Podcasts about reassured

When trouble is on the horizon, it can be hard to trust in God's promises, and to believe He has a plan for us.The book of Judges in the Old Testament gives us an awesome example of trusting God in the story of Gideon.God called Gideon to lead Israel into battle with the Midianites, who had a sizable army of 135,000 men. Gideon gathered an army of 32,000 men to battle with the Midianites, but despite odds in favor of the enemy, God told Gideon there were too many men in his army. Through a selection process, God whittled the Israelite army down to just 300 men.Though Gideon was afraid, he trusted God to fulfill His promise. And God told Gideon they needed a smaller army so people would know God won the battle—and not some large army.The night of the battle, Gideon and his servant snuck into the camp of the enemy and overheard the telling of a dream. The two Midianites interpreted the dream to mean that Gideon's small army would wipe out their larger army.Reassured, Gideon returned to camp to begin the battle. The Midianites were so frightened, many of them began fighting and killing one another, thinking that Gideon's army was all around them.Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”Gideon trusted God's plan, even when he didn't understand. Because of his faith, God helped Gideon and the Israelites to conquer the Midianites with an army a fraction of the size of the enemy's.Let's pray.Lord, you are mighty to save. Help us to trust you in every battle. We love you, and believe you have a plan for us. Give us courage to face the challenges in our lives, knowing you are here with us, and you have a good plan. In Jesus' name, amen.Change your shirt, and you can change the world! Save 15% Off your entire purchase of faith-based apparel + gifts at Kerusso.com with code KDD15.

In this episode, we explore the power of reassurance in uncertain times. Discover how to quiet your inner critic, affirm your strengths, and embrace the divine timing of your life. Through inspiring stories, scriptures, and actionable strategies, you'll learn to trust in your path, even when the destination seems unclear. Tune in to find comfort in knowing that you are guided, supported, and exactly where you need to be. Share, like, and follow this Vivalife SPF ME podcast on Spotify/amazon/google platforms Leave a comment on how this resonated with you. VivaLife SPF ME • A podcast on Spotify for Podcasters Subscribe to our youtube: https://youtube.com/@vivalifehealthhub8261?si=zLFMLAZ126ss6qyO Click the link below to join our mailing list, events and experiences https://vivalifespfme.com/dr-kelly-o-md-linktree Book Dr. Kelly O. MD: https://vivalifespfme.com/speaker Buy your journal: https://vivalifespfme.myshopify.com/products/vivalife-spf-me-journal

After a fortnight of dreaming, it's back to reality as Sam, Kish and Luke sit down to discuss just what went wrong for Fulham after they were turned over by struggling Wolves at the Cottage. Reassured, the gang then look forward to the upcoming trip to Tottenham with a preview that includes one of the greatest quiz answers in FFC history.

Andrew Hanna // 1 John 3:7-24 // 11.24.2024

In this episode of Just Covered, we meet Phil Jeynes, Director of Corporate Strategy at Reassured. Phil is a well-recognised and respected protection expert with more than 20 years' experience. During our thoughtful chat, he reflects personally on the change he's seen across the industry, particularly around emphasis for ongoing customer care and how training has evolved. He also talks about his health scare, with cancer, and the financial and emotional piece of mind that critical illness cover was able to offer him at an extremely challenging time. This episode also covers: · The evolution of protection sales, from sometimes aggressive and shocking tactics, to consultative and empathetic longer-term approaches. · The importance of early and ongoing communication around protection policies to provide maximum benefit to the customer.  · The changing culture around accepting and discussing mental health issues and the financial and emotional burden of being either mentally or physically ill. 

Subject: After The Tomb Speaker or Performer: Bro. Adam Armstrong Scripture Passage(s): John 20:24-29 Date of Delivery: October 13, 2024

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It can be scary when our newborns get sick, have fevers or have difficulty breathing. It can also be hard to know when we should seek medical health and when we can wait and see. In this episode of Wild and Well, I am joined by pediatrician Dr Kristen Weidert. We discuss newborn health issues and what do about them. Dr Kristen outlines several potential health issues that can arise in the early days and weeks of a baby's life and what we need to know about them. Dr Kristen and I chat about: What health conditions can present during the newborn phase The three tiers of newborn health issues Fevers, difficulty breathing, rashes, vomiting and diarrhea in newborns: what we need to know When to be reassured and when to seek medical support for a newborn's health condition Dr Kristin Weidert is a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine and board-certified pediatrician, mom of two girls, and co-founder of Sage Mother Co. Alongside her best friend from medical school, she launched Sage Mother Co. to address the lack of support she noticed for women in the early stages of motherhood. Kristin is dedicated to helping women navigate the transformative journey of becoming mothers by providing education, resources, and, most importantly, a supportive community through her work with Sage Mother Co. Episode Links: Say hi to Dr Kristen on Instagram Check out Sage Mother Co Listen to the Sage Mother Podcast Join The Sage Circle: An expert-led community for mothers of littles Grab Dr Kristen's freebie:7 Days of Calm: Reframing the Overwhelm of New Motherhood Say hello to me over on Instagram Check out my books and program Listen and Subscribe to Wild + Well on: Apple Podcast | Spotify

“The daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.” — Isaiah 37:22 Reassured by the Word of the Lord, the poor trembling citizens of Zion grew bold, and shook their heads at Sennacherib's boastful threats. Strong faith enables the servants of God to look with calm contempt upon their most haughty foes. We know […]

In Luke 1-26-38, we are shown 4 aspects of Gabriel's announcement concerning Jesus.-I. The recipient of Gabriel's -v. 26- announcement is Mary -v. 27d---A. A virgin -v. 27a, d-.-B. Betrothed to Joseph of the house of David -v. 27b, c-.-C. Favored by God -v. 28-.-D. Perplexed by Gabriel's greeting -v. 29-.-E. Reassured of God's favor -v. 30--II. The content of Gabriel's announcement is Jesus.-A. Jesus will be the name of the son you conceive and bear -v. 31-.-B. Jesus will be great and called the Son of the Most High -v. 32a-.-C. Jesus will reign eternally over His kingdom from David's throne--vs. 32b-33-.-Clarifying question- How will this be since I am a virgin -v. 34----Clarifying answer- The power of the Most High, the Holy Spirit, will do-this -v. 35a, b-.-D. So, Jesus will be called holy, the Son of God -v. 35c-.-III. The reassuring sign of Gabriel's announcement is Elizabeth.-A. Elizabeth was barren but is now six months pregnant -v. 36-.-B. Because nothing is impossible for God -v. 37-.-IV. The response to Gabriel's announcement is submission -v. 38-.

In Luke 1-26-38, we are shown 4 aspects of Gabriel's announcement concerning Jesus.-I. The recipient of Gabriel's -v. 26- announcement is Mary -v. 27d---A. A virgin -v. 27a, d-.-B. Betrothed to Joseph of the house of David -v. 27b, c-.-C. Favored by God -v. 28-.-D. Perplexed by Gabriel's greeting -v. 29-.-E. Reassured of God's favor -v. 30--II. The content of Gabriel's announcement is Jesus.-A. Jesus will be the name of the son you conceive and bear -v. 31-.-B. Jesus will be great and called the Son of the Most High -v. 32a-.-C. Jesus will reign eternally over His kingdom from David's throne--vs. 32b-33-.-Clarifying question- How will this be since I am a virgin -v. 34----Clarifying answer- The power of the Most High, the Holy Spirit, will do-this -v. 35a, b-.-D. So, Jesus will be called holy, the Son of God -v. 35c-.-III. The reassuring sign of Gabriel's announcement is Elizabeth.-A. Elizabeth was barren but is now six months pregnant -v. 36-.-B. Because nothing is impossible for God -v. 37-.-IV. The response to Gabriel's announcement is submission -v. 38-.

In Luke 1:26-38, we are shown 4 aspects of Gabriel's announcement concerning Jesus.I. The recipient of Gabriel's (v. 26) announcement is Mary (v. 27d):A. A virgin (v. 27a, d).B. Betrothed to Joseph of the house of David (v. 27b, c).C. Favored by God (v. 28).D. Perplexed by Gabriel's greeting (v. 29).E. Reassured of God's favor (v. 30)II. The content of Gabriel's announcement is Jesus.A. Jesus will be the name of the son you conceive and bear (v. 31).B. Jesus will be great and called the Son of the Most High (v. 32a).C. Jesus will reign eternally over His kingdom from David's throne(vs. 32b–33).Clarifying question: How will this be since I am a virgin (v. 34)?Clarifying answer: The power of the Most High, the Holy Spirit, will dothis (v. 35a, b).D. So, Jesus will be called holy, the Son of God (v. 35c).III. The reassuring sign of Gabriel's announcement is Elizabeth.A. Elizabeth was barren but is now six months pregnant (v. 36).B. Because nothing is impossible for God (v. 37).IV. The response to Gabriel's announcement is submission (v. 38).

Embracing Reassurance: Finding Strength in Support In this episode we dive into the power of reassurance and how it can transform our lives. Join our host, as she discusses stories of overcoming doubt and finding strength through reassurance. From affirmations to the wisdom of scriptures, we'll explore practical ways to boost self-confidence and resilience. Tune in for an inspiring message that will leave you feeling empowered and ready to face any challenge with renewed courage. Don't miss this chance to learn how to harness the power of reassurance to achieve your dreams. Share, like and follow this Vivalife SPF ME podcast- spotify/amazon/google platforms Subscribe to our youtube: https://youtube.com/@vivalifehealthhub8261?si=zLFMLAZ126ss6qyO Click the link below to join our mailing list, events and experiences https://vivalifespfme.com/dr-kelly-o-md-linktree

In this MUM episode, Spiritual Medium Jaime Breeze shares how relationships with pets transcend physical life and can continue through reincarnation. Jaime sheds light on how she communicates with animals on the other side, providing comfort to those who are grieving their animal companions, and emphasized the importance of acknowledging grief, encouraging individuals to honor their feelings and the memory of their pets through rituals and journaling.About Jaime Breeze:Born with an inner sense of ‘knowing', Jaime was aware of the Spirit World from a very young age. At 3 years old, she began speaking openly about her past lives and about ‘others' around her that nobody else could see. By the age of 16, Jaime had begun working with Spiritual Healers that taught her how to develop her natural gifts, harness her insights, and learn different healing modalities. Over the years, Jaime's fascination with Heaven, reincarnation, and with those who have crossed over, along with her training, has allowed her skills to flourish.In early 2016 however, Jaime suffered a great loss and battled with her first true experience of grief. After seeking guidance from grief counsellors and therapists, Jaime began to understand that navigating her grief would truly test her in ways she had never been tested before. There were no books to read, exercises to complete or steps to follow in order to help make the pain go away. Even the personal knowledge of life after death still did not bring her the healing or peace she so desperately needed.Months later while visiting with a friend, an image of a young man who we will call “Luke” appeared out of nowhere in front of her. Luke psychically communicated to Jaime who he was, how he passed and that he needed to deliver a message to his sister who was still on earth. Jaime couldn't deny what was happening so she quickly started telling her friend all about it. Her friend listened intently to what Jaime was relaying from this Spirit. To Jaime's surprise, her friend knew exactly who Luke was and was actually friends with Luke's sister who lived on the other side of the country! Jaime's friend quickly delivered this sacred message to Luke's sister whom had longed for some sign from her brother since the day he had passed. Reassured by his efforts to contact her, she now knew that although his physical form had moved on, he would always be there for her in spirit.Until this point in her life, Jaime had never experienced such a strong connection to a spirit. The energy Luke showed her, the love he had for his sister, and his concern for her was unfathomable. Not only did Luke find a portal of sorts to connect with his sister, he also gave Jaime back her hope and excitement for life again. It was during that moment that other spirits began appearing and Jaime realized she was to be a Spiritual Medium on a professional level. She knew that the time had come to embrace her gift and help both herself and others to communicate with those who had passed. Mediumship brought back a zest for life for Jaime. She now knew she needed to experience and understand what ultimate grief was before the doors to the other side could fully open. She understood now that her past experiences of lost love combined with her true understanding of grief and all its many intricacies gave her the life the purpose, she had long desired. Her intention, her goal, was now clear. Through the deliverance of messages and signs from those departed, she would use her skills to help people feel joy and purpose in their lives again and bring an element of peace and comfort to those souls left on earth to grieve.Link with Jaime:* Beyond the Rainbow Bridge Masterclass: A Pet Medium's Guide to Understanding Your Companion's Journey Through Death and the Afterlife* Instagram* Website***10% off any readings for Mum listenersMUM is produced by ⁠Ellen Wong⁠ and edited by ⁠Stepfanie Aguilar.⁠ Your support allows us to continue creating this podcast. If you enjoy this episode, please take a moment to rate and review. Keep this conversation alive by bringing it to your communities.Follow Mum on Instagram ⁠⁠@mumthepod⁠⁠.If you are interested in working privately with Ellen, visit ⁠tripwithellen.com⁠ to learn more about her Death/Birth Program and her spirit medicine private retreats.Water + Fire Free Community Grief Circle is every 4th Tuesday of the month at 6p pst / 9p est. Register here.MUM Links* Spirit Medicine Retreat* Private Mentorship* Membership Get full access to Trip with Ellen at tripwithellen.substack.com/subscribe

