazy to me about Chopin. She wrote in the days of Freud, but she was so far ahead of her time psychologically; nobody would get her for another 60 years- literally two entire movements later in the field of psychology. Well, when they did get her, they really got her. In 1969 a Norwegian critic Per Seyersted brought her out into the open in a big way. This is what he said, “ Chopin, and I quote “broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman's submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman's urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom.” Finally people were understanding what she was trying to do. That's exactly what she wanted to show- the complexity of being human. Here's another Chopin quote whole talking about the role of a writer, “Thou shalt not preach; “thou shalt not instruct thy neighbor”. Or as her great- grandmother Carleville, who was extremely influencial in her life, used to tell her, Kate's grandmother who raised her was known for saying this “One may know a great deal about people without judging them. God does that.” Well, she was immediately resurrected. Today she is considered one of America's premiere writers. Well, it also didn't hurt her reputation that she was being discovered in Europe at the exact same time, the women's movement was taking off in the United States and finding an unsung feminist writer was very popular. Yeah, I thought she WAS a feminist writer, but you don't see her as that. I really don't, and that's not to say there isn't any feminism in the book, because obviously, it's about life as a woman at the turn of the century. Virginia Wolfe famouslty argued in her essay A Room of One's Own that no one knew what women were thinking and feeling in the 17th century because they weren't writing. Well, you can't say that about Chopin. She was absolutely writing about what women were thinking and feeling, it just took 60 years for the world to allow her to share it. If we want to talk the particulars about The Awakening, which of course we do, we have a female protagonist. I'm not going to call her a hero because I don't find anything heroic about her. But it's very very honest characterization of what women feel, and honestly, perhaps it's what a lot of people feel- both men and women when they live, as we all do, within cultures of high expectations. Isn't writing about standing up to cultural norms and societal expectations kind of cliché? I'm surprised you find it interesting in this situation. Well, it for sure can be. It's what a lot of teenage angst poetry is about. But Chopin's book is a lot more complex than just a denouncement on social expectations of women's roles. In some ways, that's just the setting. This particular woman, Edna, is for sure, unhappyily objectified by a husband. That part is obvious. But, Chopin isn't necessarily moralizing against this or anything else. In the opening encounter between husband and wife, we see the wife being objectified, but we also see that they have worked out some deal. She has a very privileged life. It's not a life between two people who have emotional intimacy, for sure. These two clearly don't. Edna asks if her husband plans on showing up for dinner. He basically sayd, I don't know- I may; I may not. It doesn't appear Edna could care less one way or another and Chopin isn't condemning them; she is observing. This are the deals people are working out in the world. She makes other observations in regard to Edna and her relationship with her children. She loves her children; sort of; but it's certainly not the motherly and passionate devotion most mothers feel towards their kids. It's definitely not the self-denying ideal, we see expressed through a different character in the book. Again, Chopin is not endorsing nor condemning. She's observing. There's no doubt, Chopin herself was progressive. She was raised in a house of dominant women. She herself was a head of household. She was educated. She made money, but she had healthy relationships with the men in her life. She is not a man-hater, that I can tell. She never remarried but there is reason to believe she had at least one other significant male relationship after her husband's death. So, portraying her as a woman who influenced feminism in any kind of deliberate way, I don't think is something that she intended, nor was it something that happened. She was cancelled. I understand that, it's just interesting that today, we think of her first and foremost as a feminist writer in large part because she had sexual content in her books. Although, as I think about the progressive women in the 1890s, what we know about them from history is that most were not really be fans of indiscriminate sex. Oh my, we're getting edgy here, but I have to ask. Why do you say that? You have to understand this is before birth control. Sexual relationships for women meant running the very real risk of generating children which was often a life-risking ordeal. Kate herself had gone through that seven times in twelve years. Women were spending half of their lives pregnant. Many progressive women in this time period were not fighting for the freedom to have sex, they were fighting for the right to NOT have it. They wanted the right to say no. The goal of Self ownership was central to nineteenth century feminism. Woman's rights were about possessing a fully realized human identity. We think of this today in terms of sexual freedom but that's the arrogance of the presence kicking in. Obviously human sexuality is a core part of the human experience and that's likely why it's central to Chopin's story, but there are other aspects of person hood. Women, especially educated ones, were interested in navigating a sense of place in the community and the universe at large- and that involves all kinds of things- hard things like love, connections, maternity. Exactly, and that's why Edna is so complicated. Being a human is difficult. Navigating “the woman's sphere”, to use the expression of the notable Chopin scholar Sandra Gilbert is complicated. And so, we all find ourselves, one way or another in cages- some of our own making, some of the makings of our community, our religion, our culture, our own personalities- whatever it is. And that is the opening of our story. The Awakening starts with a woman in a cage. This is not to say that men do not experience cages or awakenigs- they absolutely do, but Chopin is a woman and will speak from inside the world of women. She will drop a woman named Edna, a middle child Presbyterian English speaking girl from Kentucky, into a French speaking Catholic world of elite Creole women. Edna is flawed, but not awful. She's flawed in the sense that we are all flawed. This woman acts out- in the way that many of us have acted out- often as children, but for some of us, we don't experience this desire for agency until later in life. For Edna it comes at the age of 26 and when it does- she will scandalize her world the way acting out always does. She finds herself in a cage and decides she wants out...but then what…where do you go from there. Let's read how Chopin sets this up in the first paragraph of her story. A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!” He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence. Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust. He walked down the gallery and across the narrow “bridges” which connected the Lebrun cottages one with the other. He had been seated before the door of the main house. The parrot and the mocking-bird were the property of Madame Lebrun, and they had the right to make all the noise they wished. Mr. Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining. Christy, does she give the entire story away in the beginning? She's doing something. She opens with a bird- a parrot. We will talk more about this later, but birds are a big deal in this book. But why a parrot- what do parrots do- well they imitate. They talk. This parrot is in a cage repeating something an English reader may not understand. What does that phrase mean? It means Go away! Go away! For God's sake! The bird is telling everyone to go away, and Mr. Pontellier pretty much ignores the bird and does actually go away. The bird speaks a little Spanish but also a language no one else understands. There's a lot of intentionality here. This book begins with a bird in a cage and the book ends with a bird, but I won't tell you how we find that bird yet. These 19th century writers were always using symbols on purpose. They really do. And if this one is our protagonist- what we can see is that she's beautiful, she's in a cage, and although she can talk, she cannot articulate something that can be heard properly or understood. And so that is our starting point. I think it is. Next episode, we will join Edna and explore this beautiful place, Grand Isle- the site, and if the title of the book hasn't given it away yet, I will, of her Awakening. We will watch Edna awaken- but then, we know from our visit with Camus…that is only step one. Now what. Indeed…now what. Well, thank you for spending time with us today. We hope you have enjoyed meeting Kate Chopin and jumping into the first paragraph of her lost but rediscovered American masterpiece, The Awakening. And if you did, please support us by sharing this episode with a firend, either by text, by twitter, Instagram or email. That's how we grow. Also, if you have a favorite book, you'd like us to discuss, you are always invited to connect with us, again via all the ways Modern world people do. Peace out!
