Podcasts about turkish muslim

Kulkul presents her ethnographic work with Turkish Muslim women in Berlin as evidence that community is not an entity but is produced by instrumentalizing specific forms of identification and boundary-making. In examining the role of community in the case of her participants, Kulkul finds that religion and culture are important not for the values they perpetuate, but for their role in forming and sustaining the community. She looks at the importance of boundaries and especially their reciprocity. Social boundaries are a set of codes of exclusion often used against migrants and refugees, while symbolic boundaries are typically understood as the way one defines one's own group. Kulkul argues that these two types of boundaries tend to trigger each other and thus be mutually reinforcing. At the same time, she presents a picture of everyday life from the perspective of migrants and the children of migrants in a cosmopolitan European city – Berlin. A valuable read for scholars of migration and culture, which will especially interest scholars focused on Europe.

OMAR SAKR: POETRY IN THE GENOCIDEOmar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is an acclaimed, award-winning author and the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win the Prime Minister's Literary Award. He is also - like the rest of the world - bearing witness to genocide. So where does art and poetry find its place amidst a horrifying and ongoing massacre? And what does it cost activists to keep showing up when staying silent is not an option?Instagram (IG @OmarSakrPoet)Australia Palestine Advocacy Network Amnesty International: Unstoppable Melbourne Activist Legal SupportNFP Law - campaigns or protestsMarieke Hardy Is Going To Die is a podcast made by Marieke Hardy (IG @marieke_hardy).You can follow at IG @GoingToDiePodMusic by Lord Fascinator (IG @lordfascinator)Produced by Darren Scarce (IG @Dazz26)Video edits by Andy Nedelkovski (IG @AndyNeds)Artwork by Lauren Egan (IG @heylaurenegan)Photography by Eamon Leggett (IG @anxietyoptions)With thanks to Amelia Chappelow (IG @ameliachappelow)Camilla McKewen (IG @CamillaLucyLucy)and Rhys Graham (IG @RhysJGraham)Drop an email to mariekehardyisgoingtodie@gmail.comWhilst acknowledging the privilege that comes with having the space to discuss death and mortality, we want to also recognise that discussing these topics can raise some wounds. Should you wish to seek extra support, please consider the following resources:https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/online-grief-support-groupshttps://www.grief.org.au/ga/ga/Support/Support_Groups.aspxhttps://www.headspace.com/meditation/griefhttps://griefline.org.au/get-help/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acknowledgement of Country// Headlines:Human rights groups condemn University of Melbourne surveillance policiesAttack on Zamzam camp in Sudan's North Darfur regionGaza and West Bank updatesCalls for review of AUKUS dealMedical groups urge federal candidates to prioritise climate change-induced health crisesConcerns about City of Melbourne's greening strategy Witt Gorrie at Trans Day of Action 2025//We listened to a speech recorded at the Trans Day of Action rally held on the 31st of March by Witt Gorrie, who described the ties between First Nations justice, trans liberation and decarceration. If you want to hear more about Witt's collaborative, abolition focused work, you can revisit our show from the 28th of February featuring Witt Gorrie and Beyond Bricks and Bars steering committee members Kate and Gia in conversation with Priya.Keep up this important work and show your support by coming down to Parliament House next Saturday the 26th April at 11:30am for the Trans Liberation Counter Protest. Bring along your p2/n95 face masks, friends, family and noisemakers!// The Nightmare Sequence//Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed spoke with Priya about their new collaborative work The Nightmare Sequence, which is out now with the University of Queensland Press (all author royalties donated to Palestinian charities). The Nightmare Sequence, featuring poetry by Omar and illustrations by Safdar, is a searing response to the atrocities committed by Israel and its allies in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Born of collective suffering and despair, the book interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas.  Omar is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the acclaimed author of the novel Son of Sin and three poetry collections, including The Lost Arabs, which won the 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Safdar Ahmed is an award-winning artist, writer, musician and cultural worker. His graphic novel Still Alive won the Multicultural NSW Award and was named Book of the Year in the 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Safdar is a founding member of the Refugee Art Project and a member of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers.// Autism Supports for Comfort, Care and Connection//Prof Deborah Lupton joins us to discuss the new autistic-led project, Autism Supports for Comfort, Care and Connection with the Project Lead, Dr Megan Rose and illustrator Sarah Firth. The project reveals the everyday and creative ways autistic adults use objects, services, and creatures to support their wellbeing. Published by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society at UNSW, the project provides beautiful illustrations and rich inner worlds of Autistic adults about the supports that help them, special interests that fill them up, and challenges they face. The illustration published with this week's episode has been used with permission from the project team.// Renters' Federal Election Priorities//Bernie Barrett, Acting CEO of Better Renting, unpacks what's on the table for renters in the major parties' housing policy platforms announced last weekend. Bernie also speaks about Better Renting's Renter's Election pledge, and what it means to think about renters in so-called australia as a voting bloc. Head to renters-election.au to find out more about and sign up to the pledge.//