The  April and Derrick series. by Deana Bard. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories. It's early evening when April is getting ready to go out for a few hours. Freshly showered and sweet-smelling, she puts on tight pair of jeans that enhance her firm thighs. The center seam separates and molds her two round ass cheeks but also tends to accentuate the lips of her pouting pussy. For a top, she chooses a light-colored silk blouse, sans a bra as usual, with the top three buttons undone to show some cleavage and sheer enough to just make out the darkness of her nipples.To her husband, Derrick, all of this preparation just for a night out with ‘the girls' at one of the local nightclubs seems a bit over the top. But he keeps those thoughts to himself. As she's about to open the door to leave, she looks over her shoulder with a twinkle in her eye and says, “Be showered by the time I get home.” Enamored by her beauty, Derrick steps over to her to give her a goodbye kiss. While doing so, his hand cups one of her breasts. She returns his gesture by putting her arms around him pulling him close. She opens her mouth, sticking her long wet tongue past his parting lips and deep into his hot mouth. The silk covering her soft but firm breast can not hide the erect state of her nipples. She lets out a soft moan when he gives the little brown pebble a pinch. Suddenly she breaks the kiss, takes her arms from around him, and gives her husband a punishing look. Stunned, he asks, “What's the matter, Babe?” “You're always too tired any other time,” she snaps. “So why do you wait until I have people waiting for me? I'm about to be late?” “Hey, my head wants it often,” he says defensively. “I can't help it if my libido and this head…, “pointing to his crotch, “can't keep up with you.” She comes close to him again, grabs the slight bulge forming in the front of his pants, and says, “Well, just make sure that you're clean and ready by the time I get home. Maybe then…” “I think I can manage that,” he says, enjoying this game they sometimes play. “If you only THINK you can manage that then,” she says in mock seriousness, “I might THINK about not coming home until morning.” He's heard that before. It's all part of their game. April smiles a wicked smile and says, “Don't forget, there are all these men who buy us drinks all night. Each hoping that they'll get lucky with us. Maybe I'll just have to let one of them serve my needs.” “My mistake, Madame,” he responds in playful homage. “I promise to be ready to service your every need upon your return, whenever that might be.” “That's more like it.” She says with a gleam in her eye while giving his balls a good squeeze. With a quick peck on the cheek, she turns and goes out the door. Through the front window, he watches as she saunters down the walk to her car. As she is about to get in, she turns towards the house. Looking right at him, she pulls at the opening of her loosely buttoned blouse and flashes a lovely tit at him, then gets in the car and drives away. He sits down to watch the evening news, but he can't keep his mind on what he's watching. His thoughts keep drifting to what April might have in mind when she gets home. Aside from normal, run-of-the-mill sex, from time to time, they had played other games. It could be based on a theme, such as ‘The Seductive College Nympho.' ‘The Barber' (where one of them gets a pubic trim or even a shave). ‘Hot Fudge Sundae' (while helplessly bound and laying naked on a plastic sheet, ice-cold ice cream is scooped onto very select and sensitive spots of the body. This is followed by drizzling hot fudge on his or her naked body. That is only half the fun because the other gets to take their time licking it all up.) They had even dabbled a little bit in 'Water Sports' (they had peed on each other in the shower several times. And when out camping one time, after drinking way too much, they held a pissing contest to see which one could pee the furthest, longest, and hardest. April won on all counts.) Once, after washing his hair, April rinsed the lather from his scalp by pissing on his head. But one form of role-playing they regularly come back to is 'Mistress and Servant.' At any other time, the responsibilities and chores of daily life are shared equally between them. But in the bedroom, something just clicks when they play these “dom” and “sub” roles. Interestingly, after several sessions with Derrick playing The Master to her role of The Servant, it became apparent that the results were never as satisfying as when April played The Master. With April's more expressive imagination, it became only natural for Derick to assume the role of Servant. This arrangement just worked for them both. After about an hour of glancing at the television and checking some porn on his phone, Derrick headed upstairs to take that shower. While the water is getting hot, he is thinking about that pussy of hers. Leaking the honeydew that he loves to lick and lap. When April gets going, the cunt oil flows so heavily that it rolls down her legs and between her ass cheeks. The sweet aroma and taste never fail to get Derrick so excited that he'll lick the entire slice between her legs, including around her dusty rosebud. All of which drives her to greater heights of pleasure and makes those juices flow heavier. He returns his attention to her big pink pussy, licking and sucking harder. Her cunt is opening and closing, and her hips start rocking up and down as if inviting the first hard cock to come along to slide in as far as it can go. She will still beg for more. Getting lathered up, Mr. Happy is rock hard and begging to be grasped firmly for a good stroking. As tempting as that is, Derrick resists the urge, instead making sure to clean every square inch, from head to toe and front to back, before rinsing off. Still dripping wet, his erection bobbing from side to side, he nakedly paces the house. Eventually, he plops himself onto the bed to finish air-drying in the warm summer breeze coming in through the open window. The orange, dusky sky of summer following a sunset gave the bedroom a dim, warm glow. Derrick soon drifted off to sleep dreaming about his sexy wife. His rock-hard cock laying across the flat of his belly – all five inches of it. He dreamed of her full breasts capped with those sensitive nipples that he so loved to suck and nibble on. This always brought on the sweet nectar that then flowed so abundantly from her beautiful pussy. Someday, he is going to get up the nerve to order one of those strap-on dildos he's seen promoted on adult websites. Designed especially to fit over a less than adequate male member. If years of internet porn have taught him anything, it's that he didn't come equipped with the best hardware. But an artificial phallus should make up for those shortcomings. And won't April be surprised when he puts that on! Then he can fuck her like he's never been able to fuck her before. The way a woman's cunt was intended to be fucked! Derrick so desperately wanted to see the blissful expression on his wife's face the first time he slides that lifelike cock into her. Like watching his very own porno movie, he has had visions of what it would look like from various angles. Watching this larger dong gliding in and out of the only pussy he has ever had the pleasure of knowing so intimately. An additional bonus of using a strap-on would be, he'll never again have to worry about cumming too soon. Whether he has an erection or not, the dildo never goes soft. That's when he'll be able fuck her juicy cunt much longer than he ever could otherwise. They will fuck until they can't fuck any longer. But she will want more. She always wants more! His dream soon takes on a life all its own. The cock he sees plowing in and out of April's pussy is suddenly not his own. Nor is it the strap-on dildo. Like an outsider looking in, he is watching his darling wife impatiently, imploringly urging some stranger to fuck her. To fuck her HARD! To fuck her like her husband can't. That remark draws Derrick's attention from his wife's face to the massive cock taking long and steady strokes as it penetrates regions of April's interior that Derrick has never come close to reaching. Derrick is mesmerized by the ability of his wife's cunt to welcome such a massive piece of man-meat without any signs of pain. Only the sounds of extreme pleasure fill the room and Derrick's ears. Strangely, this passion play doesn't stir Derrick from his sleep. Instead, he is entranced by the erotic scene playing out before him as this faceless stranger ravages the love of his life, taking her to all new sexual heights. It is both heart-rending and exciting at the same time. The rhythm of the conjoined lovers increases along with the lustful grunts and moans with the approaching climax. Derrick knows he should try putting a stop to this before she ends up with a belly full of a stranger's baby-batter. But then again, he is just as excited to witness the expression on his wife's face when massive quantities of cum explode into the deepest recesses of her insides. Just as the lovers were reaching a manic crescendo of lust, Derrick felt a tickling sensation on his belly. That's when reality began to drag him from dreamland. Warm lips were suctioning up the puddle of pre-cum that lay on his belly. Derrick cracked open his eyelids. Outside the window, it is now completely dark. Inside, only by the dim light from a lit candle on the headboard of their bed can he make out that April is completely naked, kneeling beside him. April's firm tits hardly dangle or sway. Her heavenly ass floats temptingly in mid-air. Eager to return the favor, Derrick can hardly wait to taste his wife's succulent pussy. Ever so slowly, he slides himself down until he can maneuver her lower end over his head. Bringing his hands around the backs of her legs, his fingertips discover her trimmed but thick bush is matted with moisture. A spontaneous thought flashes through his mind; What if this dampness is the result of his darling wife already having had wild, sweaty, and wanton sex? With a stranger?! It was said in jest. But April had warned of that possibility. Even that possibility could not dissuade him. No matter what, Derrick would not be denied the opportunity to get his tongue into his wife's pussy. Dare he look first for confirming evidence? Or should he just close his eyes, take the deep dive and let the chips fall where they may? His fingertips fought against the sliminess that coated her pussy lips to spread them wide. Only then would the truth be exposed. As it turned out, there was not a single visible trace that April had been with another man. A sense of relief came over Derrick that his wife had remained faithful to him and their wedding vows. Resting his head back down for a moment, Derrick watched as a few rivulets of her honey seeped out of her love hole and rolled down the length of her ever-enlarging pink gash. It rolls down the clit, which is getting longer and harder by the moment. Droplets of sensual oils formed on her clit then drip down into his hungry mouth, which he savors and then swallows. Another thought occurred to him. What if they used a condom? Evidence of any dalliance on April's part wouldn't be visible. There was only one way to be sure. The smell and taste of latex and lube would provide all the evidence needed. Curiosity took over. Raising his head, he inhales deeply, then without waiting for the results of the sniff test, he takes one long lick of her gash. Nothing unusual here. Everything tastes and smells just a perfect as it always had. Reassured in his wife's fidelity, he sticks his tongue out further and deeper into her inflamed crack, circling and lapping faster and faster. Laying on his back always helped to ensure little of her honey would go anywhere but into his mouth. Using his tongue, he tries to dig out more and more of her musky cream. Derrick may enjoy this even more than April does. What Derrick had no way of knowing, that April was having her own incidental thoughts. “If only he could lick and fuck at the same time. Oh, god! What a nasty thought. Having a tongue lapping at my pussy while a cock is plowing my pussy. Now that would be heaven.” As April is having these thoughts, she is busily attending to his throbbing manhood. Teasingly only sucking on the round head. Artfully swirling her tongue around the tip then across the little lips of the piss hole, swabbing out the steady stream of pre-cum. After a while, changing to long, deep bobs of her head. Devouring the entire shaft. Of course, Derrick's dick is only long enough for just the mushroom to reach and be tightly surrounded by her throat. At the same time, she cups, rolls, and squeezes his ball sack. “I wish…,” April thinks to herself. “I wish I could trade in Derrick's dick for something more substantial. The length is passable. But why does it have to be as skinny as a broomstick?” she laments. “I love him to pieces. But if I could change just one thing, it would be for him to have a thicker cock.” This train of thought is interrupted when she senses that he is getting too worked up, too soon. She doesn't want him cumming yet. And not into her mouth! She has other plans. Releasing his pulsing dick from her lips, she inserts her index finger into her mouth and coats it good with spit. Now, while lightly kissing and licking his dick down to the base, she slowly begins tickling and teasing the puckered rim of his asshole. From between her legs, she hears Derrick softly moan. Slowly, very slowly, she pushes her fingertip past his sphincter. Deeper and deeper. She watches as his dick bobs and throbs, bouncing off his belly as it strains to get larger and harder. With her finger fully planted in his anus, she begins massaging his prostate gland. Doing this causes even heavier and thicker pre-cum to flow out of his swollen erection, which she is all too happy to lick up and swallow. April has never been a fan of having cum in her mouth. But Derrick's pre-cum is the sweetest she's ever tasted. She feels Derrick's hands on her tits as he softly kneads them. She can feel his tongue darting in and out of her pussy, just slightly opening the membranes of her love hole. She knows her juices are flowing, and she contracts her kegel muscles hoping to squeeze out larger quantities into his waiting mouth. But this is torture, for what she really wants right now is a cock. A big, thick cock! And, what the heck, a longer one too. The kind she's seen on her own porn searches. This is not the first time to have these thoughts. But it is the first while in the midst of a sexual romp with her husband. At least once, she'd like to know what it feels like to have that kind of fullness. To get fucked in ways she has never been able to experience with her husband. Something only a much bigger cock could accomplish. But would something that large actually fit? She'd be willing to try. How exciting it would be to feel something that large and meaty pushing against the opening of her pussy. As if making sure it can fit. After all, her cunt has only had a real cock of half the size this faceless lover is packing. The longer April's mind thinks about it, the hornier she is getting. And as horny as she is right now, she's sure she could take it to the hilt! Suddenly it pushes through, and she can feel her soft pink membranes being stretched like never before. With each stroke, the oversized rod goes a little deeper, like a sword, piercing its way into realms thus far never explored. As it does, she senses only the slightest discomfort. But this is instantly followed by intense pleasure. Finally, it is almost all the way in. April has never known such sensations. Then the large shaft is drawn out until only the tip is still parting the lips. The sudden loss of fullness is almost unbearable. Then, suddenly, with one final lunge, the stranger shoves his massive cock is all the way into her hot cunt. Who is fucking who? With each mighty thrust, she rises up to greet it. She is fucking that man-meat with total abandon. With each thrust, she can feel it pushing on her cervix. She is moaning and groaning with delight. It feels as though the cock is getting even harder, and better yet, bigger! Suddenly the cock explodes with lots of cum! It's like white-hot lava filling her insides in ways she has never felt before. There is so much cum; it's pushing its way through her cervix and filling her womb. That did it. April's entire body is overtaken by a rocking orgasm. She is almost screaming with pleasure as she presses her pussy firmly onto her husband's gaping mouth and talented tongue. Spraying and smearing her juices all over his face. As she is regaining her senses, she realizes it was all due to her fantasy. She lies there a few moments longer, relaxes, and thinks, “WOW! That was great. I need to use that fantasy more often.” Rising up and off Derrick's chest, she notices he is still in need of relief. Her dreaming had caused her to ignore her husband's needy dick. Removing herself from Derrick's still attentive mouth, she turns and bends down to give him a kiss on the lips. His face is covered with her juices, thick and sticky from her orgasm. This causes her to momentarily wonder what pussy juice tastes like, first hand, direct from the source. Rather than second hand, either from his lips or off her fingers. This triggers another thought. A very devious idea pops into April's head. She immediately proceeds with a plan. Turning her back to him, she maneuvers herself until she is straddling his waiting hard-on. Holding his erection upright, she lines it up with her vagina, and, as if trying to puncture something deep inside her, she drops down on it with all of her weight. They start rocking together. Derrick loves this position because he can watch his rod going in and out of her dripping pussy. He is so turned on by the sight of this that he must use every bit of control to delay cumming. To assist in delaying the inevitable, he lays still. Letting his wife do all the work. This is a method they had worked out and used many times before. Still, April is being much more assertive than usual. An indication that she is more turned on than she has been in some time. Normally, she would use this position to help prolong their session. However, that doesn't seem to be her objective this time. Once again, she has shoved her index finger deep into Derrick's anus and stroking his prostate gland. At the same time, she is working so hard on his now well-oiled staff. Pumping faster and squeezing harder. Rather than trying to delay his orgasm, she seems to be trying to intensify it. As if she is desperate to feel an excess of hot jizz squirting inside her. And it's working. Unable to hold back any longer, Derrick is rocked by one of the most powerful orgasms he's had in a long time, possibly ever. He can feel big gobs of his cream flowing through his cock and into the confines of April's hungry cunt. And she is milking it out of him for all she's worth. Wringing out his balls and pressing firmly against his prostate while still holding tightly to his cock with the constricted membranes of her cunt. Derrick's heart is pounding. He closes his eyes for a moment to catch his breath and make the room stop spinning. Finally, once April is sure his dick has spit out the last of his semen, she lifts herself off him. Without looking, he is aware when his limping prick being released from her snatch and drops to his stomach. After a moment or two, Derrick groggily reopens his eyes. As he does, he is greeted with her pussy hovering directly over his mouth, white cream oozing from it. The exact scene he had expected to see when April first came home. by DeanaBard for Literotica

