#this was in the early 1900s and in the US where i live and vote

[kaurwreck]

I hate how fandom does flower symbolism; there are very few, if any, universal flower meanings, and flower symbolism is nonsense unless rooted in specificity.

[batboyblog]

Less than 60 days out from the election, how do you think we’re doing, considering the recent debate and Taylor Swift unleashing the Swifties?

I'll start this by saying we're with-in the margin of effort, if either side really puts their backs into it, and pushes and shows up, volunteers in big numbers and turns out voters it could go either way.

So having said that, I feel good, right now the national polls are close, but all show Harris ahead. The swing state polls likewise are close but mostly show tied or leaning to Harris. On top of which Senate Democrats (and the candidate for Governor in NC) are running far ahead of her in polling, I hope thats a sign that late undecideds will break Democrat, they often do break toward the incumbent.

On the debate, I'm often skeptical that debates shift things. That said I think anyone watching would say that debate is pretty unique in the history of Presidential debates. The media has been working very hard to uh "sane wash" Trump and what he says. That debate was an unfiltered view of Trump. I'm frankly shocked he brought up the pet eating, the right has been meming about it but I thought he'd only say some dogwhistle to it not just straight up say some of the most racist shit imaginable on live TV. The bar for Trump was very low and he still failed totally to meet it. Likewise Harris had a high bar and met it, she was claim, she was professional, she came across as ready and smart while also serving as the audience surrogate to let us all know "yeah this is as crazy as you think it is"

just briefly here the attack on Haitian Americans is crazy, and racist, and the whole "the immigrants are eating dogs" goes back 100+ years, I've read people accusing NYC Jews in the early 1900s of kidnapping and eating neighborhood cats and dogs. But also its politically crazy too since Florida where Trump and Republican Senator Rick Scott have both been slipping in the polls as America's largest ethnic Haitian community, just over 500,000 or roughly 2% of the state, so great plan to call them pet stealing and eating monsters just before an election.

The other factor is the Laura Loomer. If anyone doesn't know who she is click that link and enjoy, but basically she's a white nationalist and Islamophobe (that's according to her) and the person extreme far right Republicans point to as proof that they're not "that bad" any ways, Loomer seems to have been with Trump, on his plane the day of the debate and every day since, and Republicans are wigging out

MTG, and any number of Trump super supporters are sounding off about how much they don't like this, and the internet is "joking" that Trump and Loomer are sleeping together. Together with his unhinged debate being connected with one of the worst people in American politics might cause serious problems. In any case a campaign of just alt-right memes is not gonna win most Americans.

On TSwift, I mean the data I've seen showed a really big jump in people exploring registering to vote after her message which is good. I'm again skeptical about how much of an impact she'll have? celebrities in general don't have that big of an impact, basically 90% of famous people are Democrats/liberal, but their fans don't always go along, don't get me wrong I'm happy she endorsed I just am unsure how big an impact it'll end up having.

So to repeat what I said at the top, we're in the margin of effort, if everyone who doesn't want Trump volunteers and puts in the work Harris will win, so

VOLUNTEER

[spider-gem]

Alright, you know what time it is: THEORY TIME!

In Hazbin Hotel, everyone’s name correlates to their character (such as Angeldust, Vox, Sir Pentious, etc). As a writer and reader, I firmly believe that names are important and can give us a deeper look into characters. Alastor, despite keeping his real name from life, is not an exception.

In a series where names reflect their characters, I would bet that Alastor’s gives us a hint into who he was before he died. This, along multiple other reasons, leads me to believe that Alastor only targeted guilty or corrupt people in power.

Hear me out:

We don’t know much about Alastor’s past, as nothing has been confirmed in the show. So for now, let’s analyze the lore we’ve gotten from Vivziepop over the years and the context clues in the show. Let’s look at the hazbin wiki:

Now, that “weird moral code” could be directed at anyone, but here’s my reasons for believing he went after corrupt people with power:

1. I’ve never seen the show, but I know that Dexter was about a vigilante serial killer that targeted criminals that haven’t been punished by the justice system due to corruption. So I would say, seeing Alastor is being compared to Dexter, Alastor likely went after the same type of people.

2. He grew up and lived in New Orleans, Louisiana in the early 1900’s as a mixed man. If you don’t know much about American history, just remember that this during a period of segregation and heavy discrimination against Black Americans, and Louisiana was one of the most racist states at the time. I’m not going to go through a whole history lesson right now, but note that lynchings reached their height by the late 1800’s to early 1900’s as a way to enforce white supremacy and intimidate minorities. Some cases, if not most, were not regarded as homicides by police and the overwhelming majority of lynching perpetrators never faced justice. Even if they were tried, all white juries ensured that they wouldn’t be convicted. Seems like a good target for a Creole serial killer, right?

3. In the series, so far, we’ve seen that Alastor’s closest connections are with female characters, such as Rosie, Mimzy, and Nifty. He’s also been described as a “momma’s boy” before, so it’s safe to say he has high respect for women. During the period of his life span, women had little rights. Sure, they gained the right to vote in 1920, but that was about it. It wasn’t even until a few years after Alastor died before women had the right to divorce their husbands, and were often stuck in abusive households. For this reason, I could see Alastor going after domestic abusers as well.

4. He probably killed bigots that attempted to tear down his radio show as well. I don’t really have much evidence for this claim, but note that Alastor was a famous radio star. He’s also Creole. While some Creole people were considered as “white-passing”, interracial marriage was prohibited in Louisiana during this period. Alastor very likely had to struggle to succeed, and there’s no doubt that certain people in power attempted to tear him down because of his heritage.

5. Let’s look at his life in hell now. Who has he been rumored to have targeted ? That’s right, powerful overlords. Even in hell, Alastor still went after people in power. Sure, this was arguably to gain power, but the point that he only went after corrupt powerful figures still stands. Anyone else we see him kill, such as the loan sharks or the angels, threatened him and the hotel first.