The Creole Nutcracker isn't a kitchen implement, it's a Creole version of the classic Christmas kid's ballet, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker. And it comes from right here in Acadiana. To put this diversity-inspired ballet in current context, let's take a step back and look at where we are with inclusion in general. We tend to think of advocacy as something nonprofits and community groups do. But more entrepreneurs are blending business and social justice in their startups. This isn't corporate social responsibility. It's social entrepreneurship. And it begins with the idea that every community can and should thrive. Grassroots social entrepreneurs work at the neighborhood level and start enterprises that try to solve social problems or address community gaps. For example, "Is there a food desert?" Start a farm stand. "A lack of housing?" Start a community housing development organization. "Do people need a place to gather and create?" How about a village. In 2021, Leigha Porter did just that with Parc Village on Lafayette's Northside. It's a community arts center that hosts talks, art exhibitions, dances classes, music lessons, a podcast studio and a conference room. Leigha calls it an “intentional creative space.” Leigha is a decorated movement artist with a background in ballet, modern and jazz dance. Her work as a dancer and choreographer has appeared on BET and at Disney World. And if you're waiting to see for how this all ties in to The Creole Nutcracker, hang in there for just one more moment. Parc Village is also the home of Heritage Parc, an arts mentorship program which Leigha co-founded with Jazmyn Jones. Leigha and Jazmyn have known each other for a long time. And together they are the minds behind the Creole Nutcracker. BAM! The duo began producing the Louisiana Creole spin on the Christmas ballet in 2018 and it has since become a smash hit annual tradition. In 2021, Jazmyn started Creole Grounds, a mobile coffee service that she runs outside of Parc Village. She's also a well-traveled dancer and has performed with Debbie Allen and Houston's Urban Souls Ballet Company. Fun fact: Jazmyn's first dance teacher was Leigha. Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website itsacadiana.com. And check out recent lunch time conversation about another Acadiana stage spectacular, The Janky Piano Show. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
RockerMike and Rob discuss the Legend of Marie Catherine Laveau was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo, herbalist and midwife who was renowned in New Orleans. Her daughter, Marie Laveau II, also practiced rootwork, conjure, Native American and African spiritualism as well as Louisiana Voodoo. https://ghostcitytours.com/new-orleans/marie-laveau/ https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2012/07/marie-laveau.html https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/article_1dfbca9c-ba4b-11eb-87a4-330e11b1b903.amp.html Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ https://app.hashtag.expert/?fpr=roberto-rossi80 https://dc2bfnt-peyeewd4slt50d2x1b.hop.clickbank.net https://8bcded2xph1jdsb8mqp8th3y0n.hop.clickbank.net/?cbpage=nb Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/getting-lumped-up-with-rob-rossi/id1448899708 https://open.spotify.com/show/00ZWLZaYqQlJji1QSoEz7a https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup #marielaveau #magic #Mardigras#FatTuesday @Mardigras @Newolreans @magic #voodoo --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support
For Video Edition, Please Click and Subscribe Here: https://youtu.be/VBRE3DFxiSQ Boyd Melson was born in Orange County, California while his father Nolan Melson was stationed there serving Active Duty in the United States Army. Boyd's father is Louisiana Creole and his mother Annette Melson is European Jewish having been born in Israel. Boyd's parents met in Germany while they both served on Active Duty in the United States Army. Boyd graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point Commissioned as a Field Artillery Officer. He was the 2004 World Military Boxing Champion and a 2008 U.S. Boxing Team Alternate. During his time on Active Duty, Boye earned his Masters of Business Administration from Touro College. He is an Eagle Scout, and currently serves in the 361st Theater Public Affairs Support Element Reserve Unit out of Fort Totten in Queens, NY. Boyd is an Iraq Combat Veteran, and currently holds the rank of Major in the Army Reserve. Boyd boxed professionally for five years having donated 100% of his boxing purses to Spinal Cord Injury Research. During his time boxing, he earned the World Boxing Council Junior Middleweight United States Championship and was appointed as the World Boxing Council Ambassador of Peace and Ambassador to the Military. Boyd's story was featured on HBO REAL SPORTS with Bryant Gumbel. He has served as a keynote speaker at various galas for people with various physical impairments. He serves on the Advisory Board for Stop Soldier Suicide. Boyd's exploits were covered by Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, The Huffington Post, and ESPN. Boyd was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and he is a member of the Great Black Speakers Bureau. In 2021, Boyd released his first Motivational Speaking Music Album "RAINDROPS: Changing Your Weather" that is available on all major music platforms.
Jonathan Mayers, poet laureate of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shares poetry in English and Kouri-Vini, the endangered Louisiana Creole language. Mayers is involved with efforts to keep Kouri-Vini alive. He also discusses some of the work he has planned during his time as poet laureate, including editing a collection of poems in Kouri-Vini. Lean more about Jonathan, his work, and Kouri-Vini on his website: https://jonathanmayers.com/home.html SUBMIT TO THE OPEN MIC OF THE AIR! www.poetryspokenhere.com/open-mic-of-the-air Visit our website: www.poetryspokenhere.com Like us on facebook: facebook.com/PoetrySpokenHere Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/poseyspokenhere (@poseyspokenhere) Send us an e-mail: poetryspokenhere@gmail.com
Louisiana-native Ja'el Gordon is a historian and genealogist who specializes in interpreting antebellum history, genetic genealogy, and conducting oral history interviews. Always staying true to her Louisiana Creole and Cajun heritage, Ja'el has over fifteen years of experience as a professional researcher with a special focus on the Deep South plantation history. Her expertise also includes repository research, collection curation, exhibition installations, transcribing and indexing, cemetery preservation, database management, and conducting genealogy and history-related workshops. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/genealogy-adventures. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jazz may be on every corner of the French Quarter, but Zydeco music is the soundtrack of south Louisiana's swamplands. With deep roots in culture and history, the unique sound endures over generations. In this week's episode, Nola chats with a Grammy Award winning musician who has dedicated his life to the sounds of Zydeco and keeping those old traditions alive. https://terrancesimmien.com/For 40 years, two- time GRAMMY award winning artist Terrance Simien and 8th generation Louisiana Creole, has been shattering the myths about what his indigenous Zydeco roots music is – and is not. Leading his Zydeco Experience bandmates – long time members Danny Williams, keyboards and Stan Chambers, bass with Lance Ellis, sax; Ian Molinaro – Thompson, drums, and our newest member, Revon Andrews on trombone. Simien has become one of the most respected and accomplished artists in American roots music today. He and his band mates have performed over 9000 concerts, toured millions of miles to over 45 countries during their eventful career. Host: author Nola Nash https://nolanash.com Thanks to Pam Stack - Executive Producer - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.authorsontheair.com Thanks to Roman Sirotin - Video/Audio Producer / Media Coordinator - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.romansirotin.com @Copyrighted by Authors on the Air Global Radio Network LLC.
Jazz may be on every corner of the French Quarter, but Zydeco music is the soundtrack of south Louisiana's swamplands. With deep roots in culture and history, the unique sound endures over generations. In this week's episode, Nola chats with a Grammy Award winning musician who has dedicated his life to the sounds of Zydeco and keeping those old traditions alive. https://terrancesimmien.com/ For 40 years, two- time GRAMMY award winning artist Terrance Simien and 8th generation Louisiana Creole, has been shattering the myths about what his indigenous Zydeco roots music is – and is not. Leading his Zydeco Experience bandmates – long time members Danny Williams, keyboards and Stan Chambers, bass with Lance Ellis, sax; Ian Molinaro – Thompson, drums, and our newest member, Revon Andrews on trombone. Simien has become one of the most respected and accomplished artists in American roots music today. He and his band mates have performed over 9000 concerts, toured millions of miles to over 45 countries during their eventful career. Host: author Nola Nash https://nolanash.com Thanks to Pam Stack - Executive Producer - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.authorsontheair.com/authorsontheair Thanks to Roman Sirotin - Video/Audio Producer / Media Coordinator - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.romansirotin.com @Copyrighted by Authors on the Air Global Radio Network LLC.