The  April and Derrick series. by Deana Bard. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories. It's early evening when April is getting ready to go out for a few hours. Freshly showered and sweet-smelling, she puts on tight pair of jeans that enhance her firm thighs. The center seam separates and molds her two round ass cheeks but also tends to accentuate the lips of her pouting pussy. For a top, she chooses a light-colored silk blouse, sans a bra as usual, with the top three buttons undone to show some cleavage and sheer enough to just make out the darkness of her nipples.To her husband, Derrick, all of this preparation just for a night out with ‘the girls' at one of the local nightclubs seems a bit over the top. But he keeps those thoughts to himself. As she's about to open the door to leave, she looks over her shoulder with a twinkle in her eye and says, “Be showered by the time I get home.” Enamored by her beauty, Derrick steps over to her to give her a goodbye kiss. While doing so, his hand cups one of her breasts. She returns his gesture by putting her arms around him pulling him close. She opens her mouth, sticking her long wet tongue past his parting lips and deep into his hot mouth. The silk covering her soft but firm breast can not hide the erect state of her nipples. She lets out a soft moan when he gives the little brown pebble a pinch. Suddenly she breaks the kiss, takes her arms from around him, and gives her husband a punishing look. Stunned, he asks, “What's the matter, Babe?” “You're always too tired any other time,” she snaps. “So why do you wait until I have people waiting for me? I'm about to be late?” “Hey, my head wants it often,” he says defensively. “I can't help it if my libido and this head…, “pointing to his crotch, “can't keep up with you.” She comes close to him again, grabs the slight bulge forming in the front of his pants, and says, “Well, just make sure that you're clean and ready by the time I get home. Maybe then…” “I think I can manage that,” he says, enjoying this game they sometimes play. “If you only THINK you can manage that then,” she says in mock seriousness, “I might THINK about not coming home until morning.” He's heard that before. It's all part of their game. April smiles a wicked smile and says, “Don't forget, there are all these men who buy us drinks all night. Each hoping that they'll get lucky with us. Maybe I'll just have to let one of them serve my needs.” “My mistake, Madame,” he responds in playful homage. “I promise to be ready to service your every need upon your return, whenever that might be.” “That's more like it.” She says with a gleam in her eye while giving his balls a good squeeze. With a quick peck on the cheek, she turns and goes out the door. Through the front window, he watches as she saunters down the walk to her car. As she is about to get in, she turns towards the house. Looking right at him, she pulls at the opening of her loosely buttoned blouse and flashes a lovely tit at him, then gets in the car and drives away. He sits down to watch the evening news, but he can't keep his mind on what he's watching. His thoughts keep drifting to what April might have in mind when she gets home. Aside from normal, run-of-the-mill sex, from time to time, they had played other games. It could be based on a theme, such as ‘The Seductive College Nympho.' ‘The Barber' (where one of them gets a pubic trim or even a shave). ‘Hot Fudge Sundae' (while helplessly bound and laying naked on a plastic sheet, ice-cold ice cream is scooped onto very select and sensitive spots of the body. This is followed by drizzling hot fudge on his or her naked body. That is only half the fun because the other gets to take their time licking it all up.) They had even dabbled a little bit in 'Water Sports' (they had peed on each other in the shower several times. And when out camping one time, after drinking way too much, they held a pissing contest to see which one could pee the furthest, longest, and hardest. April won on all counts.) Once, after washing his hair, April rinsed the lather from his scalp by pissing on his head. But one form of role-playing they regularly come back to is 'Mistress and Servant.' At any other time, the responsibilities and chores of daily life are shared equally between them. But in the bedroom, something just clicks when they play these “dom” and “sub” roles. Interestingly, after several sessions with Derrick playing The Master to her role of The Servant, it became apparent that the results were never as satisfying as when April played The Master. With April's more expressive imagination, it became only natural for Derick to assume the role of Servant. This arrangement just worked for them both. After about an hour of glancing at the television and checking some porn on his phone, Derrick headed upstairs to take that shower. While the water is getting hot, he is thinking about that pussy of hers. Leaking the honeydew that he loves to lick and lap. When April gets going, the cunt oil flows so heavily that it rolls down her legs and between her ass cheeks. The sweet aroma and taste never fail to get Derrick so excited that he'll lick the entire slice between her legs, including around her dusty rosebud. All of which drives her to greater heights of pleasure and makes those juices flow heavier. He returns his attention to her big pink pussy, licking and sucking harder. Her cunt is opening and closing, and her hips start rocking up and down as if inviting the first hard cock to come along to slide in as far as it can go. She will still beg for more. Getting lathered up, Mr. Happy is rock hard and begging to be grasped firmly for a good stroking. As tempting as that is, Derrick resists the urge, instead making sure to clean every square inch, from head to toe and front to back, before rinsing off. Still dripping wet, his erection bobbing from side to side, he nakedly paces the house. Eventually, he plops himself onto the bed to finish air-drying in the warm summer breeze coming in through the open window. The orange, dusky sky of summer following a sunset gave the bedroom a dim, warm glow. Derrick soon drifted off to sleep dreaming about his sexy wife. His rock-hard cock laying across the flat of his belly – all five inches of it. He dreamed of her full breasts capped with those sensitive nipples that he so loved to suck and nibble on. This always brought on the sweet nectar that then flowed so abundantly from her beautiful pussy. Someday, he is going to get up the nerve to order one of those strap-on dildos he's seen promoted on adult websites. Designed especially to fit over a less than adequate male member. If years of internet porn have taught him anything, it's that he didn't come equipped with the best hardware. But an artificial phallus should make up for those shortcomings. And won't April be surprised when he puts that on! Then he can fuck her like he's never been able to fuck her before. The way a woman's cunt was intended to be fucked! Derrick so desperately wanted to see the blissful expression on his wife's face the first time he slides that lifelike cock into her. Like watching his very own porno movie, he has had visions of what it would look like from various angles. Watching this larger dong gliding in and out of the only pussy he has ever had the pleasure of knowing so intimately. An additional bonus of using a strap-on would be, he'll never again have to worry about cumming too soon. Whether he has an erection or not, the dildo never goes soft. That's when he'll be able fuck her juicy cunt much longer than he ever could otherwise. They will fuck until they can't fuck any longer. But she will want more. She always wants more! His dream soon takes on a life all its own. The cock he sees plowing in and out of April's pussy is suddenly not his own. Nor is it the strap-on dildo. Like an outsider looking in, he is watching his darling wife impatiently, imploringly urging some stranger to fuck her. To fuck her HARD! To fuck her like her husband can't. That remark draws Derrick's attention from his wife's face to the massive cock taking long and steady strokes as it penetrates regions of April's interior that Derrick has never come close to reaching. Derrick is mesmerized by the ability of his wife's cunt to welcome such a massive piece of man-meat without any signs of pain. Only the sounds of extreme pleasure fill the room and Derrick's ears. Strangely, this passion play doesn't stir Derrick from his sleep. Instead, he is entranced by the erotic scene playing out before him as this faceless stranger ravages the love of his life, taking her to all new sexual heights. It is both heart-rending and exciting at the same time. The rhythm of the conjoined lovers increases along with the lustful grunts and moans with the approaching climax. Derrick knows he should try putting a stop to this before she ends up with a belly full of a stranger's baby-batter. But then again, he is just as excited to witness the expression on his wife's face when massive quantities of cum explode into the deepest recesses of her insides. Just as the lovers were reaching a manic crescendo of lust, Derrick felt a tickling sensation on his belly. That's when reality began to drag him from dreamland. Warm lips were suctioning up the puddle of pre-cum that lay on his belly. Derrick cracked open his eyelids. Outside the window, it is now completely dark. Inside, only by the dim light from a lit candle on the headboard of their bed can he make out that April is completely naked, kneeling beside him. April's firm tits hardly dangle or sway. Her heavenly ass floats temptingly in mid-air. Eager to return the favor, Derrick can hardly wait to taste his wife's succulent pussy. Ever so slowly, he slides himself down until he can maneuver her lower end over his head. Bringing his hands around the backs of her legs, his fingertips discover her trimmed but thick bush is matted with moisture. A spontaneous thought flashes through his mind; What if this dampness is the result of his darling wife already having had wild, sweaty, and wanton sex? With a stranger?! It was said in jest. But April had warned of that possibility. Even that possibility could not dissuade him. No matter what, Derrick would not be denied the opportunity to get his tongue into his wife's pussy. Dare he look first for confirming evidence? Or should he just close his eyes, take the deep dive and let the chips fall where they may? His fingertips fought against the sliminess that coated her pussy lips to spread them wide. Only then would the truth be exposed. As it turned out, there was not a single visible trace that April had been with another man. A sense of relief came over Derrick that his wife had remained faithful to him and their wedding vows. Resting his head back down for a moment, Derrick watched as a few rivulets of her honey seeped out of her love hole and rolled down the length of her ever-enlarging pink gash. It rolls down the clit, which is getting longer and harder by the moment. Droplets of sensual oils formed on her clit then drip down into his hungry mouth, which he savors and then swallows. Another thought occurred to him. What if they used a condom? Evidence of any dalliance on April's part wouldn't be visible. There was only one way to be sure. The smell and taste of latex and lube would provide all the evidence needed. Curiosity took over. Raising his head, he inhales deeply, then without waiting for the results of the sniff test, he takes one long lick of her gash. Nothing unusual here. Everything tastes and smells just a perfect as it always had. Reassured in his wife's fidelity, he sticks his tongue out further and deeper into her inflamed crack, circling and lapping faster and faster. Laying on his back always helped to ensure little of her honey would go anywhere but into his mouth. Using his tongue, he tries to dig out more and more of her musky cream. Derrick may enjoy this even more than April does. What Derrick had no way of knowing, that April was having her own incidental thoughts. “If only he could lick and fuck at the same time. Oh, god! What a nasty thought. Having a tongue lapping at my pussy while a cock is plowing my pussy. Now that would be heaven.” As April is having these thoughts, she is busily attending to his throbbing manhood. Teasingly only sucking on the round head. Artfully swirling her tongue around the tip then across the little lips of the piss hole, swabbing out the steady stream of pre-cum. After a while, changing to long, deep bobs of her head. Devouring the entire shaft. Of course, Derrick's dick is only long enough for just the mushroom to reach and be tightly surrounded by her throat. At the same time, she cups, rolls, and squeezes his ball sack. “I wish…,” April thinks to herself. “I wish I could trade in Derrick's dick for something more substantial. The length is passable. But why does it have to be as skinny as a broomstick?” she laments. “I love him to pieces. But if I could change just one thing, it would be for him to have a thicker cock.” This train of thought is interrupted when she senses that he is getting too worked up, too soon. She doesn't want him cumming yet. And not into her mouth! She has other plans. Releasing his pulsing dick from her lips, she inserts her index finger into her mouth and coats it good with spit. Now, while lightly kissing and licking his dick down to the base, she slowly begins tickling and teasing the puckered rim of his asshole. From between her legs, she hears Derrick softly moan. Slowly, very slowly, she pushes her fingertip past his sphincter. Deeper and deeper. She watches as his dick bobs and throbs, bouncing off his belly as it strains to get larger and harder. With her finger fully planted in his anus, she begins massaging his prostate gland. Doing this causes even heavier and thicker pre-cum to flow out of his swollen erection, which she is all too happy to lick up and swallow. April has never been a fan of having cum in her mouth. But Derrick's pre-cum is the sweetest she's ever tasted. She feels Derrick's hands on her tits as he softly kneads them. She can feel his tongue darting in and out of her pussy, just slightly opening the membranes of her love hole. She knows her juices are flowing, and she contracts her kegel muscles hoping to squeeze out larger quantities into his waiting mouth. But this is torture, for what she really wants right now is a cock. A big, thick cock! And, what the heck, a longer one too. The kind she's seen on her own porn searches. This is not the first time to have these thoughts. But it is the first while in the midst of a sexual romp with her husband. At least once, she'd like to know what it feels like to have that kind of fullness. To get fucked in ways she has never been able to experience with her husband. Something only a much bigger cock could accomplish. But would something that large actually fit? She'd be willing to try. How exciting it would be to feel something that large and meaty pushing against the opening of her pussy. As if making sure it can fit. After all, her cunt has only had a real cock of half the size this faceless lover is packing. The longer April's mind thinks about it, the hornier she is getting. And as horny as she is right now, she's sure she could take it to the hilt! Suddenly it pushes through, and she can feel her soft pink membranes being stretched like never before. With each stroke, the oversized rod goes a little deeper, like a sword, piercing its way into realms thus far never explored. As it does, she senses only the slightest discomfort. But this is instantly followed by intense pleasure. Finally, it is almost all the way in. April has never known such sensations. Then the large shaft is drawn out until only the tip is still parting the lips. The sudden loss of fullness is almost unbearable. Then, suddenly, with one final lunge, the stranger shoves his massive cock is all the way into her hot cunt. Who is fucking who? With each mighty thrust, she rises up to greet it. She is fucking that man-meat with total abandon. With each thrust, she can feel it pushing on her cervix. She is moaning and groaning with delight. It feels as though the cock is getting even harder, and better yet, bigger! Suddenly the cock explodes with lots of cum! It's like white-hot lava filling her insides in ways she has never felt before. There is so much cum; it's pushing its way through her cervix and filling her womb. That did it. April's entire body is overtaken by a rocking orgasm. She is almost screaming with pleasure as she presses her pussy firmly onto her husband's gaping mouth and talented tongue. Spraying and smearing her juices all over his face. As she is regaining her senses, she realizes it was all due to her fantasy. She lies there a few moments longer, relaxes, and thinks, “WOW! That was great. I need to use that fantasy more often.” Rising up and off Derrick's chest, she notices he is still in need of relief. Her dreaming had caused her to ignore her husband's needy dick. Removing herself from Derrick's still attentive mouth, she turns and bends down to give him a kiss on the lips. His face is covered with her juices, thick and sticky from her orgasm. This causes her to momentarily wonder what pussy juice tastes like, first hand, direct from the source. Rather than second hand, either from his lips or off her fingers. This triggers another thought. A very devious idea pops into April's head. She immediately proceeds with a plan. Turning her back to him, she maneuvers herself until she is straddling his waiting hard-on. Holding his erection upright, she lines it up with her vagina, and, as if trying to puncture something deep inside her, she drops down on it with all of her weight. They start rocking together. Derrick loves this position because he can watch his rod going in and out of her dripping pussy. He is so turned on by the sight of this that he must use every bit of control to delay cumming. To assist in delaying the inevitable, he lays still. Letting his wife do all the work. This is a method they had worked out and used many times before. Still, April is being much more assertive than usual. An indication that she is more turned on than she has been in some time. Normally, she would use this position to help prolong their session. However, that doesn't seem to be her objective this time. Once again, she has shoved her index finger deep into Derrick's anus and stroking his prostate gland. At the same time, she is working so hard on his now well-oiled staff. Pumping faster and squeezing harder. Rather than trying to delay his orgasm, she seems to be trying to intensify it. As if she is desperate to feel an excess of hot jizz squirting inside her. And it's working. Unable to hold back any longer, Derrick is rocked by one of the most powerful orgasms he's had in a long time, possibly ever. He can feel big gobs of his cream flowing through his cock and into the confines of April's hungry cunt. And she is milking it out of him for all she's worth. Wringing out his balls and pressing firmly against his prostate while still holding tightly to his cock with the constricted membranes of her cunt. Derrick's heart is pounding. He closes his eyes for a moment to catch his breath and make the room stop spinning. Finally, once April is sure his dick has spit out the last of his semen, she lifts herself off him. Without looking, he is aware when his limping prick being released from her snatch and drops to his stomach. After a moment or two, Derrick groggily reopens his eyes. As he does, he is greeted with her pussy hovering directly over his mouth, white cream oozing from it. The exact scene he had expected to see when April first came home. by DeanaBard for Literotica