Umit Kurt on "The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province" (Harvard University Press). The book draws on archival sources, memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts and property liquidation records to detail the dispossession of Antep's Armenian community and the transfer of their wealth to Ottoman and later Turkish Muslim elites. Become a member on Patreon or Substack to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to each episode.

Should Christians (especially Catholics) be more public? This week on A Podcast About Catholic Things, Eric and Dan talk about the obligation of Catholics to show their faces (even their rosaries) to their friends, family, neighbors, and even coworkers. The overall agreement between them is that Catholics must use their freedom of religion or lose it--and that things would not have gotten this bad if we had been more vocal in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Catholics need to 'take up space.' In current events, we continue to talk about the American election and encourage all Christians to support the one man in Washington who is fighting for us. Facebook bans efforts to overcome the fake election. China condemns Mike Pompeo for not designating Turkish Muslim group as terrorists. Trump fires Mark Esper. In the land of nonsense, Seattle hires pimp as alternative to police force. Rhode Island signs checks as Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. Statue in Palencia, Spain gets refaced as a potato head (pictured below), while Cincinnati puts up a Charlie Brown Christmas tree (also pictured below). Hasbro sells offensive squeeze doll. Eli Lilly gives us bamlanivimab. A fat guy in China falls through a well. Japan adds another great invention to the toilet industry.VIEW ON APPLE PODCASTS VIEW ON GOOGLE PODCASTS VIEW ON AMAZON VIEW ON AUDIBLE VIEW ON CASTBOX VIEW ON PODCASTADDICT VIEW ON STITCHER VIEW ON BITCHUTE VIEW ON RUMBLE VIEW ON TUNE-IN VISIT US ON FACEBOOK

A new feature for 2023 at Unity of Fairfax is “Interfaith Friendship Sunday” when we share our Sunday experience with friends from other faith communities. This Sunday, we celebrate our friendship with the Turkish Muslim community.

Award-winning poet Omar Sakr shares some of his work, inviting the audience into his process and passions.Omar Sakr is an award-winning poet born and raised in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, as well as The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier's Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award. The Lost Arabs has also been released in the US through Andrews McMeel Universal. In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. Omar's poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, featuring in the American Academy of Poets' Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Margins, Tinderbox, Wildness, Peril, Circulo de Poesía, Overland, Meanjin, and Griffith Review, among others. He has also been anthologised in Border Lines: Poems of Migration (2020), in the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020), in Best Australian Poems 2016, and in Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016). A widely published essayist, Omar's creative and critical non-fiction work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Archer, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, SBS Life, The Wheeler Centre, and Junkee. His essays have been anthologised in Fire, Flood, and Plague (2020) and Going Postal: More Than Yes or No (2018), and his short fiction has appeared in Kindred: 12 Queer LoveOzYA Stories (2019) as well as After Australia (2020).Queerstories an award-winning LGBTQI+ storytelling project directed by Maeve Marsden, with regular events around Australia. For more information, visit www.queerstories.com.au and follow Queerstories on Facebook.The Queerstories book is published by Hachette Australia, and can be purchased from your favourite independent bookseller or on Booktopia.To support Queerstories, become a patron at www.patreon.com/ladysingsitbetterAnd for gay stuff and insomnia rants follow Maeve Marsden on Twitter and Instagram. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For our first episode of the year, we're joined by Özlem Cekic, Denmark's first Muslim MP (2007-2015) and creator of #dialoguecoffee, discussing her inspiring new book, Overcoming Hate Through Dialogue. Tune in for a unique perspective on prejudice, where Cekic shares what it was like being a young Turkish Muslim immigrant growing up in Denmark, getting inundated with hate mail on election and how she coped and confronted the haters.