To conclude, there’s no saying what sent Alastor on his path as a serial killer. I personally favor the popular fan theory that his first kill that sent him on this path was his father, likely after his father harmed/killed his mother, but anyone’s theory is as valid as that one at the moment. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

It could just be the social justice warrior in me saying, “Oh yeah, Alastor TOTALLY killed corrupt cops and domestic abusers”. However, I do believe that my theory on Alastor’s moral code is true based on my observations.

[deeagonemissing]

I'm not really into posting serious topics on here but here is my piece of mind on the election in America this year.

I've heard so many people here saying "Why should I care about who becomes president in America? I don't live there, it won't affect me." Spoiler alert! It does affect you, no matter where you live!

Why? Because America is one of the most powerful countries in the world and it's been that way for a really long time and most candidates for presidency around the world use American presidents as role models. So if the final verdict is that Trump will be the president for the next 4 years, we'll just end up with a bunch of smaller Trumps all around the world.

But why is Trump such a bad president? Well first of all because his values don't align with the values that would make a good president. He might not literally say it but from the laws he has proposed so far, he still believes that the roles in the family should be the same as they were in the early and mid 1900's (basically that the woman/wife only has basic human rights and is supposed to only take care of children, cook and keep the household clean while the man/husband is supposed to be the provider of the household and even have authority upon his wife). Second of all, because he really doesn't know shit about economy. He wants to deport all emigrants, legal and illegal. But why do emigrants help the economy? Because most emigrants leave their home country to work on a higher payed salary than they would get in their home country. Emigrants are a cheap working force that he wants to get rid off (also, I'm saying this as someone who has family working abroad, I'm not saying it to insult anyone). So deporting emigrants is just sabotaging yourself, your own country. Third of all, because Trump is basically an undercover pedophile. I'm saying this based on his comments from interviews about his own daughter. Yes, Ivanka Trump is now a full grown woman, well over the age of consent. But a father making comments about how "he would've dated his daughter if he wasn't her father." or how "her body is voluptuous and she's hot." is extremely creepy considering that this man has known and seen his daughter since day one, Ivanka didn't get that "hot voluptuous body" just now at 43 years of age because that's not how the human body works. And besides you really can't make publicly sexualizing your daughter on TV sound good, no matter how hard you try. There is more I can say about Trump not being a man fitting to be president but I don't want to get into more taboo/complicated topics because I don't want to influence anyone based on my own opinions.

In my opinion, the only people that have voted for Trump are: uneducated people, extremely religious people and/or traditionalists (most religious people are also traditionalists and vice versa). What people fail understand is that religion is supposed to be about love, acceptance and peace, while hatred and judgement towards anybody is considered a sin in most religions. Taking away the rights of inoccent people simply for their race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender etc is inhumane. A good leader is one that's sees past these aspects of a person (despite their personal opinions) and judges based someone based on their values and who they are as a person. Even if you're black, white, asian, homosexual, heterosexual, christian, muslim, atheist, satanist, man or woman, on top of everything you're a person, and every person deserves the rights they've fought for for years, it's sadistic taking someone's rights simply because they don't align with your ideal type of person.

So, respectfully, if you're someone who supports Trumps (or any similar) ideologies, please unfollow this blog and go about your day as usual. I'm not here to fight with anyone, I just want to share my perspective of this.

[scotianostra]

9th October 1900 saw the birth in Edinburgh of Alastair Sim, the actor best known for his character and comedy roles.

He was the youngest of Alexander and Isabella Sim's four children. His father was a tailor who owned his own shop on Lothian Road, it is still a shop selling running gear nowadays.To use a suitable phrase for his father, I like the jib of the man, Alexander was one of a group of professional people in Edinburgh who noted the plight of wounded Veterans returning from the front who had little or no prospects of suitable accommodation or employment ahead of them. They founded the Scottish Veterans Garden City Association during the 1st World War and, under the chairmanship of Lord Salvesen, paid for the construction of houses for the use of returning servicemen.

Alexander Sim was offered, but refused, a knighthood.

For a time, the family lived above the shop, but as Alastair entered school, the business picked up enough that they were able to move to a house in Craigleith. Young Alistair was educated at Bruntsfield Primary, James Gillespie's High School and George Heriot's School. He worked for his father then another Edinburgh tailor but showed little aptitude and decided to enter Edinburgh University, studying analytical chemistry, but his further education was cut short when he was called up to the army. After the war he returned home and announced to his parents he was going to take up acting, this wnet down like a lead balloon and there was a falling out, Alistair left the family home and spent a year in the Scottish Highlands with a group of jobbing workers.

On returning to Edinburgh Sim took post in the burgh assessor's office. In his spare time, he entered poetry reading classes, winning the gold medal for verse speaking at the Edinburgh Music Festival.This led to him taking a job as a Fulton lecturer in elocution at New College, part of the University of Edinburgh.

Alastair Sim began working as a stage actor in 1930, taking on minor roles. His deep talent was soon discovered, and he was cast as Othello that same year. In 1932, he met and married Naomi Plaskill, his muse and wife for life. The couple had one child, a daughter named Merlith. It wasn't long before Sim moved to films in supporting roles. One of his more memorable characters was that of Detective Sergeant Bingham in the film series Inspector Hornleigh. His on-screen presence was so dominant that he has often been credited with "stealing the scene" from the film's star actors.

Throughout the 1940s, Sim was cast in several lead roles; he starred in the thriller Green for Danger, the comedy The Happiest Days of Your Life and Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright, among other major films. One of Sim's better-known portrayals was that of Captain Hook in the production of Peter Pan, a role he reprised six times during his career. In a national cinema poll in 1950, Sim was voted the most popular film actor in Britain.

I think quite a few of us will remember Alastair Sim in a slightly different role to those I have already pointed out, growing up before we had all the TV channels we have now and watching the old black & white films and the classic Belles of St Trinians where he played headmistress Millicent Fritton.