Jazz may be on every corner of the French Quarter, but Zydeco music is the soundtrack of south Louisiana's swamplands. With deep roots in culture and history, the unique sound endures over generations. In this week's episode, Nola chats with a Grammy Award winning musician who has dedicated his life to the sounds of Zydeco and keeping those old traditions alive. https://terrancesimmien.com/ For 40 years, two- time GRAMMY award winning artist Terrance Simien and 8th generation Louisiana Creole, has been shattering the myths about what his indigenous Zydeco roots music is – and is not. Leading his Zydeco Experience bandmates – long time members Danny Williams, keyboards and Stan Chambers, bass with Lance Ellis, sax; Ian Molinaro – Thompson, drums, and our newest member, Revon Andrews on trombone. Simien has become one of the most respected and accomplished artists in American roots music today. He and his band mates have performed over 9000 concerts, toured millions of miles to over 45 countries during their eventful career. Host: author Nola Nash https://nolanash.com Thanks to Pam Stack - Executive Producer - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.authorsontheair.com/authorsontheair Thanks to Roman Sirotin - Video/Audio Producer / Media Coordinator - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.romansirotin.com @Copyrighted by Authors on the Air Global Radio Network LLC.
Join hosts Janice and Cerekana of Speak On It! for a conversation with Rodney Sam about the Legacy: Marie Senegal - his African Ancestor. Marie is Rodney Sam's paternal 7th great-grandmother and the oldest known ancestor of African descent. She was born in 1699 in Africa and was in the French colony of Louisiana by the 1720s. She is described as "Marie Senegal" and was emancipated out of slavery in 1769 by Andre Masse, an early French trader, and rancher, in Louisiana with her family. Rodney descends from her daughter, Marie-Flore, who was manumitted over a decade earlier. Rodney Sam is a graduate of Prairie View A&M University. His family has deep Louisiana Creole roots that extend to the beginning of the colony. He is passionate about learning about the history, genealogy, and culture of his Louisiana Creole ancestors.
Southern food is too complex and varied to ever achieve a conclusive origin story. While the influences are many, there are three major cultures to consider—Native American, West African, and European. Different ingredients define the Southern states more so than any other part of the country. There are seven significant cuisines Louisiana Creole, Low Country, Appalachian, Cajun, Gullah, Floribbean and Soul Food. Phil and Barbara work through all of this and the three types of cooking techniques in an extensive episode.
Movement of planets September 2021 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Monologue about movement of planets August 2021 and the void of course moon. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Jonathan Mayers talks about being named the new Poet Laureate, how he creates art in several genres, and his work at saving the Louisiana Creole language.
Planetary movement for June 2021 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
This week we continue our conversation with Amanda Lafleur about Louisiana French. The first part of our conversation focused on the development of the Dictionary of Louisiana French. In this second episode, we are joined by a colleague, Nathan Wendt, who studies Louisiana Creole, and we begin talking about some of the unique words and structures of Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole.
May 2021 Planetary Movement May 2021 Louisiana Creole Black Woman Professional Psychic: Veronica German USA www.veronicagerman.com +1(510)697-0104
Mysteries and mysticism. Sarah Doucette Jean-Louis is a former therapist turned detective. And she's got a body on her doorstep. After author Myra Jolivet reads to us from The Holiday Murder Melange, we talk about the influence of Creole culture in Sarah's life, what Pushed Times Chewing Pepper means (that's the title of the first full length novel in this series), and the courage and tenacity it takes to be a writer. This week's mystery author At six years old Myra was a poet and playwright, holding SRO productions in her Berkeley, California backyard. That led to a 20+ year career in TV news, politics and corporate communications. When her children went off to college she gathered the nerve to begin a series of cozy, paranormal murder mysteries, the Sarah Doucette Jean-Louis mysteries. Sarah’s life is a blend of Myra’s own California and Louisiana Creole cultures that have helped her create a world of mysticism, murder and humor. To learn more about Myra and all her books visit MyraJolivet.com Press play (above) to listen to the show, or read the excerpt below. Remember you can also listen on Apple Podcasts,Stitcher, Android, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, and Spotify. Except from The Holiday Murder Melange Sarah Doucette Jean-Louis removed freshly baked kale chips from her oven and uncorked a bottle of Luc Pirlet Cabernet, as velvety as her new purple Chesterfield sofa. She had planned to sit, sip and read. It was a gorgeous, sunny day in the San Francisco Bay Area, but two interruptions pissed all over her one-person peaceful Saturday afternoon. The first was a call from her mother, a mini-Lena Horne look-alike powerhouse of a woman who stood four feet, ten inches. Every greeting from her sounded like an order. “Good afternoon, Ma-ma.” “Good afternoon, Sarah. I hope you’re well. I want to run something past you.” “I get to have an opinion?” “Don’t sass. I think that this year you should host the family holiday dinner.” Sarah wanted to quiet the inner child begging for family validation, but couldn’t. “Oh, Ma-ma. Me? I’ve wanted to host since I was a kid. Wow, I get to pick the menu and set a gorgeous table, and . . .” Ma-ma cut her off. “That’s right. You’re good at all of that.” “Yes, but why me this time? I know it’s usually the married-with-children and I’m neither.” Creole holiday meals are major events and to be chosen to host is a woman’s rite of passage, like a Creole bat mitzvah. Men are never chosen to host in the culture; they’re served. Sarah had a love-hate relationship with Creole tradition. “Sarah, you’re such a great cook. I just thought it was time.” Sarah remembered something. “Wait a minute. Isn’t Lizette’s kitchen being remodeled?” Her sister, with her slender caramel-colored face, was called the beautiful one. She and her husband, Tom, had the favored home for holiday gatherings. “Well, yes. The work isn’t going so well. It won’t be ready in time.” “Ah, and we all know that Lyle’s wife is a terrible cook. Her food tastes like feet.” Sarah’s brother was a shorter version of their father with chocolate skin, a round face and a thin mustache. He and his wife Tracy had the least favored home for meals. One year they all were left with a touch of diarrhea. “Well, ok. You weren’t first choice. I just tend to think of my married kids for this.” “No problem. I’ll make it festive.” Fifty-plus years in California had only separated Sarah’s mother from her Louisiana Creole accent, not from the cultural biases. Sarah considered herself the misfit daughter born to transplants, Bernice and the late Charles Jean-Louis. She was a curvy size eight with brown locks, brown eyes and brown skin—a near monochrome. She had career success but lacked the MRS status symbol Creoles revered. “Don’t forget to run the menu past me.” “Of course.” “How’s my favorite attorney?” “Manuel is wonderful.”
Hey Spooksters! Today's episode is dedicated to our Patron, Kristy! Kristy has requested we cover Marie Laveau. Marie was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo, herbalist, and midwife who was renowned in New Orleans. We'll walk through her life, career, how she has been portrayed in media, and more! If you'd like to write/send anything to us we have a PO Box! Our address is: 3 Spooked Girls PO Box 5583 JBER, AK 99505-0583 Check out the following link for our socials, REGISTER FOR OUR CHARITY VIRTUAL LIVE SHOW, Patreon, & more https://linktr.ee/3spookedgirls Sources from today's episode - www.3spookedgirls.com/sources Have a personal true crime story or paranormal encounter you'd like to share with us? Send us an email over to 3spookedgirls@gmail.com Thank you to Sarah Hester Ross for our intro music! Thank you to CK for assisting with editing!