Should Christians (especially Catholics) be more public? This week on A Podcast About Catholic Things, Eric and Dan talk about the obligation of Catholics to show their faces (even their rosaries) to their friends, family, neighbors, and even coworkers. The overall agreement between them is that Catholics must use their freedom of religion or lose it--and that things would not have gotten this bad if we had been more vocal in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Catholics need to 'take up space.' In current events, we continue to talk about the American election and encourage all Christians to support the one man in Washington who is fighting for us. Facebook bans efforts to overcome the fake election. China condemns Mike Pompeo for not designating Turkish Muslim group as terrorists. Trump fires Mark Esper. In the land of nonsense, Seattle hires pimp as alternative to police force. Rhode Island signs checks as Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. Statue in Palencia, Spain gets refaced as a potato head (pictured below), while Cincinnati puts up a Charlie Brown Christmas tree (also pictured below). Hasbro sells offensive squeeze doll. Eli Lilly gives us bamlanivimab. A fat guy in China falls through a well. Japan adds another great invention to the toilet industry.

[Comment: Month of the Rosary] Friends of the Rosary, October is the month of the Rosary. Annually, this month is dedicated to the Most Holy Rosary, primarily due to the fact that on October 7th we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. On this day in 1571, a Christian military coalition led by Spain defeated the Turkish Muslim forces in Lepanto, Greece. The Christians won due to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and the massive prayer of the Holy Rosary. The miraculous help of the Mary avoided Western Hemisphere to fall under the violent Islamic Ottoman Empire. As an offering of thanksgiving, Pope St. Pius V declared this day as the feast day of Our Lady of Victory, later known as Our Lady of the Rosary. The Battle of Lepanto is not the only historic event where the intervention of the Immaculate Mary through the Holy Rosary changed the course of history. This, your host Mikel, wrote a little ebook collecting surprising stories around the Rosary. Here is the link, https://therosarynetwork.org/free-book-the-rosary-a-gift-from-heaven/ [Written by Mikel A | The Rosary Network, New York] __ For extending the devotion of the Holy Rosary. The rosary, as given to St. Dominic, is a meditation on the mysteries of the Incarnate King, as well as a meditation on the sorrows and joys of His Mother. The Rosary is what the world needs to overcome darkness and the plans of those who deny the only truth, Jesus Christ. For fighting our own weaknesses and sins and pursuing the goal of having our names are written in heaven. For the quick recovery of President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and all of the victims who have contracted the COVID virus. [Today's Rosary in Video]

In this in-depth interview with Yaldaz Sadakova—creator of Foreignish.net and author of The Wrong Passport: Memoir Stories About Immigration—we unpack the dreaded question "Where are you from?", its limitations, how it's a micro-aggression, and a better question to ask; Yaldaz speaks to how she found new emotional and intellectual anchors after leaving her birth country and how she found her creative voice in a foreign land; her feelings of shame and distress about forgetting her mother tongue; becoming estranged from her Turkish Muslim heritage; we interrogate our hesitation to correct people when they mispronounce our names; she elaborates as to why she's convinced borders are a form of injustice; and much more. This episode was edited and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @JE_Torres_Lopez Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona https://thenasiona.com/