The  April and Derrick series. by Deana Bard. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories. It's early evening when April is getting ready to go out for a few hours. Freshly showered and sweet-smelling, she puts on tight pair of jeans that enhance her firm thighs. The center seam separates and molds her two round ass cheeks but also tends to accentuate the lips of her pouting pussy. For a top, she chooses a light-colored silk blouse, sans a bra as usual, with the top three buttons undone to show some cleavage and sheer enough to just make out the darkness of her nipples.To her husband, Derrick, all of this preparation just for a night out with ‘the girls' at one of the local nightclubs seems a bit over the top. But he keeps those thoughts to himself. As she's about to open the door to leave, she looks over her shoulder with a twinkle in her eye and says, “Be showered by the time I get home.” Enamored by her beauty, Derrick steps over to her to give her a goodbye kiss. While doing so, his hand cups one of her breasts. She returns his gesture by putting her arms around him pulling him close. She opens her mouth, sticking her long wet tongue past his parting lips and deep into his hot mouth. The silk covering her soft but firm breast can not hide the erect state of her nipples. She lets out a soft moan when he gives the little brown pebble a pinch. Suddenly she breaks the kiss, takes her arms from around him, and gives her husband a punishing look. Stunned, he asks, “What's the matter, Babe?” “You're always too tired any other time,” she snaps. “So why do you wait until I have people waiting for me? I'm about to be late?” “Hey, my head wants it often,” he says defensively. “I can't help it if my libido and this head…, “pointing to his crotch, “can't keep up with you.” She comes close to him again, grabs the slight bulge forming in the front of his pants, and says, “Well, just make sure that you're clean and ready by the time I get home. Maybe then…” “I think I can manage that,” he says, enjoying this game they sometimes play. “If you only THINK you can manage that then,” she says in mock seriousness, “I might THINK about not coming home until morning.” He's heard that before. It's all part of their game. April smiles a wicked smile and says, “Don't forget, there are all these men who buy us drinks all night. Each hoping that they'll get lucky with us. Maybe I'll just have to let one of them serve my needs.” “My mistake, Madame,” he responds in playful homage. “I promise to be ready to service your every need upon your return, whenever that might be.” “That's more like it.” She says with a gleam in her eye while giving his balls a good squeeze. With a quick peck on the cheek, she turns and goes out the door. Through the front window, he watches as she saunters down the walk to her car. As she is about to get in, she turns towards the house. Looking right at him, she pulls at the opening of her loosely buttoned blouse and flashes a lovely tit at him, then gets in the car and drives away. He sits down to watch the evening news, but he can't keep his mind on what he's watching. His thoughts keep drifting to what April might have in mind when she gets home. Aside from normal, run-of-the-mill sex, from time to time, they had played other games. It could be based on a theme, such as ‘The Seductive College Nympho.' ‘The Barber' (where one of them gets a pubic trim or even a shave). ‘Hot Fudge Sundae' (while helplessly bound and laying naked on a plastic sheet, ice-cold ice cream is scooped onto very select and sensitive spots of the body. This is followed by drizzling hot fudge on his or her naked body. That is only half the fun because the other gets to take their time licking it all up.) They had even dabbled a little bit in 'Water Sports' (they had peed on each other in the shower several times. And when out camping one time, after drinking way too much, they held a pissing contest to see which one could pee the furthest, longest, and hardest. April won on all counts.) Once, after washing his hair, April rinsed the lather from his scalp by pissing on his head. But one form of role-playing they regularly come back to is 'Mistress and Servant.' At any other time, the responsibilities and chores of daily life are shared equally between them. But in the bedroom, something just clicks when they play these “dom” and “sub” roles. Interestingly, after several sessions with Derrick playing The Master to her role of The Servant, it became apparent that the results were never as satisfying as when April played The Master. With April's more expressive imagination, it became only natural for Derick to assume the role of Servant. This arrangement just worked for them both. After about an hour of glancing at the television and checking some porn on his phone, Derrick headed upstairs to take that shower. While the water is getting hot, he is thinking about that pussy of hers. Leaking the honeydew that he loves to lick and lap. When April gets going, the cunt oil flows so heavily that it rolls down her legs and between her ass cheeks. The sweet aroma and taste never fail to get Derrick so excited that he'll lick the entire slice between her legs, including around her dusty rosebud. All of which drives her to greater heights of pleasure and makes those juices flow heavier. He returns his attention to her big pink pussy, licking and sucking harder. Her cunt is opening and closing, and her hips start rocking up and down as if inviting the first hard cock to come along to slide in as far as it can go. She will still beg for more. Getting lathered up, Mr. Happy is rock hard and begging to be grasped firmly for a good stroking. As tempting as that is, Derrick resists the urge, instead making sure to clean every square inch, from head to toe and front to back, before rinsing off. Still dripping wet, his erection bobbing from side to side, he nakedly paces the house. Eventually, he plops himself onto the bed to finish air-drying in the warm summer breeze coming in through the open window. The orange, dusky sky of summer following a sunset gave the bedroom a dim, warm glow. Derrick soon drifted off to sleep dreaming about his sexy wife. His rock-hard cock laying across the flat of his belly – all five inches of it. He dreamed of her full breasts capped with those sensitive nipples that he so loved to suck and nibble on. This always brought on the sweet nectar that then flowed so abundantly from her beautiful pussy. Someday, he is going to get up the nerve to order one of those strap-on dildos he's seen promoted on adult websites. Designed especially to fit over a less than adequate male member. If years of internet porn have taught him anything, it's that he didn't come equipped with the best hardware. But an artificial phallus should make up for those shortcomings. And won't April be surprised when he puts that on! Then he can fuck her like he's never been able to fuck her before. The way a woman's cunt was intended to be fucked! Derrick so desperately wanted to see the blissful expression on his wife's face the first time he slides that lifelike cock into her. Like watching his very own porno movie, he has had visions of what it would look like from various angles. Watching this larger dong gliding in and out of the only pussy he has ever had the pleasure of knowing so intimately. An additional bonus of using a strap-on would be, he'll never again have to worry about cumming too soon. Whether he has an erection or not, the dildo never goes soft. That's when he'll be able fuck her juicy cunt much longer than he ever could otherwise. They will fuck until they can't fuck any longer. But she will want more. She always wants more! His dream soon takes on a life all its own. The cock he sees plowing in and out of April's pussy is suddenly not his own. Nor is it the strap-on dildo. Like an outsider looking in, he is watching his darling wife impatiently, imploringly urging some stranger to fuck her. To fuck her HARD! To fuck her like her husband can't. That remark draws Derrick's attention from his wife's face to the massive cock taking long and steady strokes as it penetrates regions of April's interior that Derrick has never come close to reaching. Derrick is mesmerized by the ability of his wife's cunt to welcome such a massive piece of man-meat without any signs of pain. Only the sounds of extreme pleasure fill the room and Derrick's ears. Strangely, this passion play doesn't stir Derrick from his sleep. Instead, he is entranced by the erotic scene playing out before him as this faceless stranger ravages the love of his life, taking her to all new sexual heights. It is both heart-rending and exciting at the same time. The rhythm of the conjoined lovers increases along with the lustful grunts and moans with the approaching climax. Derrick knows he should try putting a stop to this before she ends up with a belly full of a stranger's baby-batter. But then again, he is just as excited to witness the expression on his wife's face when massive quantities of cum explode into the deepest recesses of her insides. Just as the lovers were reaching a manic crescendo of lust, Derrick felt a tickling sensation on his belly. That's when reality began to drag him from dreamland. Warm lips were suctioning up the puddle of pre-cum that lay on his belly. Derrick cracked open his eyelids. Outside the window, it is now completely dark. Inside, only by the dim light from a lit candle on the headboard of their bed can he make out that April is completely naked, kneeling beside him. April's firm tits hardly dangle or sway. Her heavenly ass floats temptingly in mid-air. Eager to return the favor, Derrick can hardly wait to taste his wife's succulent pussy. Ever so slowly, he slides himself down until he can maneuver her lower end over his head. Bringing his hands around the backs of her legs, his fingertips discover her trimmed but thick bush is matted with moisture. A spontaneous thought flashes through his mind; What if this dampness is the result of his darling wife already having had wild, sweaty, and wanton sex? With a stranger?! It was said in jest. But April had warned of that possibility. Even that possibility could not dissuade him. No matter what, Derrick would not be denied the opportunity to get his tongue into his wife's pussy. Dare he look first for confirming evidence? Or should he just close his eyes, take the deep dive and let the chips fall where they may? His fingertips fought against the sliminess that coated her pussy lips to spread them wide. Only then would the truth be exposed. As it turned out, there was not a single visible trace that April had been with another man. A sense of relief came over Derrick that his wife had remained faithful to him and their wedding vows. Resting his head back down for a moment, Derrick watched as a few rivulets of her honey seeped out of her love hole and rolled down the length of her ever-enlarging pink gash. It rolls down the clit, which is getting longer and harder by the moment. Droplets of sensual oils formed on her clit then drip down into his hungry mouth, which he savors and then swallows. Another thought occurred to him. What if they used a condom? Evidence of any dalliance on April's part wouldn't be visible. There was only one way to be sure. The smell and taste of latex and lube would provide all the evidence needed. Curiosity took over. Raising his head, he inhales deeply, then without waiting for the results of the sniff test, he takes one long lick of her gash. Nothing unusual here. Everything tastes and smells just a perfect as it always had. Reassured in his wife's fidelity, he sticks his tongue out further and deeper into her inflamed crack, circling and lapping faster and faster. Laying on his back always helped to ensure little of her honey would go anywhere but into his mouth. Using his tongue, he tries to dig out more and more of her musky cream. Derrick may enjoy this even more than April does. What Derrick had no way of knowing, that April was having her own incidental thoughts. “If only he could lick and fuck at the same time. Oh, god! What a nasty thought. Having a tongue lapping at my pussy while a cock is plowing my pussy. Now that would be heaven.” As April is having these thoughts, she is busily attending to his throbbing manhood. Teasingly only sucking on the round head. Artfully swirling her tongue around the tip then across the little lips of the piss hole, swabbing out the steady stream of pre-cum. After a while, changing to long, deep bobs of her head. Devouring the entire shaft. Of course, Derrick's dick is only long enough for just the mushroom to reach and be tightly surrounded by her throat. At the same time, she cups, rolls, and squeezes his ball sack. “I wish…,” April thinks to herself. “I wish I could trade in Derrick's dick for something more substantial. The length is passable. But why does it have to be as skinny as a broomstick?” she laments. “I love him to pieces. But if I could change just one thing, it would be for him to have a thicker cock.” This train of thought is interrupted when she senses that he is getting too worked up, too soon. She doesn't want him cumming yet. And not into her mouth! She has other plans. Releasing his pulsing dick from her lips, she inserts her index finger into her mouth and coats it good with spit. Now, while lightly kissing and licking his dick down to the base, she slowly begins tickling and teasing the puckered rim of his asshole. From between her legs, she hears Derrick softly moan. Slowly, very slowly, she pushes her fingertip past his sphincter. Deeper and deeper. She watches as his dick bobs and throbs, bouncing off his belly as it strains to get larger and harder. With her finger fully planted in his anus, she begins massaging his prostate gland. Doing this causes even heavier and thicker pre-cum to flow out of his swollen erection, which she is all too happy to lick up and swallow. April has never been a fan of having cum in her mouth. But Derrick's pre-cum is the sweetest she's ever tasted. She feels Derrick's hands on her tits as he softly kneads them. She can feel his tongue darting in and out of her pussy, just slightly opening the membranes of her love hole. She knows her juices are flowing, and she contracts her kegel muscles hoping to squeeze out larger quantities into his waiting mouth. But this is torture, for what she really wants right now is a cock. A big, thick cock! And, what the heck, a longer one too. The kind she's seen on her own porn searches. This is not the first time to have these thoughts. But it is the first while in the midst of a sexual romp with her husband. At least once, she'd like to know what it feels like to have that kind of fullness. To get fucked in ways she has never been able to experience with her husband. Something only a much bigger cock could accomplish. But would something that large actually fit? She'd be willing to try. How exciting it would be to feel something that large and meaty pushing against the opening of her pussy. As if making sure it can fit. After all, her cunt has only had a real cock of half the size this faceless lover is packing. The longer April's mind thinks about it, the hornier she is getting. And as horny as she is right now, she's sure she could take it to the hilt! Suddenly it pushes through, and she can feel her soft pink membranes being stretched like never before. With each stroke, the oversized rod goes a little deeper, like a sword, piercing its way into realms thus far never explored. As it does, she senses only the slightest discomfort. But this is instantly followed by intense pleasure. Finally, it is almost all the way in. April has never known such sensations. Then the large shaft is drawn out until only the tip is still parting the lips. The sudden loss of fullness is almost unbearable. Then, suddenly, with one final lunge, the stranger shoves his massive cock is all the way into her hot cunt. Who is fucking who? With each mighty thrust, she rises up to greet it. She is fucking that man-meat with total abandon. With each thrust, she can feel it pushing on her cervix. She is moaning and groaning with delight. It feels as though the cock is getting even harder, and better yet, bigger! Suddenly the cock explodes with lots of cum! It's like white-hot lava filling her insides in ways she has never felt before. There is so much cum; it's pushing its way through her cervix and filling her womb. That did it. April's entire body is overtaken by a rocking orgasm. She is almost screaming with pleasure as she presses her pussy firmly onto her husband's gaping mouth and talented tongue. Spraying and smearing her juices all over his face. As she is regaining her senses, she realizes it was all due to her fantasy. She lies there a few moments longer, relaxes, and thinks, “WOW! That was great. I need to use that fantasy more often.” Rising up and off Derrick's chest, she notices he is still in need of relief. Her dreaming had caused her to ignore her husband's needy dick. Removing herself from Derrick's still attentive mouth, she turns and bends down to give him a kiss on the lips. His face is covered with her juices, thick and sticky from her orgasm. This causes her to momentarily wonder what pussy juice tastes like, first hand, direct from the source. Rather than second hand, either from his lips or off her fingers. This triggers another thought. A very devious idea pops into April's head. She immediately proceeds with a plan. Turning her back to him, she maneuvers herself until she is straddling his waiting hard-on. Holding his erection upright, she lines it up with her vagina, and, as if trying to puncture something deep inside her, she drops down on it with all of her weight. They start rocking together. Derrick loves this position because he can watch his rod going in and out of her dripping pussy. He is so turned on by the sight of this that he must use every bit of control to delay cumming. To assist in delaying the inevitable, he lays still. Letting his wife do all the work. This is a method they had worked out and used many times before. Still, April is being much more assertive than usual. An indication that she is more turned on than she has been in some time. Normally, she would use this position to help prolong their session. However, that doesn't seem to be her objective this time. Once again, she has shoved her index finger deep into Derrick's anus and stroking his prostate gland. At the same time, she is working so hard on his now well-oiled staff. Pumping faster and squeezing harder. Rather than trying to delay his orgasm, she seems to be trying to intensify it. As if she is desperate to feel an excess of hot jizz squirting inside her. And it's working. Unable to hold back any longer, Derrick is rocked by one of the most powerful orgasms he's had in a long time, possibly ever. He can feel big gobs of his cream flowing through his cock and into the confines of April's hungry cunt. And she is milking it out of him for all she's worth. Wringing out his balls and pressing firmly against his prostate while still holding tightly to his cock with the constricted membranes of her cunt. Derrick's heart is pounding. He closes his eyes for a moment to catch his breath and make the room stop spinning. Finally, once April is sure his dick has spit out the last of his semen, she lifts herself off him. Without looking, he is aware when his limping prick being released from her snatch and drops to his stomach. After a moment or two, Derrick groggily reopens his eyes. As he does, he is greeted with her pussy hovering directly over his mouth, white cream oozing from it. The exact scene he had expected to see when April first came home. by DeanaBard for Literotica