Things are about to get groovy as we visit St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 with our special tour guide, "The Witch Queen of New Orleans," Mary Oneida Toups! Follow us as we venture through New Orleans's oldest and most haunted cemetery while socializing with the spirits that dwell there, including "Voodoo Queen" herself, Madam Marie Laveau. We also have a run-in with the Devil of Algiers, so look out!Born in Mississippi in 1928, Mary Oneida married a Cajun Freemason, Albert Toups. In 1968, Mary and Albert moved to New Orleans where Mary's love and passion for witchcraft and the occult blossomed to such heights that she chartered the Religious Order of Witchcraft in 1972, the first coven to be registered as an official religious organization within the state of Louisiana. Mary Toups said, "the dead walk the alleys of St. Louis No. 1 more than the living. And when I pass over, I’ll certainly be one of them.” Her cause of death is a mystery, with historians speculating that she was either poisoned or suffered a brain tumor. While it is believed that Mary and Albert Toups are buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in a deliberately unmarked tomb, this has never been confirmed. The most famous spirit said to roam the cemetery is that of "Voodoo Queen," Madam Marie Laveau. Born in 1801, Marie was a free woman of color with African, Native American, and French decency. Laveau was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo, herbalist and midwife who made a lucrative life for herself in New Orleans. Renowned for her healing and wisdom, many naysayers believe she acquired her knowledge from the help of New Orleans elite, and not always by kind tactics. She died in 1881 at 79 years old, peacefully in her bed. The tomb of Marie Laveau is often marked with the "X"s by hopefuls requesting good fortune from her spirit. If their wishes are met, they are to return to her tomb with an offering in repayment. While this is a long tradition of St. Louis, defacing the tomb today will get you fined (just write the "X"s with your fingers). While St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is one of New Orleans's most popular haunted attractions, NOLA is haunted by more than just ghosts. The "Devil-Man" had Algiers in a panic in 1938. Terrorizing drivers, shouting sexist & racist comments to residents, and storming bars demanding free beer to evade eternal damnation. The Devil-Man was an unstoppable nuisance. When police went to shoot the Devil-Man, their bullets were said to have been returned to them by a summoned set of furry hands. Police apprehended a man who called himself, "Lord Herold." Later identified as Clark Carlton, a black man who had traveled to NOLA all the way from Arkansas. He claimed all of the chaos in Algiers was his doing and that he was sent to New Orleans by the ancient Roman god of the sea, Neptune. Despite admitting to the crime spree, the PD kept getting reports of devil sightings. After that night, the devil made one last appearance in Algiers, as a woman was said to have given birth to a "Baby-Devil." For photos, cast info, updates, and more, follow us on Instagram @thetalegatepodcast and share YOUR encounters to thetalegatepodcast@gmail.com.See you later, Talegaters!Credits:“Cheese Head” & “Paul Morphy” played by Aaron Sherry“Florida Man” & “Bernard de Bore” played by Harrison Foreman“Mary Oneida Toups” played by Kathryn Baker“Ernest Nathan Morial” played by Greg Hernandez“Maria Laveau” played by Zemelis Samuel“Dev” played by Tommy Schwanfelder"Groovy Retro 70's Vibe Police Theme Music" by Studio Rodent"Talegate Theme" by Mat JonesWritten & Edited by Harrison Foreman
407. Part 2 of our interview with Maddie Lafuse about Marie Laveau. Marie Laveau was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo, herbalist and midwife who was renowned in New Orleans. Her daughter, Marie Laveau II, (1827–c. 1862) also practiced rootwork, conjure, Native American and African spiritualism as well as Louisiana Voodoo. This week in Louisiana history. March 6, 1867. General Philip Sheridan arrives in New Orleans to command the Fifth Military District (Louisiana and Texas) during Reconstruction. This week in New Orleans history. Terrytown Opens. March 6, 1960. On July 2, 1959, the Jefferson Parish Council authorized its intention to create new drainage, garbage collection, flood protection, and road lighting for its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Westbank wards which lie between Gretna and Plaquemines Parish. At this time both Timberlake and Terrytown (tentatively called Oakdale) were planned as housing developments. The waterworks district had already been created and the developers agreed to provide interim financing for the service. The area's population stood at 1000 but optimistic leaders expected the number to grow to 40,000 by 1980. This week in Louisiana. The Audubon Golf Trail includes seventeen distinct courses offering unique attractions. Here in Louisiana, golf courses seem a natural part of the landscape. And for good reason: The courses of Louisiana's Audubon Golf Trail — the innovative collection of 17 top-notch courses, covering all five regions of the state — are all members of the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program, which promotes ecologically sound land management and the conservation of natural resources. Established in 2001, the Audubon Golf Trail includes courses designed by Arnold Palmer, David Toms and Pete Dye. The Audubon Golf Trail provides a splendid sample of golf in Louisiana. Be sure to swing by. Postcards from Louisiana. Craig plays trumpet by Café du Monde. Listen on iTunes.Listen on Google Play.Listen on Google Podcasts.Listen on Spotify.Listen on Stitcher.Listen on TuneIn.The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.Like us on Facebook.
406. Maddie Lafuse talks to us about Marie Laveau. Part 1. Marie Laveau was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo, herbalist and midwife who was renowned in New Orleans. Her daughter, Marie Laveau II, (1827–c. 1862) also practiced rootwork, conjure, Native American and African spiritualism as well as Louisiana Voodoo.This week in Louisiana history. February 27, 1827. New Orleans kicks off its first Mardi Gras. A group of masked and costumed students dance through the streets of New Orleans, Louisiana, marking the restart of the city’s famous Mardi Gras celebrations after the Spanish had outlawed them.This week in New Orleans history. Mardi Gras Day was cancelled on February 27, 1979 due to the New Orleans Police strike. Some Orleans Parish parades were rescheduled in Jefferson Parish. This week in Louisiana. Otis House at Fairview-Riverside State Park Learn about the history of 19th century Madisonville entrepreneur while walking the grounds of a magnificent state park.William Theodore Jay was a 19th century entrepreneur who made a fortune in sawmilling. He also had fine taste when it came to real estate, since he sited his home, today called the Otis House, on a particularly beautiful bend in the Tchefuncte River. The surrounding property is known as Fairview-Riverside State Park. Jay had what would become known as the Otis House constructed in 1885, at a time when New Orleans was undergoing a growth spurt and needed lumber for home construction. Living on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Jay created a sawmill empire in the town of Madisonville and built a home that reflects his success. The home featured twelve-foot-high ceilings, wraparound verandas on the first and second floors, and heart pine floors, all of which visitors can see in their restored beauty today.Postcards from Louisiana. Shawan Rice sings on Royal Street.Listen on iTunes.Listen on Google Play.Listen on Google Podcasts.Listen on Spotify.Listen on Stitcher.Listen on TuneIn.The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.Like us on Facebook.
Kelly Clayton talks about her new book Mother of Chaos: Queen of the Nines, family and Louisiana. Kelly Clayton is a writer, poet, playwright, and workshop facilitator. She is a Louisiana Creole with roots 15 generations deep. She returned home after twenty years in New York City spent teaching herself to write. Though she dropped out of high school for creative reasons (four sons), she kept both pantry and bookshelves full by working as a waitress, line cook, publisher's assistant, exotic dancer, and event producer. She is a VONA/Voices, as well as a Hedgebrook Alumnae. She was a recipient of the Hedgebrook Women Authoring Change Award.Kelly’s poetry has been published by, among others: Future Cycle Press, Delacorte Press, China Grove Press, The Dead Mule Society of Southern Literature, and Random House.She was awarded an Artist's Residency with the Acadiana Center for the Arts for the production of her original play, "Dancing With Aurora Borealis.”Kelly develops and teaches bespoke writing workshops in Louisiana schools, both public and private, for the Lafayette Juvenile Detention Center, and to groups of formerly incarcerated adults. She currently lives in Lafayette with her husband, youngest of four sons and their Great Pyrenees, Mabelline.To connect with Kelly: www.kellykclayton.comInformation about ordering signed copies: kellykclayton@gmail.comOfficial Contact: kellykclayton@gmail.comKelly is available for readings via Zoom, as well as in person. Send inquiries to:kellykclayton@gmail.comFor more information visit: That Painted Horse Press
I was invited to participate in UC Berkely's Mixed Month for October 2020. I got to interview Co-Retention Director for Mixed@Berkeley, Saige Simien to talk about her Louisiana Creole heritage and working with Mixed@Berkeley. * * * If you are in need of masks, that are fashionable and have a culture spin then check out my new website... Masks By Mane, a portion of the proceeds are donated to various COVID Relief Funds. Also, if you would like to visit my virtual comic book store, head on over to Gulf Coast Cosmos for all your comic book needs. * * * You can continue the conversation on our private Facebook group after you listen to this episode at http://facebook.com/groups/militantlymixed * * * Produced and Edited by: Sharmane Fury Music by: David Bogan, the One - https://www.dbtheone.com/ * * * Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or leave us a voicemail at 323-545-6001 * * * Militantly Mixed is a fan-sponsored podcast, if you are enjoying the show please consider sponsoring us on Patreon or Paypal today! You can also purchase Militantly Mixed enamel pins in the Masks By Mane Store. Thank you. This is a ManeHustle Media Podcast. Turn your side hustle into your ManeHustle.