Former Prime Minister David Cameron has broken his long silence on Brexit, confessing in new memoirs that he is "truly sorry" for the chaos and rancour that has engulfed Britain after it voted to leave the European Union three years ago."I failed," Cameron concedes in his book, "For the Record," excerpted on Saturday in the London Times.The memoirs are artfully revealing. Cameron both covers his posterior and concedes some mistakes - of strategy and timing, mostly. He admits he is today "depressed" about Brexit; he charges that the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, was a major misleader; and he confesses he smoked a lot of dope during his Eton school days - sneaking off to an island in the River Thames to get "off my head" on marijuana.It was Cameron who confidently called for the June 2016 Brexit referendum - and it was Cameron who led the muddled, muted campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union.After Brexit won 52% to 48%, Cameron quickly resigned, notably caught on a hot mic humming a tune as he strode away from the podium in front of 10 Downing Street.Many Britons blame Cameron for today's Brexit quagmire, branding the former prime minister "the man who broke Britain."Cameron's critics say the British public was never really clamouring for the 2016 referendum and that Cameron called it only to quell internal squabbles in his fractious Conservative Party and to quiet the rabid Tory tabloids.Cameron confesses the whole thing quickly devolved into a "terrible Tory psychodrama."In an interview with the Times newspaper, as a part of the book's pre-publication publicity campaign, Cameron labelled Prime Minister Johnson's possible "no-deal" Brexit "a bad outcome."He also warned that the country might be forced to stage a second referendum on whether to leave the European Union."I don't think you can rule it out, because we're stuck," said Cameron, who served as prime minister from 2010 to 2016.In his memoir and interview, Cameron charges that his former political chums - Johnson and his sidekick, the current government minister in charge of carrying out Brexit, Michael Gove - misled voters in 2016 about the swell benefits of leaving Europe.Cameron calls his former friend Gove "mendacious" and says Gove and Johnson behaved "appallingly" during the 2016 referendum.Cameron points to their false pro-Brexit claims that Turkey was about to join the European Union (it wasn't) and their suggestions that soon Britain would be flooded by millions of Turkish Muslim immigrants (never happened).While he does not call Johnson or Gove liars, Cameron said the pair "left the truth at home" when they claimed, for example, that leaving Europe would produce a $440 million a week windfall to fund the country's beloved National Health Service."Boris had never argued for leaving the EU, right? Michael was a very strong Eurosceptic, but someone whom I'd known as this liberal, compassionate, rational Conservative ended up making arguments about Turkey and being swamped and what have you. They were trashing the government of which they were a part, effectively," Cameron told the newspaper.Cameron later said in an interview published Sunday that Johnson didn't really believe in Brexit when he broke ranks and led the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. Cameron had been expecting Johnson's help during the hard-fought campaign.Cameron says of Johnson: "The conclusion I am left with is that he risked an outcome he didn't believe in because it would help his political career."Cameron said in an interview published Sunday that Johnson didn't really believe in Brexit when he broke ranks and led the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. Cameron had been expecting Johnson's help during the hard-fought campaign.Cameron says of Johnson: "The conclusion I am left with is that he risked an outcome he didn't believe in because it would help his political career."In a bit of a side-dish, Cameron remembers Johnson's curren...

Examines how the Protestant Reformation began with strong support from the Ottoman Empire, that was attempting to divide and conquer Europe for Islam. Protestants often chanted, “Rather be Turkish [Muslim] than Papal [Catholic].”

Annegret Steioff is an actress comedian and has been featured in many short films from her home country and now she’s making a name for herself in the U.S. Annegret was born and raised in a tiny German town that always smelled like burnt chocolate. Until she was three years old she lived with a Turkish Muslim immigrant family because her mom decided she would rather smell the roses. She was a florist. Annegret was supposed to take over the family business but she decided to go to university instead. If only she had chosen something REAL like Law, Agriculture or backpiping. Instead she got her BA in Acting, WON (!) the green card and moved to the us. Annegret gets her humor from her dad who was once approached about not cutting his grass and decided to bulldozer the garden, fill it with concrete and paint it green. That's also how Annegret learned about concrete burn. Check out some of her stuff by following the links below. https://youtu.be/FWFYMxv2-8I Annegret Steioff in "Zusammen ist man weniger allein" Annegret Steioff in "Das exaltierte Fräulein" von Lope de Vega You can check me out on my website at ljeffreymoore.com Music Featured on the Show: Intro I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626 Ft: J Lang, Morusque Outro The Vendetta by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/58628 Ft: Apoxode --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/l-jeffrey-moore/support

I was invited by a podcast listener of mine, a muslim from Turkey named Burak Isaerdem that enjoyed the last couple episodes to come onto his youtube show to share insights around personal development, and world peace (topic of my TEDXTalk). Was a really fun experience to be a guest on a show instead of always being the host. If you would like to book me on your how please email me quintoncarlin@gmail.com Check out my TED x Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SjvensWbvQ&t=4s Connect with me on social media and check out & support the show sponsors to take the 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge, Order some #1 CBD Oil & Build a Click Funnels Website and if you do enroll in any of these programs I will give you a 45 min 1 on 1 call with me for free @ https://linktr.ee/quintoncarlin --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-developed-life/message