Looking through his other roles, I spotted he played the notorious Dr Knox, not once-but twice. For those who don't know, the doctor of note was a professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University, he paid Messrs Burke & Hare for fresh cadavers to demonstrate the human anatomy at the University.

I mentioned Alistair's father refusing a knighthood, and it pleases me to tell you he too refused the offer of becoming Sir Alistair Sim in the early 70's.

He died of cancer in August 1976, insisting that his body be used for medical research - and that there should be no memorial service for him. His widow lived until 1999; she published a memoir, Dance and Skylark: Fifty Years with Alastair Sim in 1987. There is a plaque, commemorating Sim's birth, outside the Filmhouse Cinema in Lothian Road, Edinburgh, only a short distance from where he was born above his father's shop.

[honey-and-sims]

As I understand it, the old family is abandoned and we will not see a continuation of Winifred and Lawrence?

I wouldn't say they are abandoned as much as they are just archived. I'm in the middle of finishing up my last English credit, and beginning a dental hygiene program after that which is an extremely difficult and surprisingly competitive field to get into, while also planning my wedding, and working full-time.

Playing the game for an hour or two each day, or something close to, and spending five or ten minutes editing vs spending an hour just finding poses, then writing the story, setting everything up in game, and editing in a way that satisfies me are very different energy levels.

It is my ultimate goal to be in a good headspace, with a healthy balance for leisure, studying and having financial stability, but right now, that's difficult to come by. I miss The Baudelaires every single day but their story also deserves to be told the right way, especially the more sensitive parts that require more research and figuring out how to present it in a palatable way. And again, especially when you consider that the Baudelaire's are living in, what today, is considered Northern Ireland in the early 1900's and there are significant moments in history quickly approaching that I must tell correctly and would feel wrong to just gloss over simply because I'm pressed for time and rushed through it just to get a post out.

I think it's easy for us to look at these historical events through a lens of academia and perhaps even through rose tinted glasses in some respects. But, for me at least, it feels so much deeper when you are telling it through a personal narrative perspective. For example, the suffragette movement. Yes it was a movement that gave women the right to vote but it also was extremely prejudice and by and in large excluded women of color. Yet, I rarely see that ever presented or shown in the stories written here. Now, I do understand that perhaps people feel they shouldn't share that history out of respect but I also think it's important to be honest about the fact that even the "progressive" women of the time were not all that progressive by today's standards. Or even the various wars that are coming quickly, like The Great War and the Irish Civil War. Civilians are always the ones who suffer the most when it comes to war, and again, I personally would feel wrong not showing that or mentioning it, at the very least.

But again, that also requires a lot more research on my part, while also staying true to who my characters are at their core and considering how these significant things would shape and bend their moral compasses, and impact their relationships with each other (because, spoiler, it will definitely have an affect on their interpersonal relationships within the family).

Now, that isn't to say I don't put as much love and care into the Flores Legacy because I still adore them as well or that I won't try to present these things where I can! But it is different in terms of perfectionism because of the fact that it's mostly gameplay and the game helps to steer their story in some ways whereas The Baudelaires are completely directed by me alone, if that makes any sense.

I apologize for the long rambling answer but I needed to get my point across that The Baudelaires are my babies. I have been playing them for years at this point and Winifred in particular is my favorite Sim that I have ever created in my 20 years of playing the sims franchise, and it was not an easy decision to put their story on hold. But I miss playing the game, and I miss historical simblr, so I decided to do something a little different, even if that's disappointing for some or even for myself.

Tl;Dr: they're not abandoned so much as they are just simply archived for right now.

[mariacallous]

I hope I'm not wrong, but I kinda feel like we have to remember that this isn't the mid to late 1900s anymore, or even the early 2000s. While it's true that this whole mess will likely galvanize Trump's current voting base, we also have to remember that we live in an era where there isn't really any absolute must-read trusted newspapers or stations that will keep this as the only big news event in the public conscious. There's now HUNDREDS of different bits and pieces of big information blasting our brains daily, all coming from sources people consider to be dubious at best or outright false at worst, and even big stuff eventually becomes routine and forgotten much faster than it used to be. Metaphorically speaking, this could just as easily end up being a very loud flash in the pan, and then people eventually just stop caring and move on.

We also have to factor in how many news sites have been getting quite a bit of backlash in response to their handling in relation to the Biden debate (regardless of what your personal opinion on that is like), and that is relatively fresh, so there's already a fair bit of distrust aimed at them as well, which means that Trump's stuff has as much of a chance of being dismissed or just not being cared for as much because it's "just another bunch of chaotic shit in a year full of chaotic shit" coming from dubious sources people are questioning more and more.

.

[reasoningdaily]

Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.

There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I’m a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries ago – have not yet been fully purged.

Slave Patrols

There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone’s home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.

As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor. Through the early 20th century, there were few standards for hiring or training officers.

Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow Laws

Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

The ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes illegal by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, Jim Crow laws aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights were enacted across southern and some northern states, replacing the Black Codes.

For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spaces for blacks and whites, such as schools, libraries, water fountains and restaurants – and enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality.

Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched. Nor did the judicial system hold the police accountable for failing to intervene when black people were being murdered by mobs.

Reverberating Today

For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.

What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take “diversity in criminal justice” courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.

[fmpdanishgirl]

THE ROARING 20'S

The 1920's were a decade of luxury and indulgence for many; however, there was a lot more to it than just wall street and flapper dresses.

FASHION OF THE 20'S 

Fashion in the 20's consisted of a lot of things. The main fashion statement of the 20's was the liberation of the corset, a very different thing from the past hundreds of years. As women were now starting to gain more rights thanks to the suffrage movement, many women did not want to be limited by the rigid corsetry of the Victorian era. 