I was invited to participate in UC Berkely's Mixed Month for October 2020. I got to interview Co-Retention Director for Mixed@Berkeley, Saige Simien to talk about her Louisiana Creole heritage and working with Mixed@Berkeley. * * * If you are in need of masks, that are fashionable and have a culture spin then check out my new website... Masks By Mane, a portion of the proceeds are donated to various COVID Relief Funds. Also, if you would like to visit my virtual comic book store, head on over to Gulf Coast Cosmos for all your comic book needs. * * * You can continue the conversation on our private Facebook group after you listen to this episode at http://facebook.com/groups/militantlymixed * * * Produced and Edited by: Sharmane Fury Music by: David Bogan, the One - https://www.dbtheone.com/ * * * Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or leave us a voicemail at 323-545-6001 * * * Militantly Mixed is a fan-sponsored podcast, if you are enjoying the show please consider sponsoring us on Patreon or Paypal today! You can also purchase Militantly Mixed enamel pins in the Masks By Mane Store. Thank you. This is a ManeHustle Media Podcast. Turn your side hustle into your ManeHustle.
Quizmasters Lee and Marc are joined by Seth and Erik to ask, suss and answer a general knowledge quiz with topics including Automobiles, Liqueur, Television, American Songwriters, Morse Code, Geography, Greek Mythology, Comic Book Records, Airports, Ethnic Holidays, Florida Wildlife, 90’s Hip Hop, Football, Scientific Terms, Literature, Sauces and more! Round One AUTOMOBILES - What car company faced major problems over a sticking accelerator fault in 2010? LIQUEUR - What liqueur is named for the lesser antilles island from where it’s primary flavor ingredient, the bitter peel of the Lahara citrus, originates? TELEVISION - What two Star Wars alum from the Original Trilogy had not met each other personally until a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory? AMERICAN SONGWRITERS - Born in 1826 in Lawrenceville, PA, what songwriter was known for songs such as “The Glendy Burk’, “Open Thy Lattice Love,” and “Angelina Baker, has been called “The Father of American Music”, and died in New York City at 37. MORSE CODE - What letter is represented by a single dot in Morse code? GEOGRAPHY - The island of Yap is known for its large what? GREEK MYTHOLOGY - In Greek Mythology, Charon (one of the Gods of the Underworld who serves Hades) has what specific role for which he charges a fee of a single coin? Round Two COMIC BOOKS RECORDS - First debuting in May of 1992, what is the longest-running creator-owned superhero comic book series? AIRPORTS - Behind the United States, what is the country with the second-most airports? ETHNIC HOLIDAYS - How many days are in-between the Jewish Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? FLORIDA WILDLIFE - Florida is home to three mustelids: the long-tailed weasel, the river otter, and what other animal? 90’s HIP HOP - In 1998, what rapper had two albums debut at #1 on the Billboard charts? TELEVISION - What TV show, airing from 1984 to 1987, centered around Vietnam War veteran Stringfellow Hawke? Rate My Question FOOTBALL - What current NFL player, who went undrafted in 2017, is known as the "Swiss Army Knife"? SAUCES - Similar to a tartar, what sauce is a staple of Louisiana Creole cuisine? Final Questions What was the first major defeat of the Japanese forces by the Allies in 1943? What state is the first U.S. State to adopt ranked choice voting for a U.S. Presidential election? The star of Orphan Black, Tatiana Maslany, has been cast as what Marvel hero? SCIENTIFIC TERMS - Coined by cartoonist Gary Larson and adopted by The Smithsonian as well as other scientific institutions, what is the term for the distinctive arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tail of a stegosaurus? LITERATURE - What novel written by Oscar Wilde was first published complete in the july 1890 issue of Lippencott's Monthly Magazine? Upcoming LIVE Know Nonsense Trivia Challenges October 1st, 2020 - Know Nonsense Trivia Challenge - Live on Twitch 8pm - 10pm EDT You can find out more information about that and all of our live events online at KnowNonsenseTrivia.com All of the Know Nonsense events are free to play and you can win prizes after every round. Thank you Thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Thank you, Quizdaddies – Dylan, Tommy (The Electric Mud) and Tim (Pat's Garden Service) Thank you, Team Captains – Shaun, Lydia, Gil, David, Rachael, Aaron, Kristen & Fletcher Thank you, Proverbial Lightkeepers – Lisa, Alex, Jenny, Logan, Spencer, Kaitlynn, Manu, Mo, Matthew, Luc, Hank, Justin, Cooper, Elyse, Sarah, Karly, Kristopher, Josh, Lucas and Max Thank you, Rumplesnailtskins – Kevin and Sara, Tiffany, Allison, Paige, We Do Stuff, Mike S. ,Kenya, Jeff, Eric, Steven, Efren, Mike J., Mike C. If you'd like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content, please visit http://theknowno.com and click "Support." Special Guests: Erik and Seth.
Louisiana Creole Black Woman Professional Psychic, Veronica German USA describes the planetary movement for September 2020. Saturn will depart Capricorn December 17, 2020. Saturn will return to Capricorn January 25, 2047
Join us as we chat with Nathan Wendte and Joseph Dunn in Louisiana Creole and French.Nathan Wendte is a doctor in anthropology linguistics at Tulane University and a specialist in the Creole language and identity of Louisiana. He is the author of "Tiv Liv Kréyòl: A Louisiana Creole Premier" which is available online and he also has the 2nd edition coming in October.Joseph Dunn is an entrepreneur and a franco-créolophone activist for Louisiana. He is the director of the Laura Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana and works with many other franco-créolophone businesses and corporations in Louisiana.