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

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

In episode 8 of the IAM podcast, I chat with the cheerful, award winning media producer & diversity champion Anna Lauren Tufecki about her love story with her Turkish Muslim husband Eren & how together they’re pioneering & redefining what love & faith looks like in a healthy, fulfilling Christian – Muslim marriage.   We chat about: Anna Lauren’s Christian upbringing How she met her husband Eren & how they celebrated an emotional interfaith wedding Eren’s religion: Sufisim & what is Islam faith & what it means to be a Sufi Muslim What they believe in now & how they pray How they plan to raise their children Anna shares the best marriage advice she’s ever received & her top interfaith resources  RESOURCES Mentioned: Anna Lauren Instagram ALLove Diversity Project Anna + Eren’s Wedding Video Wedding Song: Beetles All You Need is Love The Social Animal by David Brooks Generation M - Shelina Janmohamed The Faith Club - Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, Priscilla Warner

In this podcast Robert AF Thurman discusses the history of Nālandā & why the Dalai Lama of Tibet identifies Tibetan Buddhism as well as himself as heirs to the university whose ruins are located in modern-day Bihar, India. Founded under the patronage of the Gupta King Chandragupta II Vikramāditya in the 5th Century then Destroyed in 1203 by Turkish Muslim invaders, Professor Thurman illustrates how Nālandā University brought together the greatest minds of India, Persia, Indonesia, China & Tibet finding it’s highest expression in the seventeen greatest Pandits of Nālandā Monastery, whom the Dalai Lama celebrates in his famous eulogy. Podcast includes an overview of the most influential of the “Great Seventeen” Mahayana Buddhist yogi scientist sages (Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka, Chandrakirti, Shantideva, Shantarakshita, Kamalashila, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, Dharmakirti, Arya Vimuktisena, Haribhadra, Gunaprabha, Shakyaprabha & Atisha) known for their middle-way centrist perspective & the popular Stages of the Path (lam-rim) teachings. “I am the longest guest of government of India for the last 58 years and am now paying back for that gesture by becoming the messenger of Indian culture. In fact, I consider myself a son of India. A few years ago, some Chinese reporters asked me why I identified myself as India’s son. I told them that my mind and each part of my brain are filled with the knowledge and thought of Nalanda. Besides, in last 50 years this body survived on Indian dal, chapati and rice. That is why both physically and spiritually, I am a son of India. Buddha himself stated my followers should not accept my teaching out of faith or out of devotion, but rather thorough investigation and experiment, the scientific way of approach. So all the Nalanda masters like Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Asanga, Chandrakirti, all these great masters of Nalanda, even Buddha’s own words, they carry investigation whether Buddha’s statement is acceptable or not. So they are always based on logic and experiment so, therefore, I follow that pattern, tradition.” HH Dalai Lama from www.huffingtonpost.in. This podcast is an excerpt from “Why does the Dalai Lama say he is “Son of Nālandā”? a talk given in October 2017. Photo by Abhishek Sundaram via www.flickr.com. To listen to more recordings from past programs with Robert AF Thurman at Tibet House US in New York City + Menla in Phoenicia, New York in the Catskills please consider becoming a Tibet House US Member. The song ‘Dancing Ling’ by

In this podcast Robert AF Thurman discusses the history of Nālandā & why the Dalai Lama of Tibet identifies Tibetan Buddhism as well as himself as heirs to the university whose ruins are located in modern-day Bihar, India. Founded under the patronage of the Gupta King Chandragupta II Vikramāditya in the 5th Century then Destroyed in 1203 by Turkish Muslim invaders, Professor Thurman illustrates how Nālandā University brought together the greatest minds of India, Persia, Indonesia, China & Tibet finding it’s highest expression in The seventeen greatest Pandits of Nālandā Monastery, whom the Dalai Lama celebrates in his famous eulogy. Podcast includes an overview of the most influential of the "Great Seventeen" Mahayana Buddhist yogi scientist sages (Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka, Chandrakirti, Shantideva, Shantarakshita, Kamalashila, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, Dharmakirti, Arya Vimuktisena, Haribhadra, Gunaprabha, Shakyaprabha & Atisha) known for their middle-way centrist perspective & the popular Stages of the Path (lam-rim) teachings. “I am the longest guest of government of India for the last 58 years and am now paying back for that gesture by becoming the messenger of Indian culture. In fact, I consider myself a son of India. A few years ago, some Chinese reporters asked me why I identified myself as India's son. I told them that my mind and each part of my brain are filled with the knowledge and thought of Nalanda. Besides, in last 50 years this body survived on Indian dal, chapati and rice. That is why both physically and spiritually, I am a son of India. Buddha himself stated my followers should not accept my teaching out of faith or out of devotion, but rather thorough investigation and experiment, the scientific way of approach. So all the Nalanda masters like Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Asanga, Chandrakirti, all these great masters of Nalanda, even Buddha's own words, they carry investigation whether Buddha's statement is acceptable or not. So they are always based on logic and experiment so, therefore, I follow that pattern, tradition.” HH Dalai Lama from www.huffingtonpost.in. This podcast is an excerpt from "Why does the Dalai Lama say he is "Son of Nālandā"?: The inaugural ISAS-VSB Lecture on Religion in the Modern World" A Talk given in October 2017. Photo by Abhishek Sundaram via www.flickr.com. To listen to more recordings from past programs with Robert AF Thurman at Tibet House US in New York City + Menla in Phoenicia, New York in the Catskills please consider becoming a Tibet House US Member. The song ‘Dancing Ling’ by Tenzin Choegyal from the album ‘Heart Sutra‘ (2004) by Ethno Super Lounge is used on the Bob Thurman Podcast with artist’s permission, all rights reserved.