Following the movement of more fredom of clothes in the 1920s, the sillouhette generally moved away from the hourglass steriotypical. Up until this point in history, many people now prefer a dropped wait line due to its versatility to different body shapes as it made everyone look great, as well as a shorter hem. This also allowed much more freedom for movement as women found they could now dance more freely as well as play many more sports. however just because these dresses were simple it does not mean they wasn't beautiful many techniques were used to create different effects which look absolutely gorgeous

Headware and hair also changed dramatically in the 1920s. Many people opted to wear hats such as chloche hats and bobbed hairstyles. This, I believe, came mostly from the insporation of La Garconne, the bachelorette, who went against almost all society standards of the previous era, getting pregnant out of wedlock, cutting her hair short, and wearing stereotypically manly clothes.

on this website it lists many other fashion trends of the 1920s in more depth.

Also in this video is shown some of the main fashion trends with more visually shown element's.

SUFFERAGETTES

The suffering movement started in 1840 and ended in 1920, but it really picked up the pace in the early 1900s. The suffrage movement was a movement by women for women focusing on gaining more rights, in particular the right to vote. 

A lot of traction for the women's rights movement came from WWI. This was because many women didn't have roles in the workplace, such as factories, etc., so when all the men were away at work, the women were needed to help run things back home while the men were at home. So when the war came to an end, many women decided that they didn't want to go back to their old lives where they depended on their husbands and, in fact, wanted to build a life for themselves and gain independence. 

One of the most famous suffrage protests was at the 1913 Epsom Derby. On this day, while the horses were racing, Emily Davison threw herself in front of King George's horse, Ammer. It is unclear whether Emily intended for the horse to hit her or for the horse to stop in another part of gaining attention for the rights, but either way, this was a tragic day and made many more people fight for women's rights, and women took a lot more seriously due to the public seeing the places they are willing to go to to get their rights.

In this video it shows the tragedy of which happened to suffragette Emily Davidson

this is another video which describes the acts of the suffragettes.

HARVARD REFERENCE

BBC News. (2018). Suffragettes: 100 years since women won the right to vote - BBC News. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: 6th February. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbdskuuocpg [Accessed 11 March 2024].

The Guardian. (2013). Suffragette Emily Davison knocked down by King's horse at Epsom. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: 4th june. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qkU_imbFoE [Accessed 11 March 2024].

Glamourdaze. (2020). Roaring 1920's Fashion Trends - What Did Women Wear. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: 1st May. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hwxFc2rLIs&t=1s [Accessed 11 March 2024].

Vintage Dancer. (2019). 1920s Fashion & Women’s Clothing Trends. [Online]. Vintage Dancer. Last Updated: 25th june. Available at: https://vintagedancer.com/1920s/1920s-womens-fashion/ [Accessed 11 March 2024].

[arthurmorganwateringhole]

Something about Mary (Linton)

When people interpret Mary Linton as manipulative (or at least, manipulating Arthur to help her), I think people fail to account for things like class difference. There’s a reason why she asks Arthur, specifically, and she voices time and again that she ought to ask someone else. So why Arthur? Anyone who’s aware of the puritanical culture of 19th-century American high society should be able to guess why, and it’s safe to assume that this is the social milieu from which the Gillis family plausibly comes from.

The stranger quest with Charles Chatenay should be case in point. This isn’t Europe. The upperclass of America are uptight, and this is indeed rooted in this country’s founding by religious extremists (which the Puritans are). In the late 1800s/early 1900s, a lot of this religious uptightness survives in movements like the Temperance movement, which in summary is a movement to ban the legal distribution of alcohol. This movement of course comes from the fallout that alcoholism causes in families, especially amongst the poor, but at the time, notions of propriety were very much rooted in religious ideals. Who upheld ideals? Often, proponents of progressivism came from wealthy families, and being cultured, polite, and otherwise morally upstanding often distinguished older moneyed families from newer moneyed families (many of whom rose up in this time period). 

That really simplified narrative about temperance and social class is there to say that it’s safe to assume the Gillis were moneyed family, and according to Arthur, Mary’s dad used to uphold very strict and rigid moral values that were part and parcel of upperclass American society. It’s precisely this draconian stance on vices which prevented both Arthur and Mary from getting married (outside of both becoming outlaws).

Years later, and for reasons we don’t know (or that I don’t know), the Gillis had fallen on hard times. Mary, newly made into a widow and therefore dependent on her father, is left in the hands of a man who’s fallen from very great heights. He’s a drunkard and steeped in debt. It’s safe to assume that this is precisely the kind of behavior that would warrant opprobrium from the Gillis family’s social peers. Gambling, debts, or watching out for your drunk father is one thing, but remember that more pressing matters beyond wealth were on the line. Jamie, her younger brother, had run off to a cult. She has enough reason to be concerned for his safety, living out in the wilds where bandits and wildlife roam. Not to mention, there IS a derelict house full of corpses laying in beds with bottles next to them, as if having died from communal self-poisoning. Clearly, cults were a scary thing. And when Mary asks Arthur to help with her dad, she had real reason to be scared that he’d gotten involved in something dangerous, besides drinking himself to death. She couldn’t ask someone in her social circle -- people who would’ve judged her rather than helped her. Or if they helped her, would’ve made her family owe them. She had to ask Arthur, the only person she knows who would never judge her (apart from rightfully blunt remarks about her father’s hypocrisy). He’s not from that upper crust of judgmental wealthy people. He’s a rough and tumble man who knows morality isn’t so black and white. He knows more than anyone people mess up (as Jamie has done) and would get him back safely. And despite his grudge against Mary’s father, Arthur would still help him out -- Mary knows he’s an unfailingly good man. And besides, she’s a widow in a time before women could vote, when property rights were definitely prioritized for men. What choice, what power did she have?

She’s not using Arthur. She’s coming to him as a desperate woman. Of course she feels bad that she broke his heart, but he’s the only one who **understands** her family without seeing her as some sort of fallen woman. He would see her for who she is: a woman who needs help; a woman whom he still loves.