Dr. Thomas Klingler joins the pod to discuss the French languages of Louisiana, the differences between Cajun and Creole, and the forces that led to the disappearance of French in the South. You can find his book on Louisiana Creole, "If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That," here --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jon-gower/support
www.GoodMorningGwinnett.com Chef Hank Reid Hank Reid is the Founder and Executive Director of Trinity Community Culinary Institutes, Inc. a non-profit organization purposed to establish an educational and creative learning program, offering classroom instruction, seminars, workshops and employment training to the local community in a recreational environment in the area of Culinary Arts. The foundation of TCCI is strengthened upon the desire to support the everyday challenges parents face to help their young adult sons and daughters transition into self-sufficient, productive adults. In 1990 Chef Hank made the transition from the Architectural Engineering field to pursue his underlying passion for Culinary Arts. While studying Mathematics at Clark-Atlanta University as a Dual Degree Major he combined his entrepreneurial spirit and his culinary skills and starting a catering business from his dorm room. Armed with only a hot plate and a toaster oven Chef Hank realized he had the gift to do a lot with very little. A true Southerner from Griffin Georgia, a small town forty miles south of Atlanta, Chef Hank began to worry less about how he would fund his education in the engineering field and more about how he could explore his talent for cooking. Rather than totally abandoning a career in Engineering, Chef Hank transferred to Southern Polytechnic in Marietta, GA to pursue an Architectural degree while working in the Baking and Pastry department of the Atlanta Hilton and Towers in downtown Atlanta. Unable to share his love for Culinary Arts with the pursuit of an Architectural degree, Chef Hank made a full commitment to his passion and enrolled in the Culinary Arts program at the Art Institute of Atlanta and accepted a part-time position at a prestigious fine dining establishment, Carbo s Café and a full-time position with Houston s as a lead production Chef. As Chef Hank excelled in and earned his degree at the Art Institute, he took an active handson learning approach to his training by working through the ranks of a popular string of Liberty House Restaurant Group establishments; OK Café, Blue Ridge Grill, Kudzu Café and Bones. In 1994, Hank was appointed the Executive chef of Lulu s Bait Shack Restaurant and Bar, specializing in Louisiana Creole cuisine, in the popular Buckhead community known for its active night-life and multitude of restaurant and bar options. From there continued his Cajun Cuisine tour as the Executive Chef at Comeuax s Louisiana Bar and Grill. In 1999 Chef Hank would workhis way into the dual role of Executive Chef and Assistant General Manager of Cripple Creek Taphouse and Grill, an upscale lodge theme casual dining concept in the fast growing suburbs of Gwinnett County located north of Atlanta. Throughout his culinary endeavors, Chef Hank always made time for kids in his community. As a volunteer baseball coach for the DeKalb County Recreation Department, Hank not only excelled as a Chef, husband and Father, he embraced the responsibility of mentoring young men and women in that community. In 2000 Chef Hank moved to Snellville, GA with his wife Rachael and two sons Davonta and Chace and immediately fell in love with the community. There was an instant desire to get involved as he did in DeKalb County so he repositioned himself in the culinary industry by accepting a position as General Manager of Woody s Barbeque located right in the heart of the Snellville Community. The blessings for Hank and his family continued. The convenience of a position at a restaurant very close to home was topped by the birth of Hank and Rachael s third, fourth and fifth children, triplet daughters; Niiah, Neeyah and Neenah. As his culinary career continued to thrive as Chef Hank remained focused on his efforts in the community. As the founder of Trinity Athletics of Snellville, Hank established this non-profit organization to support the youth in the local community focused on programs for students addressing physical and social health deficiencies. It offered support in the areas of athletic camps, seminars and study groups relating to academics, personal finance, social interaction, peer pressure and physical health. Additionally, he served three terms on the W.C. Britt Elementary School Council and one term as P.T.A. Co-President. In 2006 Chef Hank was appointed to the City of Snellville s Parks and Recreation Board where he served for two terms. After a four year run with Woody s Barbeque, Chef Hank remained in the same location for another two years after the Woody s franchise left town and Ground Round, an American Cuisine concept from the north, came in. In 2006, Chef Hank began the most natural process for a person with his level of experience. He began the process of opening his own establishment. That establishment was to become the town favorite Trinity Bistro and Coffee Bar. Chef Hank and his family enjoyed two years of success until the harsh economy of 2008 claimed the small businesses of many including Trinity Bistro. The passion never left Hank as he vowed to be back in the fold of the Snellville community. Force to work outside the community, Hank spent two years with the growing Panera Bread Corporation and then the callcame for Chef Hank from Sweet Georgia s Juke Joint, a popular Southern cuisine concept right in the middle of downtown Atlanta. He was appointed to the prestigious position of Executive Chef. Tailor-made for Hank s style of cooking, the Juke Joint quickly rose from average ratings to an internationally recognized downtown Atlanta eatery. Chef Hank enjoyed great success making one television appearance after another. He continued to grow the Juke Joint brand and stabilize the organization s cuisine with quality traditional recipe building and establishing concise cost-effective culinary procedures resulting in the increase of the company s bottom line. Seemingly the job of a life time, Chef Hank was still not content with his path. He embarked upon what would be the culmination of all his experiences, Trinity Community Culinary Institutes, Inc. This is Chef Hank s true dream, a community enrichment program taking all of his experiences and the greatest attributes of all of them, organizing them with the purpose of sharing and offering direction, helping kids and inviting the entire community to experience the joy of cooking by opening a recreational style culinary school. TCCI, short for Trinity Community Culinary Institute is purposed to provide community enrichment by offering a recreational Culinary Arts program designed to offer essential direction to community youth that will develop a population of young men and women better adapted to be contributors to society than detractors from it. Its goal is to be a resource for an alternative recreational outlet for families in the community by hosting activities accenting the fun, creative and competitive elements of Culinary Arts. Chef Hank declares an obligation to enhance the hospitality aspects of the community by establishing student-run dining and catering operations and supporting local dining establishments with quality human resources from the local community.TCCI also positions itself to lead other organizations with similar ideas and encourage them to put some action behind your passion. Chef Hank opens the door and sets the table to unite a coalition of Cultural Arts innovators purposed to activate the creative nature in all young adults, nurturing their dreams into constructive, productive reality. Finally in a role Chef Hank has desired for years, his dedication and commitment has never been greater and the community has been very receptive and even excited about TCCI. He is currently serving the Snellville Community as an Executive Board member of both the Snellville Economic Development Council and Integrity Christian Academy of Snellville. Chef Hank is also a potential Mayoral appointee to the Snellville Board of Appeals. In addition, a number of political figures have endorsed Chef Hank s community enrichment program which will support TCCI s goals to establish the concept anywhere there is a need for support to young men and women starving for positive encouragement and realistic hope for their futures.
Ed and Cara introduce you to the exciting world of creole languages! We discuss how a pidgin becomes a creoles, what makes a creole a creole to begin with as well as touching on the world's many creoles like Haitian Creole, Louisiana Creole, Malaysian Creole and Juba Arabic. How an accent transforms over time in an isolated setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHKGErnN9W8 @linguisticsever@edwardgiordano@carajoell
Movement of planets, holy days in April 2020 Pacific Time.
Greetings, I am a professional psychic encouraging readings with me by phone at (510) 697-0104. Use PayPal, Cash App and I accept credit cards. Let's talk $77 www.veronicagerman.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Opportunity Detroit - Joe Spencer, Owner, Louisiana Creole Gumbo
Opportunity Detroit - Joe Spencer, Owner, Louisiana Creole Gumbo
Today we celebrate Louisiana Creole accordionist and zydeco band leader, Queen Ida
Today we celebrate Louisiana Creole accordionist and zydeco band leader, Queen Ida
Lafayette is considered to be the center of Acadiana, the area of Cajun and Louisiana Creole culture in the state. From swamp boat tours to rum tasting, zydeco breakfasts and tours of the Tabasco Factory, travel writer Linda Kissam ‘Food, Wine & Shopping Diva’, Benjamin J. Berthelot - President & CEO of Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission, and Captain Tucker Friedman - Owner of Atchafalaya Basin Landing & Marina, share what makes Lafayette such a unique and fun destination. See Linda's travel story here: https://nationalparktraveling.com/listing/authentic-lafayette-louisiana/Featured music is ‘Luke’s Stomp’ by www.JohnnyMastro.com
Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “The Fat Man”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I’ve had to edit it down rather ruthlessly — I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn’t affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who’s still alive — we’re now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine — and I hope he’ll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song — “Junko Partner” by Dr. John — that doesn’t appear in the finished podcast. But it’s a good song anyway. Fats Domino’s forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright — a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We’ll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there’s a reason for that — his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, “Danza”, I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk’s piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk’s “Danza” and “Night in the Tropics” on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who’s interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it’s dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word “Negro” thoughout — at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it’s very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a very good book, though I don’t totally buy Coleman’s argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) — it’s labelled “New Orleans Joys” there, but it’s clearly the same song as “New Orleans Blues”, which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the “Spanish tinge”. The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll. The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll — people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock — the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues — Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls “vocal group rock and roll” but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I’d add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands — people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York. So far, we’ve talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven’t yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let’s take a trip down the Mississippi. We can trace New Orleans’ importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic — Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer — he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this: [Excerpt of “Danza”] That’s a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s. And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form. We don’t know — we can’t know — how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both — we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk’s work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans. And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans’ status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music — all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap. Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic — he wrote pieces called things like “the Dying Poet”, he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for “death”. He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose. So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time. But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used. In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We’ll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey “Piano” Smith… it’s in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own. And if there’s one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it’s “Junker’s Blues”. You’ve probably not heard that name before, but you’ve almost certainly heard the melody: [section of “Junker’s Blues” as played by Champion Jack Dupree] That’s Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That’s the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style. “Junker’s Blues” itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which we’re going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair… [section of “Tipitina”] “Tee Nah Nah” [“Tee Nah Nah” — Smiley Lewis] And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie. But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be “the first rock and roll record”. Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do. He grew up in a kind of poverty that’s hard to imagine now — his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them. By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He’d played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show — Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him. But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities — and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws’ house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn’t exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records. Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino. Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II — he’d already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging. After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with “Country Boy” [excerpt of “Country Boy” by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra] Now, something you may notice about that song is that “dan, dah-dah” horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as “habanera” rhythms. That word means “from Havana”, and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music — Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece — coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century. The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a “bam bam” [demonstrates]. That beat is one we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future. These rhythms were the basis of the original tango — which didn’t have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that “dan, dah-dah” rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him — French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans — that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish tinge”. Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll’s “New Orleans Blues”: [excerpt “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton] Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It’s the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations. But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that “dah dah dah” up against something else — on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it — and he seems to have been the first one to do this — that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour. I’m going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I’m going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other. You have the backbeat, which we’ve talked about before — “one TWO three FOUR” — emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that. And you have the tresillo, which is “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and” — emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and”. You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this: [excerpt — recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other] That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I’ve said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something). The musicians on “Country Boy” were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time. Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word “funky” to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There’s a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band “can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?” Palmer would then pretend to “wind up” his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That’s the kind of story that’s hard to believe, but it’s been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true. Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa’s studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music. Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa’s case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We’ve actually already heard one record made by him, last week — Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn’t have that New Orleans sound to it — it’s of the type we’re referring to as coastal jump band music. It’s music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city. Matassa’s studio was tiny — it was in the back room of his family’s appliance store, which also had a bookmaker’s upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production — he’d been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today’s standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn’t record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master. To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master — the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master — it’s a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out — at which point, you create a new mother from the original master. They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone’s job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor — by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax. A wax master couldn’t be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn’t be used as a master, so you had two choices — you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you’d be able to play one of them — destroying it in the process — to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same. To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians. Truth be told, the J&M studio didn’t have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact. But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino’s first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made. Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was “Junker’s Blues”. Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren’t quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine. But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. “The Fat Man” was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of “The Fat Man”, too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of “they call me a junker, because I’m loaded all the time”, Domino sang “they call me the fat man, ‘cos I weigh two hundred pounds”. Now, “The Fat Man” actually doesn’t have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it’s *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that “Spanish tinge” that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It’s music that absolutely couldn’t come from anywhere else. [Excerpt from “The Fat Man”] Domino’s scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers — there’s a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I’ve not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there’d be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing — Domino’s later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record — but in this case it’s Domino’s own voice doing the job. And while this recording doesn’t have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it’s definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You’d have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you’d lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you’d lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you’d lay Domino’s piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they’re not doing is playing the same thing — there’s an astonishing complexity there. Bartholomew’s lyrics, to the extent they’re about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway — the same kind of thing as Howlin’ Wolf’s later “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” or “Built for Comfort” — but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino’s obvious *cheeriness*. Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry — to the extent that it’s difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he’d lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005. By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person — I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive — remember, this was the era of the blues shouter — Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he’s bragging sexually, he doesn’t actually sound like he means it. “The Fat Man” went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino — and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we’ve seen who’s going to get more episodes about him. We’ve now reached the point where we’re seeing the very first rock star — and this is the point beyond which it’s indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who’d sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it’s Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as “The Fat Man”, it’s safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as “the first rock and roll record” to go, we’re now definitely in the rock and roll era.
Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Fats Domino and "The Fat Man". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I've had to edit it down rather ruthlessly -- I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn't affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who's still alive -- we're now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine -- and I hope he'll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song -- "Junko Partner" by Dr. John -- that doesn't appear in the finished podcast. But it's a good song anyway. Fats Domino's forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright -- a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We'll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there's a reason for that -- his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, "Danza", I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk's piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk's "Danza" and "Night in the Tropics" on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who's interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it's dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word "Negro" thoughout -- at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it's very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. It's a very good book, though I don't totally buy Coleman's argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of "New Orleans Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) -- it's labelled "New Orleans Joys" there, but it's clearly the same song as "New Orleans Blues", which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the "Spanish tinge". The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll. The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll -- people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock -- the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues -- Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls "vocal group rock and roll" but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I'd add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands -- people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York. So far, we've talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven't yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let's take a trip down the Mississippi. We can trace New Orleans' importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic -- Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer -- he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this: [Excerpt of "Danza"] That's a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s. And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form. We don't know -- we can't know -- how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both -- we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk's work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans. And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans' status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music -- all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap. Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic -- he wrote pieces called things like "the Dying Poet", he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for "death". He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose. So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time. But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used. In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We'll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey "Piano" Smith... it's in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own. And if there's one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it's "Junker's Blues". You've probably not heard that name before, but you've almost certainly heard the melody: [section of "Junker's Blues" as played by Champion Jack Dupree] That's Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That's the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style. "Junker's Blues" itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", which we're going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also "Tipitina" by Professor Longhair... [section of "Tipitina"] "Tee Nah Nah" ["Tee Nah Nah" -- Smiley Lewis] And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie. But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be "the first rock and roll record". Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do. He grew up in a kind of poverty that's hard to imagine now -- his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them. By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He'd played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show -- Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him. But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities -- and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws' house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn't exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records. Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino. Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II -- he'd already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging. After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with "Country Boy" [excerpt of "Country Boy" by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra] Now, something you may notice about that song is that "dan, dah-dah" horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as "habanera" rhythms. That word means "from Havana", and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music -- Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece -- coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century. The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a "bam bam" [demonstrates]. That beat is one we'll be seeing a lot of in the future. These rhythms were the basis of the original tango -- which didn't have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that "dan, dah-dah" rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him -- French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans -- that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the "Spanish tinge". Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll's "New Orleans Blues": [excerpt "New Orleans Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton] Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It's the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations. But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that "dah dah dah" up against something else -- on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it -- and he seems to have been the first one to do this -- that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour. I'm going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I'm going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other. You have the backbeat, which we've talked about before -- "one TWO three FOUR" -- emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that. And you have the tresillo, which is "ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and" -- emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, "ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and". You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this: [excerpt -- recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other] That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I've said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something). The musicians on "Country Boy" were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time. Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word "funky" to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There's a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band "can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?" Palmer would then pretend to "wind up" his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That's the kind of story that's hard to believe, but it's been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true. Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa's studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music. Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa's case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We've actually already heard one record made by him, last week -- Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight", which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. "Good Rockin' Tonight" was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn't have that New Orleans sound to it -- it's of the type we're referring to as coastal jump band music. It's music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city. Matassa's studio was tiny -- it was in the back room of his family's appliance store, which also had a bookmaker's upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production -- he'd been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today's standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn't record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master. To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master -- the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master -- it's a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out -- at which point, you create a new mother from the original master. They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone's job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor -- by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax. A wax master couldn't be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn't be used as a master, so you had two choices -- you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you'd be able to play one of them -- destroying it in the process -- to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same. To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians. Truth be told, the J&M studio didn't have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact. But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino's first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made. Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was "Junker's Blues". Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren't quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine. But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. "The Fat Man" was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of "The Fat Man", too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of "they call me a junker, because I'm loaded all the time", Domino sang "they call me the fat man, 'cos I weigh two hundred pounds". Now, "The Fat Man" actually doesn't have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it's *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that "Spanish tinge" that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It's music that absolutely couldn't come from anywhere else. [Excerpt from "The Fat Man"] Domino's scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers -- there's a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I've not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there'd be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing -- Domino's later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record -- but in this case it's Domino's own voice doing the job. And while this recording doesn't have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it's definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You'd have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you'd lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you'd lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you'd lay Domino's piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they're not doing is playing the same thing -- there's an astonishing complexity there. Bartholomew's lyrics, to the extent they're about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway -- the same kind of thing as Howlin' Wolf's later "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy" or "Built for Comfort" -- but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino's obvious *cheeriness*. Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry -- to the extent that it's difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he'd lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005. By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person -- I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don't recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive -- remember, this was the era of the blues shouter -- Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he's bragging sexually, he doesn't actually sound like he means it. "The Fat Man" went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino -- and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we've seen who's going to get more episodes about him. We've now reached the point where we're seeing the very first rock star -- and this is the point beyond which it's indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who'd sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it's Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as "The Fat Man", it's safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as "the first rock and roll record" to go, we're now definitely in the rock and roll era.