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Acts 18:1-17

When trouble is on the horizon, it can be hard to trust in God's promises, and to believe He has a plan for us.   The book of Judges in the Old Testament gives us an awesome example of trusting God in the story of Gideon.   God called Gideon to lead Israel into battle with the Midianites, who had a sizable army of 135,000 men. Gideon gathered an army of 32,000 men to battle with the Midianites, but despite odds in favor of the enemy, God told Gideon there were too many men in his army. Through a selection process, God whittled the Israelite army down to just 300 men.   Though Gideon was afraid, he trusted God to fulfill His promise. And God told Gideon they needed a smaller army so people would know God won the battle, and not some large army.   The night of the battle, Gideon and his servant snuck into the camp of the enemy and overheard the telling of a dream. The two Midianites interpreted the dream to mean that Gideon's small army would wipe out their larger army.   Reassured, Gideon returned to camp to begin the battle. The Midianites were so frightened, many of them began fighting and killing one another, thinking that Gideon's army was all around them.   Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”   Gideon trusted God's plan, even when he didn't understand. Because of his faith, God helped Gideon and the Israelites to conquer the Midianites with an army a fraction of the size of the enemy's.   Let's pray.   Lord, you are mighty to save. Help us to trust you in every battle. We love you, and believe you have a plan for us. Give us courage to face the challenges in our lives, knowing you are here with us, and you have a good plan. In Jesus' name, amen.

Finance Minister Enoch Godogwana has described South Africa's public finances as significantly weaker in his mid-term budget emphasising that measures to stabilise public finances and reform the economy to generate higher growth are essential. Markets reactions were generally favourable with the rand strengthening. Thea Fourie from S&P Global Market Intelligence said in an interview with Biznews that lower expenditure was a welcome surprise and that the investor community appeared to be happy with Mr Godongwana's projections, but said concerns lingered about the persistent rise in the public sector debt-to-GDP ratio. Medium term risks remained on the horizon, she said. Transnet and Eskom, Fourie warned could be bad news for the debt trajectory. These risks she said raised concerns about the government's ability to achieve its objectives. - Linda van Tilburg