[geekygirl85]

Thoughts from a former feminist

I have always been submissive in nature. It wasn't until I started learning about Male Led Relationships/Traditional Gender Roles that I realized my submissive side is totally natural and part of how women are and why women were created.

Being raised how I was made me think that men and women were equal in all aspects. I thought that way until I learned the truth. Women and men are equals but not at the same time.

I have learned more about what feels totally natural to me in the last 6 months than I have over the last few decades. I make sure to learn something everyday. I’m still shaking off the last of the feminist views that were shoved down my throat growing up. 

The original wave of feminists, if you want to call them that, where early 1900's. They were family-oriented women who just wanted the right to vote. They weren't looking for societal norms to change.

The original message of feminism is one I can get behind and support. The man hating modern one that was created during the decade of free love is one that makes no sense to me. The visions of not needing a man for anything. That men are what makes everything wrong with society is so far left in ideas that anyone who goes against them are anti-woman.

My views are that men are needed but it has to be the right kind of men. I will admit, yes, there are toxic men with toxic masculinity out there but the same can be said about women. Not all women are the same which is fine.

Those of us who want to live our lives how we enjoy them than that should be for us. We don't need people trying to tell us that we are wrong, we oppressed, that we are what is creating the downfall of womanhood. We are simply trying to live our lives how we want and how we want our kids to be raised.

As a generation of free will and free thinkers can't both sides just stay in their own lanes and stop trying to control the other side even though we are happy.

[queerchoicesblog]

Epilogue: Underwater (SC Titanic, Zetta x Adele Series)

As promised, here the epilogue of the Zetta x Adele Series, folks. 

This is the very end of a project that meant me quite a lot to me and got me through the last terrible year. Thanks to all those who supported it: hope you enjoyed it and will enjoy this ending.

In case you were wondering, this song inspired the whole series, particularly the last chapters:

I will skip the tag list for once since it’s pointless anyway. 

➡️ Ch. 1, Ch. 2/1, Ch. 2/2, Ch. 3, Ch. 4, Ch. 5, Ch. 6, Ch. 7, Ch. 8/1, Ch. 8/2, Ch. 9, Ch. 10/1, Ch. 10/2, Ch. 11/1, Ch. 11/2, Ch. 12, Ch. 13, Ch. 14, Ch. 15 , Ch. 16, Ch. 17

_________________________

Almost a century after the sinking of the RMS Titanic and to celebrate Canada becoming the first country outside Europe to legalise same-sex marriage, the Canadian Film Institute decided to work side by side with several LGBTQ+ organisations across the world to put together an exhibition focused on the early queer cinema and the many queer stars who were forced to hide their true selves in the Golden Age of cinematography, spanning from 1890s till the aftermath of Second World War. "A testament to the role the LGBTQ+ community played in the history of cinema and that we have always been here, even if people hardly saw us" as a journalist wrote on a queer magazine. After the recent discovery of some private documents, the curators were overjoyed to include an icon of the 1900s - 1910s cinema like Zetta Serda into the retrospective and cast a new light on her extraordinary career sadly soon forgotten after the advent of the sound era. Yet, the silent picture star was mentioned as a model and 'endless source of inspiration" by many queer movie stars like Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo all part of the retrospective. Rumor has it that as soon as she landed in America, Marlene Dietrich demanded his agent a meeting with Mrs King.