Rodney Sam will discuss the uniqueness of Louisiana Creole genealogy and a personal journey to learn about his Louisiana Creole heritage. He has conducted extensive research on the following surnames in his family: Sam, Rideau, Edward, Desmerais, Donato, Masse, Senette, Pitre, Charles, Jacques, Young, Fruge, LaChapelle, Tesson, Birotte and Meullion. The geographic locations for his research are in the following Louisiana parishes of St. Landry, Evangeline, St. Martin, Lafayette and to a lesser extent St. Mary parish. Rodney Sam is an avid genealogist who has pursued a lifelong passion in studying the history, genealogy and culture of his Louisiana Creole ancestors. He currently works as a Library Services Specialist at the Clayton Genealogical Library in Houston.
Joe Spencer, owner of Louisiana Creole Gumbo in Eastern Market, talks about how he opened a second restaurant on Detroit's northwest side and started a food truck service for manufacturing plants without traditional bank financing. Sherita Smith, executive director of the Grandmont Rosedale Development Corp., discusses retail and restaurant business opportunities on Detroit's northwest side.
On today's episode of THE FOOD SEEN, Pableaux Johnson kick-starts our 2018 season with a Louisiana Creole tradition: red beans & rice. A meal regulated for Mondays, made with leftovers from Sunday dinner, is the extension dinner by a day, by the benevolent hand of hospitality. Before moving to New Orleans, Johnson lived in Austin, Texas, and would throw big gumbo parties for friends in the hundreds, feeding them soul food past po'boys and beignets. In 2009, he took his show on the road, bringing his Red Beans & Rice Show to the masses. Named one of Epicurious' "100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time", Johnson, a photographer and journalist at heart, is the life of the food party, Mardi Gras, and Jazz Fest all in one! The Food Seen is powered by Simplecast
Today we celebrate Louisiana Creole accordionist Queen Ida
The idea behind the Beyond Bourbon Street podcast is to bring you stories about the food, music, places, people and events that make New Orleans unique. Today's guest manages to cover all five of those things! In this episode, Mark sits down with Vance Vaucresson, president of Vaucresson Sausage Company. Vance's company is the last of the original food vendors at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival, continuing the tradition begun by his late father, but that only scratches the surface. Vance is also a family man, a performer with a beautiful voice, and a student and ambassador of his Louisiana Creole roots. Mark and Vance trace the Vaucresson family history from 19th century France to present-day New Orleans. Learn how Vance’s father opened the first black-owned Creole restaurant in the French Quarter and was instrumental in the beginnings of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The two also discuss present day festivals including the New Orleans Po-Boy Festival and BBQ and Blues, both coming up in October 2016. Learn about the musical adaptation of Dan Baum’s book "Nine Lives" and gain insight into the music culture of New Orleans. Along the way you’ll meet members of the Bouttè family as well as singer-songwriter and native son, Paul Sanchez. All this and more on episode #20 of Beyond Bourbon Street! If you enjoy the show, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. New episodes are available every other Wednesday. You can find us on Twitter | Instagram | Facebook| Website Thanks for listening! Mark mark@beyondbourbonst.com
Jari C.Honora and James Morgan III will discuss a step by step guide to documenting fraternal society participation of ancestors and relatives as well as offer tips and tricks on how to locate documents in this field of study. They will show that through understanding fraternal happenings in state and local communities, researchers will be able to get a better understanding of not only who their ancestors were, but also a better understanding of relatives contributions to society at large. James Morgan III is a Prince Hall Mason serving as Worshipful Master of Corinthian Lodge #18 in Washington, D.C. and as the Worshipful Associate Grand Historian of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia. Mr. Morgan is a member of the Phylaxis Society, the only independent research organization dedicated to study African American Freemasonry and Fraternalism and has published several critically acclaimed research papers in their journal. He recently co-wrote and published the 2016 book “The Greatest Prince Hall Mason of the 20th Century”. Jari C. Honora is a New Orleans native and proud Louisiana Creole with roots dating back more than two centuries along Bayou LaFourche and the German-Acadian Coast. He is a member of several societies including the Louisiana Historical Society and CreoleGen, which maintains a popular blog, CreoleGen.org. He serves as an officer in a variety of other organizations including the Association of St. Augustine Alumni. He serves as National Historian for the Knights of Peter Claver and is writing a history of that organization. Music - Sweet Mellow Spice with A. K. Alexander Productions
July 29, 2015. Creole United performs a concert of creole music from southwest Louisiana. Speaker Biography: Creole United is a group representing three generations of Louisiana Creole music culture. The members consider themselves the keepers of the music culture of the Southwest Louisiana Creoles. This mix of musical styles originated among the French-speaking African Americans of the lower Mississippi, with influences of Cajun, African, and Spanish music. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7052
Marie Catherine Laveau was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo renowned in New Orleans. Her daughter, Marie Laveau II, also practiced Voudoun, as well as Voodoo. She and her mother had great influence over their multiracial following.She became the most famous and powerful Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. She was respected and feared by all. Voodoo in New Orleans was a blend of West African religion and Catholicism. Voodoo deities are called Loahs and they are closely paired with the Catholic Saints.
Chef Micah Martello and the King Creole Food Truck Chef Micah Martello has been in the food business for over 20 years. He's been an executive chef, a food and beverage director, and a restaurant owner. He now owns and operates a Louisiana-themed food truck in Burlington, NC. Originally from Baton Rouge (we graduated high school together!), Micah spent time in New Orleans where he owned a restaurant called Nautical. That restaurant was named in Bon Appetit Magazine's "Best of the Year" in 1999. Micah arrived in Burlington, NC by way of Chapel Hill. Restaurant life can be grueling, especially on young families. In order to devote more time to his family, Micah left the restaurant business for about 5 years. Starting a food truck was something that he has thought about for a while. He loves being a chef, and he figured that a food truck would allow him to practice his craft without being tied down to a restaurant. He was right. In the fall of 2012, the King Creole Food Truck was born. "The food truck allows me to practice my craft without being tied down to a restaurant, plus it gives me direct interaction with my customers, which I love." The name "King Creole" actually comes from a movie starring Elvis Presley that was released in 1958. And, for Micah, the name represents "Louisiana food." [Incidentally, Elvis sang a song in that movie called "Crawfish." I love that song! You can listen to it below.] I just wrote an article this morning that explains the difference between Cajun and Creole cuisines. For most people who are not from here, those two cuisines seem like they are one and the same, like it's all just "Louisiana food." They are both tantalizing, and they both say "home" to me, but there are some definite distinctions. You can read about the differences here: Louisiana Cooking: Cajun or Creole? "Don’t know what Creole is? Allow us to drop some knowledge on you. Louisiana Creole blends African, French, Italian, Native American, Spanish AND Portuguese flavors with good ol’ Southern cookin’. Sounds amazing, right? It is. King Creole creates our dishes from scratch using only the freshest local ingredients. We aim to please and to fill your stomach with the tastiest, most flavorful authentic cookin’ you’ll find in the Greensboro and Burlington, North Carolina area." FULL SHOW NOTES CAN BE FOUND AT CATHOLICFOODIE.COM.