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart" and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There are two Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two . For information on Janis Joplin I used three biographies -- Scars of Sweet Paradise by Alice Echols, Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, and Buried Alive by Myra Friedman. I also referred to the chapter '“Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul' in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton. Some information on Bessie Smith came from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, a book I can't really recommend given the lack of fact-checking, and Bessie by Chris Albertson. I also referred to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis And the best place to start with Joplin's music is this five-CD box, which contains both Big Brother and the Holding Company albums she was involved in, plus her two studio albums and bonus tracks. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode contains discussion of drug addiction and overdose, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse, child abandonment, and racism. If those subjects are likely to cause you upset, you may want to check the transcript or skip this one rather than listen. Also, a subject I should probably say a little more about in this intro because I know I have inadvertently caused upset to at least one listener with this in the past. When it comes to Janis Joplin, it is *impossible* to talk about her without discussing her issues with her weight and self-image. The way I write often involves me paraphrasing the opinions of the people I'm writing about, in a mode known as close third person, and sometimes that means it can look like I am stating those opinions as my own, and sometimes things I say in that mode which *I* think are obviously meant in context to be critiques of those attitudes can appear to others to be replicating them. At least once, I have seriously upset a fat listener when talking about issues related to weight in this manner. I'm going to try to be more careful here, but just in case, I'm going to say before I begin that I think fatphobia is a pernicious form of bigotry, as bad as any other form of bigotry. I'm fat myself and well aware of how systemic discrimination affects fat people. I also think more generally that the pressure put on women to look a particular way is pernicious and disgusting in ways I can't even begin to verbalise, and causes untold harm. If *ANYTHING* I say in this episode comes across as sounding otherwise, that's because I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. Like all people, Janis Joplin had negative characteristics, and at times I'm going to say things that are critical of those. But when it comes to anything to do with her weight or her appearance, if *anything* I say sounds critical of her, rather than of a society that makes women feel awful for their appearance, it isn't meant to. Anyway, on with the show. On January the nineteenth, 1943, Seth Joplin typed up a letter to his wife Dorothy, which read “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.” As you can probably tell from that message, the Joplin family were a strange mixture of ultraconformism and eccentricity, and those two opposing forces would dominate the personality of their firstborn daughter for the whole of her life.  Seth Joplin was a respected engineer at Texaco, where he worked for forty years, but he had actually dropped out of engineering school before completing his degree. His favourite pastime when he wasn't at work was to read -- he was a voracious reader -- and to listen to classical music, which would often move him to tears, but he had also taught himself to make bathtub gin during prohibition, and smoked cannabis. Dorothy, meanwhile, had had the possibility of a singing career before deciding to settle down and become a housewife, and was known for having a particularly beautiful soprano voice. Both were, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent people, but they were also as committed as anyone to the ideals of the middle-class family even as they chafed against its restrictions. Like her mother, young Janis had a beautiful soprano voice, and she became a soloist in her church choir, but after the age of six, she was not encouraged to sing much. Dorothy had had a thyroid operation which destroyed her singing voice, and the family got rid of their piano soon after (different sources say that this was either because Dorothy found her daughter's singing painful now that she couldn't sing herself, or because Seth was upset that his wife could no longer sing. Either seems plausible.) Janis was pushed to be a high-achiever -- she was given a library card as soon as she could write her name, and encouraged to use it, and she was soon advanced in school, skipping a couple of grades. She was also by all accounts a fiercely talented painter, and her parents paid for art lessons. From everything one reads about her pre-teen years, she was a child prodigy who was loved by everyone and who was clearly going to be a success of some kind. Things started to change when she reached her teenage years. Partly, this was just her getting into rock and roll music, which her father thought a fad -- though even there, she differed from her peers. She loved Elvis, but when she heard "Hound Dog", she loved it so much that she tracked down a copy of Big Mama Thornton's original, and told her friends she preferred that: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] Despite this, she was still also an exemplary student and overachiever. But by the time she turned fourteen, things started to go very wrong for her. Partly this was just down to her relationship with her father changing -- she adored him, but he became more distant from his daughters as they grew into women. But also, puberty had an almost wholly negative effect on her, at least by the standards of that time and place. She put on weight (which, again, I do not think is a negative thing, but she did, and so did everyone around her), she got a bad case of acne which didn't ever really go away, and she also didn't develop breasts particularly quickly -- which, given that she was a couple of years younger than the other people in the same classes at school, meant she stood out even more. In the mid-sixties, a doctor apparently diagnosed her as having a "hormone imbalance" -- something that got to her as a possible explanation for why she was, to quote from a letter she wrote then, "not really a woman or enough of one or something." She wondered if "maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up.” I'm not a doctor and even if I were, diagnosing historical figures is an unethical thing to do, but certainly the acne, weight gain, and mental health problems she had are all consistent with PCOS, the most common endocrine disorder among women, and it seems likely given what the doctor told her that this was the cause. But at the time all she knew was that she was different, and that in the eyes of her fellow students she had gone from being pretty to being ugly. She seems to have been a very trusting, naive, person who was often the brunt of jokes but who desperately needed to be accepted, and it became clear that her appearance wasn't going to let her fit into the conformist society she was being brought up in, while her high intelligence, low impulse control, and curiosity meant she couldn't even fade into the background. This left her one other option, and she decided that she would deliberately try to look and act as different from everyone else as possible. That way, it would be a conscious choice on her part to reject the standards of her fellow pupils, rather than her being rejected by them. She started to admire rebels. She became a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music combined the country music she'd grown up hearing in Texas, the R&B she liked now, and the rebellious nature she was trying to cultivate: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] When Lewis' career was derailed by his marriage to his teenage cousin, Joplin wrote an angry letter to Time magazine complaining that they had mistreated him in their coverage. But as with so many people of her generation, her love of rock and roll music led her first to the blues and then to folk, and she soon found herself listening to Odetta: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] One of her first experiences of realising she could gain acceptance from her peers by singing was when she was hanging out with the small group of Bohemian teenagers she was friendly with, and sang an Odetta song, mimicking her voice exactly. But young Janis Joplin was listening to an eclectic range of folk music, and could mimic more than just Odetta. For all that her later vocal style was hugely influenced by Odetta and by other Black singers like Big Mama Thornton and Etta James, her friends in her late teens and early twenties remember her as a vocal chameleon with an achingly pure soprano, who would more often than Odetta be imitating the great Appalachian traditional folk singer Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Lord Randall"] She was, in short, trying her best to become a Beatnik, despite not having any experience of that subculture other than what she read in books -- though she *did* read about them in books, devouring things like Kerouac's On The Road. She came into conflict with her mother, who didn't understand what was happening to her daughter, and who tried to get family counselling to understand what was going on. Her father, who seemed to relate more to Janis, but who was more quietly eccentric, put an end to that, but Janis would still for the rest of her life talk about how her mother had taken her to doctors who thought she was going to end up "either in jail or an insane asylum" to use her words. From this point on, and for the rest of her life, she was torn between a need for approval from her family and her peers, and a knowledge that no matter what she did she couldn't fit in with normal societal expectations. In high school she was a member of the Future Nurses of America, the Future Teachers of America, the Art Club, and Slide Rule Club, but she also had a reputation as a wild girl, and as sexually active (even though by all accounts at this point she was far less so than most of the so-called "good girls" – but her later activity was in part because she felt that if she was going to have that reputation anyway she might as well earn it). She also was known to express radical opinions, like that segregation was wrong, an opinion that the other students in her segregated Texan school didn't even think was wrong, but possibly some sort of sign of mental illness. Her final High School yearbook didn't contain a single other student's signature. And her initial choice of university, Lamar State College of Technology, was not much better. In the next town over, and attended by many of the same students, it had much the same attitudes as the school she'd left. Almost the only long-term effect her initial attendance at university had on her was a negative one -- she found there was another student at the college who was better at painting. Deciding that if she wasn't going to be the best at something she didn't want to do it at all, she more or less gave up on painting at that point. But there was one positive. One of the lecturers at Lamar was Francis Edward "Ab" Abernethy, who would in the early seventies go on to become the Secretary and Editor of the Texas Folklore Society, and was also a passionate folk musician, playing double bass in string bands. Abernethy had a great collection of blues 78s. and it was through this collection that Janis first discovered classic blues, and in particular Bessie Smith: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Black Mountain Blues"] A couple of episodes ago, we had a long look at the history of the music that now gets called "the blues" -- the music that's based around guitars, and generally involves a solo male vocalist, usually Black during its classic period. At the time that music was being made though it wouldn't have been thought of as "the blues" with no modifiers by most people who were aware of it. At the start, even the songs they were playing weren't thought of as blues by the male vocalist/guitarists who played them -- they called the songs they played "reels". The music released by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and so on was thought of as blues music, and people would understand and agree with a phrase like "Lonnie Johnson is a blues singer", but it wasn't the first thing people thought of when they talked about "the blues". Until relatively late -- probably some time in the 1960s -- if you wanted to talk about blues music made by Black men with guitars and only that music, you talked about "country blues". If you thought about "the blues", with no qualifiers, you thought about a rather different style of music, one that white record collectors started later to refer to as "classic blues" to differentiate it from what they were now calling "the blues". Nowadays of course if you say "classic blues", most people will think you mean Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, people who were contemporary at the time those white record collectors were coming up with their labels, and so that style of music gets referred to as "vaudeville blues", or as "classic female blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] What we just heard was the first big blues hit performed by a Black person, from 1920, and as we discussed in the episode on "Crossroads" that revolutionised the whole record industry when it came out. The song was performed by Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer, and was originally titled "Harlem Blues" by its writer, Perry Bradford, before he changed the title to "Crazy Blues" to get it to a wider audience. Bradford was an important figure in the vaudeville scene, though other than being the credited writer of "Keep A-Knockin'" he's little known these days. He was a Black musician and grew up playing in minstrel shows (the history of minstrelsy is a topic for another day, but it's more complicated than the simple image of blackface that we are aware of today -- though as with many "more complicated than that" things it is, also the simple image of blackface we're aware of). He was the person who persuaded OKeh records that there would be a market for music made by Black people that sounded Black (though as we're going to see in this episode, what "sounding Black" means is a rather loaded question). "Crazy Blues" was the result, and it was a massive hit, even though it was marketed specifically towards Black listeners: [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] The big stars of the early years of recorded blues were all making records in the shadow of "Crazy Blues", and in the case of its very biggest stars, they were working very much in the same mould. The two most important blues stars of the twenties both got their start in vaudeville, and were both women. Ma Rainey, like Mamie Smith, first performed in minstrel shows, but where Mamie Smith's early records had her largely backed by white musicians, Rainey was largely backed by Black musicians, including on several tracks Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider"] Rainey's band was initially led by Thomas Dorsey, one of the most important men in American music, who we've talked about before in several episodes, including the last one. He was possibly the single most important figure in two different genres -- hokum music, when he, under the name "Georgia Tom" recorded "It's Tight Like That" with Tampa Red: [Excerpt: Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, "It's Tight Like That"] And of course gospel music, which to all intents and purposes he invented, and much of whose repertoire he wrote: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] When Dorsey left Rainey's band, as we discussed right back in episode five, he was replaced by a female pianist, Lil Henderson. The blues was a woman's genre. And Ma Rainey was, by preference, a woman's woman, though she was married to a man: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Prove it on Me"] So was the biggest star of the classic blues era, who was originally mentored by Rainey. Bessie Smith, like Rainey, was a queer woman who had relationships with men but was far more interested in other women.  There were stories that Bessie Smith actually got her start in the business by being kidnapped by Ma Rainey, and forced into performing on the same bills as her in the vaudeville show she was touring in, and that Rainey taught Smith to sing blues in the process. In truth, Rainey mentored Smith more in stagecraft and the ways of the road than in singing, and neither woman was only a blues singer, though both had huge success with their blues records.  Indeed, since Rainey was already in the show, Smith was initially hired as a dancer rather than a singer, and she also worked as a male impersonator. But Smith soon branched out on her own -- from the beginning she was obviously a star. The great jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet later said of her "She had this trouble in her, this thing that would not let her rest sometimes, a meanness that came and took her over. But what she had was alive … Bessie, she just wouldn't let herself be; it seemed she couldn't let herself be." Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923, as part of the rush to find and record as many Black women blues singers as possible. Her first recording session produced "Downhearted Blues", which became, depending on which sources you read, either the biggest-selling blues record since "Crazy Blues" or the biggest-selling blues record ever, full stop, selling three quarters of a million copies in the six months after its release: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Downhearted Blues"] Smith didn't make royalties off record sales, only making a flat fee, but she became the most popular Black performer of the 1920s. Columbia signed her to an exclusive contract, and she became so rich that she would literally travel between gigs on her own private train. She lived an extravagant life in every way, giving lavishly to her friends and family, but also drinking extraordinary amounts of liquor, having regular affairs, and also often physically or verbally attacking those around her. By all accounts she was not a comfortable person to be around, and she seemed to be trying to fit an entire lifetime into every moment. From 1923 through 1929 she had a string of massive hits. She recorded material in a variety of styles, including the dirty blues: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues] And with accompanists like Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "Cold in Hand Blues"] But the music for which she became best known, and which sold the best, was when she sang about being mistreated by men, as on one of her biggest hits, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do" -- and a warning here, I'm going to play a clip of the song, which treats domestic violence in a way that may be upsetting: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do"] That kind of material can often seem horrifying to today's listeners -- and quite correctly so, as domestic violence is a horrifying thing -- and it sounds entirely too excusing of the man beating her up for anyone to find it comfortable listening. But the Black feminist scholar Angela Davis has made a convincing case that while these records, and others by Smith's contemporaries, can't reasonably be considered to be feminist, they *are* at the very least more progressive than they now seem, in that they were, even if excusing it, pointing to a real problem which was otherwise left unspoken. And that kind of domestic violence and abuse *was* a real problem, including in Smith's own life. By all accounts she was terrified of her husband, Jack Gee, who would frequently attack her because of her affairs with other people, mostly women. But she was still devastated when he left her for a younger woman, not only because he had left her, but also because he kidnapped their adopted son and had him put into a care home, falsely claiming she had abused him. Not only that, but before Jack left her closest friend had been Jack's niece Ruby and after the split she never saw Ruby again -- though after her death Ruby tried to have a blues career as "Ruby Smith", taking her aunt's surname and recording a few tracks with Sammy Price, the piano player who worked with Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Ruby Smith with Sammy Price, "Make Me Love You"] The same month, May 1929, that Gee left her, Smith recorded what was to become her last big hit, and most well-known song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out": [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] And that could have been the theme for the rest of her life. A few months after that record came out, the Depression hit, pretty much killing the market for blues records. She carried on recording until 1931, but the records weren't selling any more. And at the same time, the talkies came in in the film industry, which along with the Depression ended up devastating the vaudeville audience. Her earnings were still higher than most, but only a quarter of what they had been a year or two earlier. She had one last recording session in 1933, produced by John Hammond for OKeh Records, where she showed that her style had developed over the years -- it was now incorporating the newer swing style, and featured future swing stars Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden in the backing band: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot"] Hammond was not hugely impressed with the recordings, preferring her earlier records, and they would be the last she would ever make. She continued as a successful, though no longer record-breaking, live act until 1937, when she and her common-law husband, Lionel Hampton's uncle Richard Morgan, were in a car crash. Morgan escaped, but Smith died of her injuries and was buried on October the fourth 1937. Ten thousand people came to her funeral, but she was buried in an unmarked grave -- she was still legally married to Gee, even though they'd been separated for eight years, and while he supposedly later became rich from songwriting royalties from some of her songs (most of her songs were written by other people, but she wrote a few herself) he refused to pay for a headstone for her. Indeed on more than one occasion he embezzled money that had been raised by other people to provide a headstone. Bessie Smith soon became Joplin's favourite singer of all time, and she started trying to copy her vocals. But other than discovering Smith's music, Joplin seems to have had as terrible a time at university as at school, and soon dropped out and moved back in with her parents. She went to business school for a short while, where she learned some secretarial skills, and then she moved west, going to LA where two of her aunts lived, to see if she could thrive better in a big West Coast city than she did in small-town Texas. Soon she moved from LA to Venice Beach, and from there had a brief sojourn in San Francisco, where she tried to live out her beatnik fantasies at a time when the beatnik culture was starting to fall apart. She did, while she was there, start smoking cannabis, though she never got a taste for that drug, and took Benzedrine and started drinking much more heavily than she had before. She soon lost her job, moved back to Texas, and re-enrolled at the same college she'd been at before. But now she'd had a taste of real Bohemian life -- she'd been singing at coffee houses, and having affairs with both men and women -- and soon she decided to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. At this point, Austin was very far from the cultural centre it has become in recent decades, and it was still a straitlaced Texan town, but it was far less so than Port Arthur, and she soon found herself in a folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. Janis would play autoharp and sing, sometimes Bessie Smith covers, but also the more commercial country and folk music that was popular at the time, like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles", a song that had originally been recorded by Wanda Jackson but at that time was a big hit for Dusty Springfield's group The Springfields: [Excerpt: The Waller Creek Boys, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"] But even there, Joplin didn't fit in comfortably. The venue where the folk jams were taking place was a segregated venue, as everywhere around Austin was. And she was enough of a misfit that the campus newspaper did an article on her headlined "She Dares to Be Different!", which read in part "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break out into song it will be handy." There was a small group of wannabe-Beatniks, including Chet Helms, who we've mentioned previously in the Grateful Dead episode, Gilbert Shelton, who went on to be a pioneer of alternative comics and create the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Shelton's partner in Rip-Off Press, Dave Moriarty, but for the most part the atmosphere in Austin was only slightly better for Janis than it had been in Port Arthur. The final straw for her came when in an annual charity fundraiser joke competition to find the ugliest man on campus, someone nominated her for the "award". She'd had enough of Texas. She wanted to go back to California. She and Chet Helms, who had dropped out of the university earlier and who, like her, had already spent some time on the West Coast, decided to hitch-hike together to San Francisco. Before leaving, she made a recording for her ex-girlfriend Julie Paul, a country and western musician, of a song she'd written herself. It's recorded in what many say was Janis' natural voice -- a voice she deliberately altered in performance in later years because, she would tell people, she didn't think there was room for her singing like that in an industry that already had Joan Baez and Judy Collins. In her early years she would alternate between singing like this and doing her imitations of Black women, but the character of Janis Joplin who would become famous never sang like this. It may well be the most honest thing that she ever recorded, and the most revealing of who she really was: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, "So Sad to Be Alone"] Joplin and Helms made it to San Francisco, and she started performing at open-mic nights and folk clubs around the Bay Area, singing in her Bessie Smith and Odetta imitation voice, and sometimes making a great deal of money by sounding different from the wispier-voiced women who were the norm at those venues. The two friends parted ways, and she started performing with two other folk musicians, Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins, and she insisted that they would play at least one Bessie Smith song at every performance: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, Larry Hanks, and Roger Perkins, "Black Mountain Blues (live in San Francisco)"] Often the trio would be joined by Billy Roberts, who at that time had just started performing the song that would make his name, "Hey Joe", and Joplin was soon part of the folk scene in the Bay Area, and admired by Dino Valenti, David Crosby, and Jerry Garcia among others. She also sang a lot with Jorma Kaukonnen, and recordings of the two of them together have circulated for years: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonnen, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] Through 1963, 1964, and early 1965 Joplin ping-ponged from coast to coast, spending time in the Bay Area, then Greenwich Village, dropping in on her parents then back to the Bay Area, and she started taking vast quantities of methamphetamine. Even before moving to San Francisco she had been an occasional user of amphetamines – at the time they were regularly prescribed to students as study aids during exam periods, and she had also been taking them to try to lose some of the weight she always hated. But while she was living in San Francisco she became dependent on the drug. At one point her father was worried enough about her health to visit her in San Francisco, where she managed to fool him that she was more or less OK. But she looked to him for reassurance that things would get better for her, and he couldn't give it to her. He told her about a concept that he called the "Saturday night swindle", the idea that you work all week so you can go out and have fun on Saturday in the hope that that will make up for everything else, but that it never does. She had occasional misses with what would have been lucky breaks -- at one point she was in a motorcycle accident just as record labels were interested in signing her, and by the time she got out of the hospital the chance had gone. She became engaged to another speed freak, one who claimed to be an engineer and from a well-off background, but she was becoming severely ill from what was by now a dangerous amphetamine habit, and in May 1965 she decided to move back in with her parents, get clean, and have a normal life. Her new fiance was going to do the same, and they were going to have the conformist life her parents had always wanted, and which she had always wanted to want. Surely with a husband who loved her she could find a way to fit in and just be normal. She kicked the addiction, and wrote her fiance long letters describing everything about her family and the new normal life they were going to have together, and they show her painfully trying to be optimistic about the future, like one where she described her family to him: "My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.) My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I'm bright and we can talk (about antimatter yet—that impressed him)! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you.