A curator drove all the way to Montreal to meet the last known heir, a certain Mrs. Julia Nowak, who greeted him on the threshold of a cosy downtown apartment. She offered him a coffee and a slice of a Polish sweet bread: the recipe was a family heirloom, she explained, beaming. She was in her late fifties, a therapist, she said. Her hazel eyes gleamed when she added, in a pleasantly soothing voice that betrayed a hint of excitement: "I must confess I am so incredibly happy that you contacted me about the retrospective. I adore the idea and I will make sure to attend it. Also" she nodded to a wedding picture hung to the wall "did you know that my wife is in politics? She campaigned for the legalisation...yes, Madeleine Fournier: see, you know her! We got married right after the law passed. If anything, your call and project made me twice as happy". She took a pause, smiling over her coffee in remembrance. "Anyway, back to the matter of your visit...yes, as far as I know, I am Zetta's last heir. As you probably know, my family wasn't officially related to her but she stated otherwise in her will". She moved to the couch and gestured the curator to follow her as she opened up one of the boxes and chests piled into the living room and picked out an old album, the leather cover worn at the edges. Dust waltzed in the air as she opened it with caution and gentle care. She showed him a slightly discoloured black and white picture of a young couple kissing for the camera in front of a church. Another wedding picture, from a different era. "Nana Hileni and Papa Maciej's wedding picture. I still remember them even if they both died when I was barely a teen...as if one couldn't bear to live without the other. Or so I like to think. She would help me with the homework, mathematics particularly, and he baked this bread for me till he was too weak to do so. He always claimed that he won Nana's heart with his pastries but she always denied it laughing". She passed another picture of the same couple proudly standing in front of the Nowak family bakery in Hoboken. "Frankly, I believe that Papa's broad shoulders and Marlon Brando smile are more likely to blame for this coup de foudre" she laughed. "And he knew how to deal with her no-nonsense attitude and vice versa. They...balanced each other, if you wish". She picked another picture and handed it to him. A woman was looking down in tender adoration and awe to a baby nestled in her arms looking up at her, outstretching a tiny arm in an attempt to touch her face. "There! This is Dad" she pointed at the baby before turning the picture where someone wrote 'Alex meets Auntie Adele'. Turning it again, she pointed at the woman. "This is Adele Carrem. Or Auntie Adele as I've always heard calling her. Nana's sister and Zetta's publicist and companion" Putting it back into the album, she carefully picked a bunch of other old pictures. "You surely know who this one is" she smiled, handing out the one on top. The photo was rather grainy but you could still recognise the same kid, slightly older, around two, sucking his thumb, cuddled up in Zetta's lap. The actress had aged a little but her features were unmistakable and it was endearing to see her sitting by the fireplace to read that kid with the sleepy face a bedtime story. "Sadly, I have never met them. I wish I did, oh you have no idea...but stories of them lived through in our family" Julia continued. "My Dad loved his Aunties - as he called them - dearly and by what I've heard and read, they loved him in manner as if he was their own. He knew little of them or Zetta's career back then...to him they were just the sweet ladies who would buy him ice-cream in Central Park or take him to see his favourite pictures over and over again at the movie theater. He said he will never forget the afternoons he used to spend with them in a Manhattan cafe that no longer exists around Christmas: Nana and Papa worked like crazy as the festive season approached and the glorious cup of hot chocolate with an elegant puff of cream on top with the Aunties became a tradition to him. He kept it alive somehow as he did the same with me". She handed the curator a bunch of other pictures: Zetta cleaning up Alex's face smeared with jam, the both of them laughing; Zetta posing with Maciej and her Dad at a table in the Hoboken bakery. He eventually mirrored her smile seeing a five years old Alex at the beach all engrossed in building a sandcastle with Hileni and Adele, and he standing at the water edge hand in hand with Miss Carrem, looking out into the distance. "These are family pictures. I'll show you the Zetta's private memorabilia we cherished". Julia searched a little, opening an old chest and handling every item inside with tender care. When she found what she was looking for, she showed the curator an elegant set of smaller boxes containing letters, dried flowers and photos. "I have already received an offer to get these published. I'm still pondering it. Before agreeing, I want to consider throughly if this is a thing they would have wanted, even if they're no longer here" The curator nodded as she kept searching. He skimmed a few letters and smiled as his eyes fall on the photos hidden away in those boxes: the two women sitting together and chatting at Hileni's wedding, Zetta's reading a script, lazily sprawled on a chaise long in her apartment. Some had short lines handwritten on the back, like a promotional picture with "Missing you" written by Zetta herself. The curator showed another to Mrs Nowak: a visibly excited Miss Carrem proudly showing to the camera a document announcing her voter registration. On the back, in Zetta's penmanship: "On the way to vote...my sweet Adele won!". "Oh you didn't know? Auntie Adele was a suffragette! I couldn't believe it when I first heard it! Nana told me that she was in and out jail when they lived in London because of protests. You know, like those suffragettes you read about in history books but less famous. Yet she fought for women's rights and kept fighting for them even in America. She was quite disappointed though by some major decisions of some feminist movements and eventually joined a socialist Union 'more rightfully welcoming working class individuals, immigrants and black brothers and sisters'. It's all in those letters but yeah, you couldn't possibly know. So little is known about her outside family". A little smile drew on her face as she put back the photo. "That photo was taken the day of the first election open to women. I checked the date. I suppose Zetta wanted to immortalise the moment...it was sweet of her, huh? Auntie Adele must have been so proud and overjoyed that day! You know, my Dad was born in 1920 when women's right to vote was legalised nationally and Nana once told me that Auntie commented the lucky coincidence saying she was incredibly happy her nephew would get to live in a fairer world. She was a true force of nature...she never talked much of the sinking of the Titanic just like Zetta and Nana actually but when one day Dad asked...he was barely a child and probably found an old article about the tragedy...Auntie Adele minimised but Nana assured him that her sister saved her life that night, risking her own to go down to the belly of the sinking ship to bring her to safety. Auntie simply shrugged, saying that it was what sisters do and that they made it to the lifeboats only thanks to Zetta, who shouted protests to stubborn officers and eventually found them a spot on a boat. I cannot even bring myself to imagine how scary that must have been: I cried so much when Madeleine took me to see Leo and Kate...to think they were there and it was all real!" She picked a few other objects out the box: a Shakespeare Sonnets book in a leather cover with golden engravings, with a little handwritten dedication 'To Adele, my sonnet 116. Happy birthday! With all my love, Zetta'; old scripts with annotations, a framed photograph of Adele and Zetta slow dancing barefoot in the living room of a gorgeous Long Island mansion. "These have a sentimental value" Mrs Nowak noted, her voice betraying the flicker of emotions as she picked it up. She took a deep sigh and continued. "I remember the day I told Dad I was gay as it was yesterday. We had always been quite close so it came natural to tell him first. We were in his car, he had come straight from college to pick me up at ice-skating practice. I..I dropped it in the middle of a conversation, bracing myself for the worst. I heard so many bad stories about coming out to your parents I was terrified of the consequences but I couldn't hide it anymore. I mean, yes, in public: bullies get even nastier if they know and I didn't want people shouting me "dyke" at school. But I needed to get it out of my chest...with someone at least. He kept quiet for a moment and I felt like drowning in shame. But then he spoke". A nostalgic tender smile formed Julia's lips. "He said he had two amazing Aunties that contributed to make his life a wondrous adventure. It was thanks to them that he, the son of a baker, could attend a prestigious college, for instance: they offered to pay for it without asking a penny back. They also helped him write his first romantic letter to his childhood sweetheart and consoled him when the little girl turned him down. But his Aunties had a secret, he added. He said: to my kid eyes they were no less a couple than Mom and Dad and at home we all treated them in manner but one day Mom made me promise to behave differently when we were in public. In public I would refer to her sister as 'Auntie Adele' but call Zetta by her name. He didn't get it and it took some getting used to. He soon noticed that even the Aunties behaved a bit differently out in the sun: they wouldn't hold hands or use endearing words in the street or when other people were around. They simply behaved like good friends did. He understood it later when he, as stubborn as a mule, asked them directly". Julia gently grazed her fingers on the glass of the framed photograph, caressing it. "And they told me everything, he said. That they were in love, just like mom and dad were, but people out there could be uncomfortable and extremely rude to women loving other women and men loving other men. That they kept their companionship a secret in public because those people had no problems with women being friends and they didn't want to have bad words or worse happening to them. I remember asking him what he thought about it. He smiled. 