Singing Nun Ya!

Singing Like a Virgin Nun tops any Vatican PR I've known in recent months. Brilliant! http://youtu.be/r0e8Uve7cJU. Cant wait to hear her and pope's duet cover of "Parigi, o cara, noi lasceremo" from La Traviata!
Ya.. Just in time for ‪#‎octobercoversongs‬ month.

Exploringmusic.org

JMP via iphn

Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin Hopkins (via www.popmatters.com)

Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin' Hopkins

By Timothy J. O'Brien and David A. Ensminger 17 May 2013

ONE
East Texas Cotton Picking Blues

The blues is born with you. When you born in this world, you were born with the blues. Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1967

Hopkins’s rural roots exposed him to what would become his lifelong hobby—fishing: “I was born down by the river, they call it Warren’s Bottom.” “I was born on the banks of the river, that’s the reason I’m a fisherman from my heart. I was born on the banks of the river that’s true, water flowing I guess… Cuz that was on the Red River.” Unfortunately for Sam Hopkins and his family, the calming and lazy flowing river through Leon County did nothing to soothe Abe Hopkins’s wild ways. After he fathered a family, Abe Hopkins continued drinking, gambling, and shooting guns. Sometimes the elder Hopkins’s gambling winnings were paid in cotton. Another time his winnings amounted to a mule and a wagon.

Sam Hopkins might have been old enough to notice friction between his mother and father due to his father’s carousing, because later he recorded a song called “Mama and Papa Hopkins”:

I wonder why my mama don’t love my papa no more
I guess my daddy been doing something wrong…
Oh yea caused my mom’s heart to ruin

In 1915, when Hopkins was about three years old, his father was murdered. Minus a breadwinner, the Hopkinses’ family life quickly became hardscrabble. His mother Frances kept the family mended and supported as best she could, but she soon came to understand the difficulty of feeding and clothing five children all by herself. In addition to the dangerous racial climate, Frances lived in a time when women suffered second-class citizenship. For example, a nearby newspaper, the Grapeland Messenger, carried an item on May 20, 1915, that read, “Hats off to Houston! She is the first city in Texas to start an organized movement against women’s suffrage.” Unfortunately, women like Frances were years away from benefiting from the freedoms promoted and pioneered by suffragettes.

read full excerpt/article here:
Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin' Hopkins

Jimmy Lafave great cover of Dylan's "Red River Shore"

Nice!

Flash insanity and FB with pre-intel chip Apple OS users

What has Adobe worked out with Facebook. All pre-intel chip Mac G4s, laptops, towers, et and OS 10.5 will not allow Flash content to play on Facebook, while watching on Youtube or other sites streaming the content work fine using the Flash player 10. This doesn't add up. Meaning all pre-intel chip Apples, OS 10.5 or before, are expected to enjoy a limited edition of FB - less any flash content, while all streams fine from Youtube. What a cram down!

Occupy Broadway Big Hit! OWS Lives On and Beyond

OWS UPDATES

Occupation Broadway was smashing success.
Saturday performance went well with
“Bye Bye All Those Wall Street Lies”
parody on '71 hit "Miss American Pie," and
"We Shall Overcome."
____________________

So Bye, Bye all those Wall St Lies.
The 99 percent is here and ready to RISE!
And them good old boys were drinkin whiskey and lied
Singing this'll be the day Wall st died.
Sining this'll be the day Wall St. died.

A long long time ago, I can still remember
How my bank teller used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance,
That I could make those dollars dance
And maybe I’d be happy for a while
But Fall ‘08 made me shiver,
Mountains high of toxic paper .
More bad news on the doorstep
with globalized economics.
I can't remember if I cried,
When I read about how Bernie Lied!
But something touched me deep inside,
The day – that day, that Wall street died/cried.

Did you write the book of hope
And do you have faith the Fed can cope?
If the senate tells you so?
Now do you believe in toxic loans?
Can bank bail outs save your simple home?
And can you teach us how to think real slow?
Well, you know some ---------- 1 percent,
Ran the banks on shorts without even a scent.
Some sat back and smiled,
While the markets fell a mile!
We were a lonely first class one time bunch.
With a lot of hope, not on some Wall St dope.
I knew we were running with little luck,
The day that Wall St died.

Now, for 200 years we've been on our own,
Where no toxic moss grows on a rolling stone
But that's not how it used to be,
When Goldman Sachs sang for FDIC
In a coat they borrowed from AIG
When the showdown stage lights grew dim.
Oh and while the SEC pants were down
Madoff stole the all time crown.
The congress couldn’t sort,
An mp3 from a CDO.
While commissions paced - the traitors danced
The DOW fell down beneath Euro trance.
Most counted pennies in the dark,
In the days, as Wall St died.

Learning some new songs !

History like nothing I've ever.... back in the days of the Midnight Special shows channek 4 - Don Kirshne???

Reachin back and reachin back. tryin to understand it.

From here to eternity...

Catfish Memories and More

Totalism to Nothing

Some 20 years ago I had a collision with instructions from my music theory professor, Paul Des Marais, (mind you a hard elbows distance from fellow student and young newlywed name Jake Heggie who recently just married the highly esteemed piano virtuoso and teacher Johana Harris) on what was an assignment in altered chromaticism involving 12 tone rows and retrograde inversions.   My “misunderstanding” evolved into my theoretical conception that “no pattern” or motif sequence was in any regards to be repeated in any context, therefore leaving the motif subject to no repetition in any regard whatsoever during the course of the entire piece, as far as it’s original form or  statement was  concerned, but  with the exception of designation in a displaced homophonic manner but then, and only then, for the purpose of designating a cadence or otherwise, but never in original color or serial origin. 

The outcome was such as reflected in this recording, listen here.  I’d like to suggest this theoretical form as a an alternative to the highly publicized school Kyle Gann, Mikel Rouse and the like have come to coin as “Totalism” and perhaps a bit of “Nothingism,” nonetheless! And therefore a nod to the king of "nothingisms!"