…" She went back to Lamar, her mother started sewing her a wedding dress, and for much of the year she believed her fiance was going to be her knight in shining armour. But as it happened, the fiance in question was described by everyone else who knew him as a compulsive liar and con man, who persuaded her father to give him money for supposed medical tests before the wedding, but in reality was apparently married to someone else and having a baby with a third woman. After the engagement was broken off, she started performing again around the coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, and she started to realise the possibilities of rock music for her kind of performance. The missing clue came from a group from Austin who she became very friendly with, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and the way their lead singer Roky Erickson would wail and yell: [Excerpt: The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me (live)"] If, as now seemed inevitable, Janis was going to make a living as a performer, maybe she should start singing rock music, because it seemed like there was money in it. There was even some talk of her singing with the Elevators. But then an old friend came to Austin from San Francisco with word from Chet Helms. A blues band had formed, and were looking for a singer, and they remembered her from the coffee houses. Would she like to go back to San Francisco and sing with them? In the time she'd been away, Helms had become hugely prominent in the San Francisco music scene, which had changed radically. A band from the area called the Charlatans had been playing a fake-Victorian saloon called the Red Dog in nearby Nevada, and had become massive with the people who a few years earlier had been beatniks: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "32-20"] When their residency at the Red Dog had finished, several of the crowd who had been regulars there had become a collective of sorts called the Family Dog, and Helms had become their unofficial leader. And there's actually a lot packed into that choice of name. As we'll see in a few future episodes, a lot of West Coast hippies eventually started calling their collectives and communes families. This started as a way to get round bureaucracy -- if a helpful welfare officer put down that the unrelated people living in a house together were a family, suddenly they could get food stamps. As with many things, of course, the label then affected how people thought about themselves, and one thing that's very notable about the San Francisco scene hippies in particular is that they are some of the first people to make a big deal about what we now  call "found family" or "family of choice". But it's also notable how often the hippie found families took their model from the only families these largely middle-class dropouts had ever known, and structured themselves around men going out and doing the work -- selling dope or panhandling or being rock musicians or shoplifting -- with the women staying at home doing the housework. The Family Dog started promoting shows, with the intention of turning San Francisco into "the American Liverpool", and soon Helms was rivalled only by Bill Graham as the major promoter of rock shows in the Bay Area. And now he wanted Janis to come back and join this new band. But Janis was worried. She was clean now. She drank far too much, but she wasn't doing any other drugs. She couldn't go back to San Francisco and risk getting back on methamphetamine. She needn't worry about that, she was told, nobody in San Francisco did speed any more, they were all on LSD -- a drug she hated and so wasn't in any danger from. Reassured, she made the trip back to San Francisco, to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother and the Holding Company were the epitome of San Francisco acid rock at the time. They were the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which Helms ran, and their first ever gig had been at the Trips Festival, which we talked about briefly in the Grateful Dead episode. They were known for being more imaginative than competent -- lead guitarist James Gurley was often described as playing parts that were influenced by John Cage, but was equally often, and equally accurately, described as not actually being able to keep his guitar in tune because he was too stoned. But they were drawing massive crowds with their instrumental freak-out rock music. Helms thought they needed a singer, and he had remembered Joplin, who a few of the group had seen playing the coffee houses. He decided she would be perfect for them, though Joplin wasn't so sure. She thought it was worth a shot, but as she wrote to her parents before meeting the group "Supposed to rehearse w/ the band this afternoon, after that I guess I'll know whether I want to stay & do that for awhile. Right now my position is ambivalent—I'm glad I came, nice to see the city, a few friends, but I'm not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man's Cher.” In that letter she also wrote "I'm awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you. I understand your fears at my coming here & must admit I share them, but I really do think there's an awfully good chance I won't blow it this time." The band she met up with consisted of lead guitarist James Gurley, bass player Peter Albin, rhythm player Sam Andrew, and drummer David Getz.  To start with, Peter Albin sang lead on most songs, with Joplin adding yelps and screams modelled on those of Roky Erickson, but in her first gig with the band she bowled everyone over with her lead vocal on the traditional spiritual "Down on Me", which would remain a staple of their live act, as in this live recording from 1968: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me (Live 1968)"] After that first gig in June 1966, it was obvious that Joplin was going to be a star, and was going to be the group's main lead vocalist. She had developed a whole new stage persona a million miles away from her folk performances. As Chet Helms said “Suddenly this person who would stand upright with her fists clenched was all over the stage. Roky Erickson had modeled himself after the screaming style of Little Richard, and Janis's initial stage presence came from Roky, and ultimately Little Richard. It was a very different Janis.” Joplin would always claim to journalists that her stage persona was just her being herself and natural, but she worked hard on every aspect of her performance, and far from the untrained emotional outpouring she always suggested, her vocal performances were carefully calculated pastiches of her influences -- mostly Bessie Smith, but also Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Etta James, Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. That's not to say that those performances weren't an authentic expression of part of herself -- they absolutely were. But the ethos that dominated San Francisco in the mid-sixties prized self-expression over technical craft, and so Joplin had to portray herself as a freak of nature who just had to let all her emotions out, a wild woman, rather than someone who carefully worked out every nuance of her performances. Joplin actually got the chance to meet one of her idols when she discovered that Willie Mae Thornton was now living and regularly performing in the Bay Area. She and some of her bandmates saw Big Mama play a small jazz club, where she performed a song she wouldn't release on a record for another two years: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball 'n' Chain"] Janis loved the song and scribbled down the lyrics, then went backstage to ask Big Mama if Big Brother could cover the song. She gave them her blessing, but told them "don't" -- and here she used a word I can't use with a clean rating -- "it up". The group all moved in together, communally, with their partners -- those who had them. Janis was currently single, having dumped her most recent boyfriend after discovering him shooting speed, as she was still determined to stay clean. But she was rapidly discovering that the claim that San Franciscans no longer used much speed had perhaps not been entirely true, as for example Sam Andrew's girlfriend went by the nickname Speedfreak Rita. For now, Janis was still largely clean, but she did start drinking more. Partly this was because of a brief fling with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis liked Pigpen as someone else on the scene who didn't much like psychedelics or cannabis -- she didn't like drugs that made her think more, but only drugs that made her able to *stop* thinking (her love of amphetamines doesn't seem to fit this pattern, but a small percentage of people have a different reaction to amphetamine-type stimulants, perhaps she was one of those). Pigpen was a big drinker of Southern Comfort -- so much so that it would kill him within a few years -- and Janis started joining him. Her relationship with Pigpen didn't last long, but the two would remain close, and she would often join the Grateful Dead on stage over the years to duet with him on "Turn On Your Lovelight": [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] But within two months of joining the band, Janis nearly left. Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records came to see the group live, and was impressed by their singer, but not by the rest of the band. This was something that would happen again and again over the group's career. The group were all imaginative and creative -- they worked together on their arrangements and their long instrumental jams and often brought in very good ideas -- but they were not the most disciplined or technically skilled of musicians, even when you factored in their heavy drug use, and often lacked the skill to pull off their better ideas. They were hugely popular among the crowds at the Avalon Ballroom, who were on the group's chemical wavelength, but Rothchild was not impressed -- as he was, in general, unimpressed with psychedelic freakouts. He was already of the belief in summer 1966 that the fashion for extended experimental freak-outs would soon come to an end and that there would be a pendulum swing back towards more structured and melodic music. As we saw in the episode on The Band, he would be proved right in a little over a year, but being ahead of the curve he wanted to put together a supergroup that would be able to ride that coming wave, a group that would play old-fashioned blues. He'd got together Stefan Grossman, Steve Mann, and Taj Mahal, and he wanted Joplin to be the female vocalist for the group, dueting with Mahal. She attended one rehearsal, and the new group sounded great. Elektra Records offered to sign them, pay their rent while they rehearsed, and have a major promotional campaign for their first release. Joplin was very, very, tempted, and brought the subject up to her bandmates in Big Brother. They were devastated. They were a family! You don't leave your family! She was meant to be with them forever! They eventually got her to agree to put off the decision at least until after a residency they'd been booked for in Chicago, and she decided to give them the chance, writing to her parents "I decided to stay w/the group but still like to think about the other thing. Trying to figure out which is musically more marketable because my being good isn't enough, I've got to be in a good vehicle.” The trip to Chicago was a disaster. They found that the people of Chicago weren't hugely interested in seeing a bunch of white Californians play the blues, and that the Midwest didn't have the same Bohemian crowds that the coastal cities they were used to had, and so their freak-outs didn't go down well either. After two weeks of their four-week residency, the club owner stopped paying them because they were so unpopular, and they had no money to get home. And then they were approached by Bob Shad. (For those who know the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the Bob Shad in that film is named after this one -- Judd Apatow, the film's director, is Shad's grandson) This Shad was a record producer, who had worked with people like Big Bill Broonzy, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine over an eighteen-year career, and had recently set up a new label, Mainstream Records. He wanted to sign Big Brother and the Holding Company. They needed money and... well, it was a record contract! It was a contract that took half their publishing, paid them a five percent royalty on sales, and gave them no advance, but it was still a contract, and they'd get union scale for the first session. In that first session in Chicago, they recorded four songs, and strangely only one, "Down on Me", had a solo Janis vocal. Of the other three songs, Sam Andrew and Janis dueted on Sam's song "Call on Me", Albin sang lead on the group composition "Blindman", and Gurley and Janis sang a cover of "All Is Loneliness", a song originally by the avant-garde street musician Moondog: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All is Loneliness"] The group weren't happy with the four songs they recorded -- they had to keep the songs to the length of a single, and the engineers made sure that the needles never went into the red, so their guitars sounded far more polite and less distorted than they were used to. Janis was fascinated by the overdubbing process, though, especially double-tracking, which she'd never tried before but which she turned out to be remarkably good at. And they were now signed to a contract, which meant that Janis wouldn't be leaving the group to go solo any time soon. The family were going to stay together. But on the group's return to San Francisco, Janis started doing speed again, encouraged by the people around the group, particularly Gurley's wife. By the time the group's first single, "Blindman" backed with "All is Loneliness", came out, she was an addict again. That initial single did nothing, but the group were fast becoming one of the most popular in the Bay Area, and almost entirely down to Janis' vocals and on-stage persona. Bob Shad had already decided in the initial session that while various band members had taken lead, Janis was the one who should be focused on as the star, and when they drove to LA for their second recording session it was songs with Janis leads that they focused on. At that second session, in which they recorded ten tracks in two days, the group recorded a mix of material including one of Janis' own songs, the blues track "Women is Losers", and a version of the old folk song "the Cuckoo Bird" rearranged by Albin. Again they had to keep the arrangements to two and a half minutes a track, with no extended soloing and a pop arrangement style, and the results sound a lot more like the other San Francisco bands, notably Jefferson Airplane, than like the version of the band that shows itself in their live performances: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Coo Coo"] After returning to San Francisco after the sessions, Janis went to see Otis Redding at the Fillmore, turning up several hours before the show started on all three nights to make sure she could be right at the front. One of the other audience members later recalled “It was more fascinating for me, almost, to watch Janis watching Otis, because you could tell that she wasn't just listening to him, she was studying something. There was some kind of educational thing going on there. I was jumping around like the little hippie girl I was, thinking This is so great! and it just stopped me in my tracks—because all of a sudden Janis drew you very deeply into what the performance was all about. Watching her watch Otis Redding was an education in itself.” Joplin would, for the rest of her life, always say that Otis Redding was her all-time favourite singer, and would say “I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I Can't Turn You Loose (live)"] At the start of 1967, the group moved out of the rural house they'd been sharing and into separate apartments around Haight-Ashbury, and they brought the new year in by playing a free show organised by the Hell's Angels, the violent motorcycle gang who at the time were very close with the proto-hippies in the Bay Area. Janis in particular always got on well with the Angels, whose drugs of choice, like hers, were speed and alcohol more than cannabis and psychedelics. Janis also started what would be the longest on-again off-again relationship she would ever have, with a woman named Peggy Caserta. Caserta had a primary partner, but that if anything added to her appeal for Joplin -- Caserta's partner Kimmie had previously been in a relationship with Joan Baez, and Joplin, who had an intense insecurity that made her jealous of any other female singer who had any success, saw this as in some way a validation both of her sexuality and, transitively, of her talent. If she was dating Baez's ex's lover, that in some way put her on a par with Baez, and when she told friends about Peggy, Janis would always slip that fact in. Joplin and Caserta would see each other off and on for the rest of Joplin's life, but they were never in a monogamous relationship, and Joplin had many other lovers over the years. The next of these was Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, who were just in the process of recording their first album Electric Music for the Mind and Body, when McDonald and Joplin first got together: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Grace"] McDonald would later reminisce about lying with Joplin, listening to one of the first underground FM radio stations, KMPX, and them playing a Fish track and a Big Brother track back to back. Big Brother's second single, the other two songs recorded in the Chicago session, had been released in early 1967, and the B-side, "Down on Me", was getting a bit of airplay in San Francisco and made the local charts, though it did nothing outside the Bay Area: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me"] Janis was unhappy with the record, though, writing to her parents and saying, “Our new record is out. We seem to be pretty dissatisfied w/it. I think we're going to try & get out of the record contract if we can. We don't feel that they know how to promote or engineer a record & every time we recorded for them, they get all our songs, which means we can't do them for another record company. But then if our new record does something, we'd change our mind. But somehow, I don't think it's going to." The band apparently saw a lawyer to see if they could get out of the contract with Mainstream, but they were told it was airtight. They were tied to Bob Shad no matter what for the next five years. Janis and McDonald didn't stay together for long -- they clashed about his politics and her greater fame -- but after they split, she asked him to write a song for her before they became too distant, and he obliged and recorded it on the Fish's next album: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Janis"] The group were becoming so popular by late spring 1967 that when Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles' films among many other classics, came to San Francisco to film Petulia, his follow-up to How I Won The War, he chose them, along with the Grateful Dead, to appear in performance segments in the film. But it would be another filmmaker that would change the course of the group's career irrevocably: [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"] When Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival, nobody had any great expectations. They were second on the bill on the Saturday, the day that had been put aside for the San Francisco acts, and they were playing in the early afternoon, after a largely unimpressive night before. They had a reputation among the San Francisco crowd, of course, but they weren't even as big as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape or Country Joe and the Fish, let alone Jefferson Airplane. Monterey launched four careers to new heights, but three of the superstars it made -- Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who -- already had successful careers. Hendrix and the Who had had hits in the UK but not yet broken the US market, while Redding was massively popular with Black people but hadn't yet crossed over to a white audience. Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the other hand, were so unimportant that D.A. Pennebaker didn't even film their set -- their manager at the time had not wanted to sign over the rights to film their performance, something that several of the other acts had also refused -- and nobody had been bothered enough to make an issue of it. Pennebaker just took some crowd shots and didn't bother filming the band. The main thing he caught was Cass Elliot's open-mouthed astonishment at Big Brother's performance -- or rather at Janis Joplin's performance. The members of the group would later complain, not entirely inaccurately, that in the reviews of their performance at Monterey, Joplin's left nipple (the outline of which was apparently visible through her shirt, at least to the male reviewers who took an inordinate interest in such things) got more attention than her four bandmates combined. As Pennebaker later said “She came out and sang, and my hair stood on end. We were told we weren't allowed to shoot it, but I knew if we didn't have Janis in the film, the film would be a wash. Afterward, I said to Albert Grossman, ‘Talk to her manager or break his leg or whatever you have to do, because we've got to have her in this film. I can't imagine this film without this woman who I just saw perform.” Grossman had a talk with the organisers of the festival, Lou Adler and John Phillips, and they offered Big Brother a second spot, the next day, if they would allow their performance to be used in the film. The group agreed, after much discussion between Janis and Grossman, and against the wishes of their manager: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Ball and Chain (live at Monterey)"] They were now on Albert Grossman's radar. Or at least, Janis Joplin was. Joplin had always been more of a careerist than the other members of the group. They were in music to have a good time and to avoid working a straight job, and while some of them were more accomplished musicians than their later reputations would suggest -- Sam Andrew, in particular, was a skilled player and serious student of music -- they were fundamentally content with playing the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore and making five hundred dollars or so a week between them. Very good money for 1967, but nothing else. Joplin, on the other hand, was someone who absolutely craved success. She wanted to prove to her family that she wasn't a failure and that her eccentricity shouldn't stop them being proud of her; she was always, even at the depths of her addictions, fiscally prudent and concerned about her finances; and she had a deep craving for love. Everyone who talks about her talks about how she had an aching need at all times for approval, connection, and validation, which she got on stage more than she got anywhere else. The bigger the audience, the more they must love her. She'd made all her decisions thus far based on how to balance making music that she loved with commercial success, and this would continue to be the pattern for her in future. And so when journalists started to want to talk to her, even though up to that point Albin, who did most of the on-stage announcements, and Gurley, the lead guitarist, had considered themselves joint leaders of the band, she was eager. And she was also eager to get rid of their manager, who continued the awkward streak that had prevented their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival from being filmed. The group had the chance to play the Hollywood Bowl -- Bill Graham was putting on a "San Francisco Sound" showcase there, featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and got their verbal agreement to play, but after Graham had the posters printed up, their manager refused to sign the contracts unless they were given more time on stage. The next day after that, they played Monterey again -- this time the Monterey Jazz Festival. A very different crowd to the Pop Festival still fell for Janis' performance -- and once again, the film being made of the event didn't include Big Brother's set because of their manager. While all this was going on, the group's recordings from the previous year were rushed out by Mainstream Records as an album, to poor reviews which complained it was nothing like the group's set at Monterey: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] They were going to need to get out of that contract and sign with somewhere better -- Clive Davis at Columbia Records was already encouraging them to sign with him -- but to do that, they needed a better manager. They needed Albert Grossman. Grossman was one of the best negotiators in the business at that point, but he was also someone who had a genuine love for the music his clients made.  And he had good taste -- he managed Odetta, who Janis idolised as a singer, and Bob Dylan, who she'd been a fan of since his first album came out. He was going to be the perfect manager for the group. But he had one condition though. His first wife had been a heroin addict, and he'd just been dealing with Mike Bloomfield's heroin habit. He had one absolutely ironclad rule, a dealbreaker that would stop him signing them -- they didn't use heroin, did they? Both Gurley and Joplin had used heroin on occasion -- Joplin had only just started, introduced to the drug by Gurley -- but they were only dabblers. They could give it up any time they wanted, right? Of course they could. They told him, in perfect sincerity, that the band didn't use heroin and it wouldn't be a problem. But other than that, Grossman was extremely flexible. He explained to the group at their first meeting that he took a higher percentage than other managers, but that he would also make them more money than other managers -- if money was what they wanted. He told them that they needed to figure out where they wanted their career to be, and what they were willing to do to get there -- would they be happy just playing the same kind of venues they were now, maybe for a little more money, or did they want to be as big as Dylan or Peter, Paul, and Mary? He could get them to whatever level they wanted, and he was happy with working with clients at every level, what did they actually want? The group were agreed -- they wanted to be rich. They decided to test him. They were making twenty-five thousand dollars a year between them at that time, so they got ridiculously ambitious. They told him they wanted to make a *lot* of money. Indeed, they wanted a clause in their contract saying the contract would be void if in the first year they didn't make... thinking of a ridiculous amount, they came up with seventy-five thousand dollars. Grossman's response was to shrug and say "Make it a hundred thousand." The group were now famous and mixing with superstars -- Peter Tork of the Monkees had become a close friend of Janis', and when they played a residency in LA they were invited to John and Michelle Phillips' house to see a rough cut of Monterey Pop. But the group, other than Janis, were horrified -- the film barely showed the other band members at all, just Janis. Dave Getz said later "We assumed we'd appear in the movie as a band, but seeing it was a shock. It was all Janis. They saw her as a superstar in the making. I realized that though we were finally going to be making money and go to another level, it also meant our little family was being separated—there was Janis, and there was the band.” [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] If the group were going to make that hundred thousand dollars a year, they couldn't remain on Mainstream Records, but Bob Shad was not about to give up his rights to what could potentially be the biggest group in America without a fight. But luckily for the group, Clive Davis at Columbia had seen their Monterey performance, and he was also trying to pivot the label towards the new rock music. He was basically willing to do anything to get them. Eventually Columbia agreed to pay Shad two hundred thousand dollars for the group's contract -- Davis and Grossman negotiated so half that was an advance on the group's future earnings, but the other half was just an expense for the label. On top of that the group got an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars for their first album for Columbia, making a total investment by Columbia of a quarter of a million dollars -- in return for which they got to sign the band, and got the rights to the material they'd recorded for Mainstream, though Shad would get a two percent royalty on their first two albums for Columbia. Janis was intimidated by signing for Columbia, because that had been Aretha Franklin's label before she signed to Atlantic, and she regarded Franklin as the greatest performer in music at that time.  Which may have had something to do with the choice of a new song the group added to their setlist in early 1968 -- one which was a current hit for Aretha's sister Erma: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] We talked a little in the last episode about the song "Piece of My Heart" itself, though mostly from the perspective of its performer, Erma Franklin. But the song was, as we mentioned, co-written by Bert Berns. He's someone we've talked about a little bit in previous episodes, notably the ones on "Here Comes the Night" and "Twist and Shout", but those were a couple of years ago, and he's about to become a major figure in the next episode, so we might as well take a moment here to remind listeners (or tell those who haven't heard those episodes) of the basics and explain where "Piece of My Heart" comes in Berns' work as a whole. Bert Berns was a latecomer to the music industry, not getting properly started until he was thirty-one, after trying a variety of other occupations. But when he did get started, he wasted no time making his mark -- he knew he had no time to waste. He had a weak heart and knew the likelihood was he was going to die young. He started an association with Wand records as a songwriter and performer, writing songs for some of Phil Spector's pre-fame recordings, and he also started producing records for Atlantic, where for a long while he was almost the equal of Jerry Wexler or Leiber and Stoller in terms of number of massive hits created. His records with Solomon Burke were the records that first got the R&B genre renamed soul (previously the word "soul" mostly referred to a kind of R&Bish jazz, rather than a kind of gospel-ish R&B). He'd also been one of the few American music industry professionals to work with British bands before the Beatles made it big in the USA, after he became alerted to the Beatles' success with his song "Twist and Shout", which he'd co-written with Phil Medley, and which had been a hit in a version Berns produced for the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] That song shows the two elements that existed in nearly every single Bert Berns song or production. The first is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm, a feel he picked up during a stint in Cuba in his twenties. Other people in the Atlantic records team were also partial to those rhythms -- Leiber and Stoller loved what they called the baion rhythm -- but Berns more than anyone else made it his signature. He also very specifically loved the song "La Bamba", especially Ritchie Valens' version of it: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"] He basically seemed to think that was the greatest record ever made, and he certainly loved that three-chord trick I-IV-V-IV chord sequence -- almost but not quite the same as the "Louie Louie" one.  He used it in nearly every song he wrote from that point on -- usually using a bassline that went something like this: [plays I-IV-V-IV bassline] He used it in "Twist and Shout" of course: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] He used it in "Hang on Sloopy": [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] He *could* get more harmonically sophisticated on occasion, but the vast majority of Berns' songs show the power of simplicity. They're usually based around three chords, and often they're actually only two chords, like "I Want Candy": [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Or the chorus to "Here Comes the Night" by Them, which is two chords for most of it and only introduces a third right at the end: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And even in that song you can hear the "Twist and Shout"/"La Bamba" feel, even if it's not exactly the same chords. Berns' whole career was essentially a way of wringing *every last possible drop* out of all the implications of Ritchie Valens' record. And so even when he did a more harmonically complex song, like "Piece of My Heart", which actually has some minor chords in the bridge, the "La Bamba" chord sequence is used in both the verse: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] And the chorus: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] Berns co-wrote “Piece of My Heart” with Jerry Ragavoy. Berns and Ragavoy had also written "Cry Baby" for Garnet Mimms, which was another Joplin favourite: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And Ragavoy, with other collaborators