'I cried. Since Auntie Zetta mentioned people claiming that women like them were sick and would burn in hell, I actually started crying. I sobbed desperately in her arms, crying that I didn't want them to burn in hell, I loved my Aunties and I was happy they loved each other. Eventually they explained me it was just a vile lie spread my malignant people. But I got quite a scare and kept staring at them with puffy red eyes and my face wet with tears for a while. It required lots of cuddling to bring a smile back on my face'. He shook his head, laughing of his endearing naivety. Then he pulled over and looked at me. He continued: 'I still don't get why people keep spreading those mean lies but I know for sure that my Aunties weren't sick and didn't end up in hell and so won't you. Don't believe bullshits like that for a split second, okay? And I also want you to remember that it doesn't change a thing for me and mom too. You will always be my little girl, our little girl and we love you'. We shared a long hug before driving back home. On the way back he insisted to buy my favourite chicken and waffles for dinner, saying mom's veggie soup could wait. For my birthday, a month later or so, he asked me to follow him to the attic and showed me this chest. To meet the Aunties that 'would have surely been there for me'". She tipped away a tear. "I told you I married Madeleine right after the legalisation of same-sex marriages. My wedding was also the last public event Mom and Dad attended together before his health worsened irremediably. He passed away last year". For a moment she looked on the verge of tears but she recovered quickly. "Sorry...anyway, that day Dad insisted on walking me down the aisle even if he was getting weak. He beamed with pride when a friend fixed a rainbow ribbon to his jacket. Later at the lunch he read a speech he had written for the day, his hand shaking. He shared the story of his Aunties. He said that despite the hardships their situation forced upon them, they had quite a happy life together, a happiness carefully hidden from the world. He wished us to find something similar to what they shared without needing to hide anymore. He said Adele and Zetta would have been so happy and proud to celebrate with all of us that day" Mrs. Nowak picked the Shakespeare Sonnet book and gave him a fond look. "He brought this to the wedding. And he read for us the sonnet 116, the one Zetta mentioned in her dedication. You know, the one that starts with 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments..." ----------------------- A few months later the exhibition on old Hollywood queer cinema and artists opened. Each artist had a room that soon filled with a crowd of enthusiastic visitors. In the first half, in a room arranged as a turn of the century nickelodeon with velvet chairs, all the memorabilia of Zetta Serda's public life: panels explaining the various stages of her career and the birth of her myth, promotional pictures of her performances, articles about her and a copy of a gazette announcing her wedding with the director Richard King. On the wall, on a screen her entire filmography rolled up in loop, bewitching spectators after a century. In display cases: the gorgeous sapphire necklace she wore on her last night on the Ship of Dreams and at the movie party of Surviving the Titanic, and a replica of her Cleopatra costume. The aging Queen of Egypt with a tragic love and destiny immortalised by Shakespeare was her last role back on the theater stage before retiring from the scenes. Old scripts with her personal annotation were displayed with photographs taken on sets and mundane events. The wall hosting the motion-picture screen cut the room in half. On the other side, the hidden half of her life. Her life with Adele no one suspected back then. A life kept secret that now unveiled in front of the eyes of the visitors. The curators discovered that finding public pictures of Miss Carrem was nearly impossible, true to the nickname she acquired as time went by: The Shadow. She stayed at Zetta's side until and even after she stopped acting, showing rare loyalty and devotion, but ever surrounded by this mystery allure. No one, even the most stubborn reporters managed to know anything about her and she was soon dismissed as a Titanic survivor, possibly a fan, who worked as Zetta's secretary and somehow gained her respect. Little they knew about the depth of their relationship and what stacks of secret letters and family memories revealed of the life of Miss Carrem. A panel finally told her story and her secret achievements: Adele, or better Adal, kept fighting for a fairer world and society her whole life and marched for women's right to vote on the famous parade in 1915. She also passed the teaching of Edith Garrud to her American sisters. The only pictures of her came from the Nowak family, except for one. The only photograph of a public appearance of Miss Carrem as well as the only known public appearance of Zetta and Adele. An old grainy photo accurately framed showed Adele shaking hands with The Unsinkable Molly Brown on a podium. In her free hand a shiny medal and a few steps behind the mayor of New York. According to the panel, the survivors' committee founded by Mrs. Brown decided to award Miss Carrem a medal for bravery and a generous check "to help her and her sister starting a new life in America". With great surprise, Miss Carrem received the medal and the check, thanked the board but refused the honors. Instead, she asked to deliver them both to the family of a certain Charlie Stoke, a stewart that lost his life in the sinking to save her life and those of many passengers. She added that her friend expressed the desire to study naval engineering one day and she wished that the money kindly offered to her would be enough to establish a scholarship for boys like him across the ocean. In another picture, Miss Carrem and her sister chatted with Moll Brown in company of Zetta. Eventually, other philanthropists and wealthy socialites signed checks for her cause so that the Stoke family received a generous contribution too. And today, as another picture confirmed, the faculty of naval engineering of the University of Newcastle hosts a marble engraving of Charlie Stoke: to his memory a scholarship had been instituted one year after on the anniversary of the sinking. Since 1913 it has been helping students of poor background to get an education and improve their life. Zetta herself became a philanthropist during her Renaissance and ever since. The first act of her new phase of her life was joining the Moll Brown survivors committee to provide help to the second and third class passengers families and survivors. Some said that the tragedy she witnessed touched her heart, other claimed that it was to be attributed to the influence of her publicist. Jokingly, she used to say that after all, she had too much money yet all she could have wished for in her life, so why not doing some good with it? A considerable donation under her and Mr King was received by the main hospital during the Spanish flu pandemic; she was particularly active in providing financial help to struggling neighbourhoods and female education institutions. In the middle of the room, a long glass display hosted the Shakespeare Sonnets opened at sonnet 116 and a selection of the private correspondence between Zetta and Adele. My darling, You will receive this letter tomorrow morning when I'll be already off to Chicago. The suitcases are ready and packed, this is a goodnight note scribbled the night before leaving you to remind you how much I love you and care about you. How much I'm going to miss you even if - thank God! - we won't be parted for long... Do not forget you promised me to write every day! Write to me, Adele, write to me whatever thought crosses that gorgeous mind of you: you know I could you rambling for hours without getting tired of the sound of your voice, of your sparkling wisdom. I wanna know everything. So don't be shy: I'll be waiting your letters with tender impatience. Can't wait to be in your arms once more. Adoringly yours, Zetta - Dear, dearest Zetta, I went to Central Park today with Hileni. It was a gorgeous spring day, sunny, a gentle breeze blowing: 'simply too beautiful to be wasted inside' as my sister put it. Did I tell you that she's still exchanging letters with the delivery boy from the hat shop? I thought they were over but apparently he invited her to the nickelodeon next week. Anyway, walking in the park with her I suddenly realised how I wanted to share that spring wonder with you. When are you coming back to New York? Tell me soon, please. And even 'soon' won't be soon enough: you're always on my mind since you left. But yes, tell me soon so I can make you promise we will go for a walk before the weather becomes too hot. Do you think I can wrap my arm with yours? Is it professional enough for a publicist? Even just for a few steps: oh you have no idea how I would love that! Or maybe you have? I hope so: it'd mean you miss me as much as I miss you when we are apart. Oh, I almost forgot: all settled with that magazine you mentioned before your departure! I negotiated a two pages long interview, plus pictures. And a cover mention. Hope I did well: you have already fired me as your secretary, I must prove you I am just what you're looking for in a publicist... Can't wait to see you again! Loving you always, Adele Only one letter was copied on a panel of its own on the main wall side by side with a blow-up of the picture of Adele and Zetta slow-dancing barefoot and free, for a blessed moment immortalised in a discreet shot. Adele pressing a tender kiss on Zetta's forehead, drawing a soft smile on the acrtress' lips. Many visitors commented it was heartwarming to see such a photograph that conveyed the intimacy and the warmth of affection radiating from the dancing couple. Some said that Zetta was even more beautiful like that: free, hair slightly askew and genuinely happy, loved. What stole their hearts away though was the letter attached to it. It was no surprise that the curators decided to name the retrospective Underwater. Dearest Adele, Forgive me for the tone of this letter. I am writing it down in bed while I cannot sleep and my mind runs back to you as if we could meet halfway between the miles separating us, in a world of fantasy of our own. It's ridiculous how much I miss you! I want you near, I need you near all the time. Take tonight: if you were here with me, I would be heavenly sleeping in your loving embrace. Most unfortunately, you are not and I'm lying here, insomniac, thinking of you. And about my life. No, don't frown. I am not getting all sad again. It's...bittersweet. And - I'll spoil you the ending so you will stop worrying, hopefully - it gets better the more you proceed. Have you ever felt trapped underwater? I did, my whole life. Always hiding, always measuring words, gestures, gazes not to let them see, not to let them know...so little time to go up and break the surface. Drop the mask and breathe. In, out. Once, twice. In my lowest moments I repeated to my myself: how are you gonna survive? One day an acquaintance with a remarkable passion for the sea explained me and the other bored commensals that you can keep someone alive by breathing oxygen into their mouth underwater. Pretty much like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation helps an unconscious person to regain consciousness. I found it interesting but doubted his words. Then I met you, Adele. My dearest, wondrous Adele. And I learnt that yes, you can't breathe if you're constantly underwater...but you won't drown if you have the right person swimming by your side in those deep waters. Put your lips on me, Adele. Touch me, hold me in your arms. And I can live underwater. With your love, I can live underwater. We can live underwater. I love you. I want to cover a full page of these three simple words: I love you. I want to cry them out and entrust them to the winds, to the night. But what for? Who cares if the world knows or not? I'll whisper them over your lips when we will be reunited. So you can breathe underwater. Counting down the hours separating us, my love. Eternally yours, Zetta