In this week’s episode, we’ll read the book equivalent of getting dicked to death by wolverines, state-mandated anal probes get two thumbs up from a Kenyan judge, and Bill Donohue will dress up like a penguin and plot against Batman. --- Click Here to make a per episode donation at Patreon.com Click Here to buy our book. Click Here to check out The Skepticrat. Click Here to check out God Awful Movies. --- Guest Links: Click Here to help Dan Arel get to the Ark Park protest Click Here to check out the HolyCrap Vlogcast --- Headlines: Creationists to counter-protest atheists at Ark Park opening: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/18/how-many-levels-of-protests-will-take-place-on-opening-day-of-the-noahs-ark-theme-park/ Donohue: Law to extend statutes on child rape was designed “to rape the Catholic church.” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/21/bill-donohue-law-to-help-child-abuse-victims-was-really-intended-to-rape-the-catholic-church/ Police in Trenton NJ plan to bring underage curfew violators to churches in the middle of the night: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/18/kids-who-violate-curfew-will-be-sent-to-church-say-trenton-nj-police/ Hackers add gay pride stuff to ISIS Twitter accounts: http://religionnews.com/2016/06/18/hackers-add-rainbows-gay-pride-slogans-to-isis-accounts/ Canadian police break up fight over whether or not the earth is flat or round http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/15/canadian-police-had-to-break-up-a-fight-over-whether-the-earth-is-flat-or-round/ Turkish Muslim mob attacks album release party at record store in Istanbul for not doing nothing during Ramadan: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/18/muslims-attack-istanbul-music-event-upset-that-it-took-place-during-ramadan/ Man attacked with machetes for not fasting on Ramadan: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/10/man-is-attacked-with-machetes-by-muslim-boys-who-were-upset-he-wasnt-fasting/ Anderson cooper is too gay to interview straight people http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/15/bryan-fischer-anderson-cooper-is-gay-so-hes-disqualified-from-interviewing-anti-gay-politicians/ Anderson cooper goes hard in the paint on bigot: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/14/floridas-anti-gay-attorney-general-pam-bondi-taken-to-task-by-anderson-cooper-for-her-past-bigotry/ Anal probes are a legal way to determine if someone is gay: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/16/kenyan-judge-says-anal-probes-are-a-legal-way-to-determine-if-someone-is-gay/   --- This Week in Misogyny: Six months for raping an accident victim: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/04/state-trooper-gets-just-6-months-for-raping-car-accident-victim.html Amish couple sells 14 year old daughter: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1303574/amish-couple-arrested-after-gifting-their-daughter-14-to-man-who-went-on-to-father-two-children-with-her/?CMP=spklr-_-Editorial-_-FBPAGE-_-TheSun-thesun-_-20160619-_-News-_-497084531-_-Image,textandlink Abortion Drone: http://thinkprogress.org/world/2016/06/21/3790692/abortion-drone-ireland/

Turkish Muslim imam Fethullah Gulen, now living in the U.S., spawned a worldwide movement asserting moderate Islam, education and social service.  KU Associate Professor Argun Saatcioglu will describe the controversy […] The post Weighing the Muslim, Social Activist Gulen Movement with Argun Saatcioglu appeared first on KKFI.