This paragraph is full of the word "if", as John contrasts those who walk in the light with those who walk in darkness.

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This is Dave Richards looking at Exodus 7: 1-13 from our 12pm service on 23 July 2023. This is from our series looking at Moses.

During Bravehearts this week, Pastor Curtis House spoke about how everyone has a need to be loved, and to give love.Join our Connexion men next Tuesday morning at 6:30 a.m.

Fiji PM says citizens of all races should feel reassured.

ICYMI: Today's episode is a great one as we catch up with Dr. Mary Meares, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Have you ever traveled outside of the country, especially to a place where your native language wasn't being spoken? How did it make you feel? Were you challenged by the experience in a good one or did you find yourself looking for something familiar? In addition to having lived and worked abroad, her research dives into the effects of culture. When you think about how we learn what the world is and how we learn about other people, that learning comes from so many different places--personal experiences, what you might learn in the classroom and even from the media. Mary's research looks at all of these things as a mechanism of understanding intercultural competence and ways it can be taught to others. Fun fact: she is reading a book--Gullah Geechee--Lessons from the Matriach--by Emily Meggett from Edisto Island and that's where Mary's ancestors are from! This is such a fun conversation and it really is going to push you to think about how we learn about others the next time you travel. Don't miss it!

A number of Pacific leaders have shared their views on the AUKUS deal that will see Australia acquire a fleet of nuclear submarines.

After the promises made in Isaiah 44:1-5, the Lord Yahweh speaks once more to remind Israel of his uniqueness, that he is the one and only God, and to reassure them there is no one else who can be their sure foundation. Rather than be like the nations, who seek deliverance from idols, God's people were to be witnesses of his redeeming love and renewing grace. In this sermon, pastor Matt wraps up this section of Isaiah, emphasizing how God's purpose in the redemption of his people is the praise of his name. The goal of his gospel is a people, renewed by his Spirit and reassured by his grace, who worship him and bear witness to the truth that there is no rock like our God.

The Lord had declared a message of comfort for his faithless servant, Israel: He would end their exile and bring them home. But Israel would need a greater liberation than this. For God's glory to fill the earth through the genuine worship and faithful witness of his people, they would need not just a fresh start but a new heart, a new Spirit, a renewed life. In this sermon, pastor Matt continues to preach that God's purpose in the redemption of his people is the praise of his name. And he enables us to live for his glory since he has given up his Son and poured out his Spirit to forgive our sins and give us new life.

Στη λίστα με τους δέκα ελκυστικότερους προορισμούς διαμονής συνταξιούχων, συμπεριλαμβάνεται η Κύπρος, σύμφωνα με έρευνα της βρετανικής ασφαλιστικής εταιρίας, Reassured.

At a certain point in our life, we all reach a phase where we feel stuck in our personal or professional life. This gives rise to the person noticing how people around him/her are moving ahead and achieving the goals they have set for themselves. In this episode of The Habit Coach Podcast, Ashdin Doctor answers listener Srilakshmi Nair's question on how to deal with stalled life, while others progress. So don't forget to tune into this episode. Check out Ashdin's Book: Change your Habits, Change your Life  Send your questions to Ashdin Doctor for The Habit Coach Hot Seat/ Know Your Coach on this link: (Habit Coach Hot Seat ) You can watch the full video episodes of The Habit Coach Podcast with Ashdin Doctor on the YouTube channel. You can also check out Ashdin's Linktree Page here: (https://linktr.ee/awesome180) Check out the Awesome180 website: (http://awesome180.com/) You can follow Ashdin Doctor on Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook Find the show across audio streaming apps:Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | JioSaavn |  Amazon Music Do follow IVM Podcasts on social media.We are @ivmpodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Date: 4 December 2022 Ministry: St Paul Ministry Season: Nativity Fast His Eminence Archbishop Angaelos, Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, encourages us to be reassured in the hands of God, even when the world around us presents challenges and anxiety

Joseph must have been crushed when he learned his fiancée was pregnant (and he was not the father). Reassured that Mary was miraculously pregnant and that her baby would fulfill God's promise to save people from their sins, Joseph's story demonstrates how God's love guides us in making decisions for His glory.Support the show

Sunday, November 20, 2022 - As we aspire as a church to reach those around us and help them grow into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ, 3 John shows us how we can embody and demonstrate the truth of the Gospel to each other and to those outside the church.

Sunday, November 13, 2022 - Sometimes we feel like we're just one mistake away from messing everything up. But God doesn't want us to walk around like we're on egg shells. Rather, we see in 2 John how God wants to prosper us in our daily walk with Him.

Sunday, November 6, 2022 - God wants us to know that He loves us and is for us! In 1 John, we'll see how we can have confidence in this truth and find the purpose behind each and every day.

Tap to tune in to this month's episode of Ask Elle, where we discuss experiencing doubt as Christians and how to find assurance in the midst of it. *Thank you to our friends at Christian Healthcare Ministries for sponsoring the show! Discover if CHM's biblical approach to healthcare is right for you today! Click here to learn more. *Check out our new digital workshop, Theology 101, here! Don't forget to use the code DODPODCAST at checkout for $2 off your purchase!   

Today's episode is a great one as we catch up with Dr. Mary Meares, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Have you ever traveled outside of the country, especially to a place where your native language wasn't being spoken? How did it make you feel? Were you challenged by the experience in a good one or did you find yourself looking for something familiar? In addition to having lived and worked abroad, her research dives into the effects of culture. When you think about how we learn what the world is and how we learn about other people, that learning comes from so many different places--personal experiences, what you might learn in the classroom and even from the media. Mary's research looks at all of these things as a mechanism of understanding intercultural competence and ways it can be taught to others. Fun fact: she is reading a book--Gullah Geechee--Lessons from the Matriach--by Emily Meggett from Edisto Island and that's where Mary's ancestors are from! This is such a fun conversation and it really is going to push you to think about how we learn about others the next time you travel. Don't miss it!

"A 75 BPS rate hike is quite significant historically. Financial stocks rallied on this news. During Covid, money was spent on the stimulus, but nothing that would impact commodity prices. However, the Energy and Healthcare Bill would influence commodity and Futures prices," says Kurt Nelson. Nelson also weighs in on crude oil and metals like platinum and gold.