[96thdayofrage]

Women’s rights activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Betsy Ross, who championed gender equity, didn’t feel the same about race. While many white suffragists worked to help eradicate the institution of slavery, they did not work to ensure that former slaves would have citizenship or voting rights.

“Black women were not accounted for in white women’s push for suffrage. Their fight wasn’t about women writ large. It was about white women obtaining power – the same power as their husbands, black women and black men be damned,” says Howard University Assistant Professor Jennifer D. Williams.

Stanton and Ross and other high-profile leaders in the movement didn’t support the 14th and 15th amendments, which granted former slaves citizenship rights and gave black men voting rights. Given this chasm, a black women’s suffrage movement developed alongside the mainstream movement.

“There was a concerted effort by white women suffragists to create boundaries towards black women working in the movement,” says historian and author Michelle Duster. “White women were more concerned with having the same power as their husbands, while black women saw the vote as a means to improving their conditions.”

Some black suffragists you should know

Sojourner Truth (About 1797-1883)

Born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree, she gained her freedom in the 1820s and supported herself through menial jobs and selling a book written by Olive Gilbert, “Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York in 1828. At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered what is now recognized as one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history, “Ain’t I a Woman?” In 1872, Truth was turned away when trying to vote in the U.S. presidential election in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Harriet Tubman (About 1820-1913)

Tubman, whose birth name was Araminta Ross, is commonly known as an emancipator who led hundreds of slaves to freedom along the underground railroad. She also was a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage, giving speeches about her experiences as a woman slave at various anti-slavery conventions, out of which the voting rights movement emerged.

Coralie Franklin Cook (1861-1942)

Cook founded the National Association of Colored Women and was known as a committed suffragist. In 1915, she published “Votes for Mothers” in the NAACP magazine The Crisis discussing the challenges of being a mother and why women need the vote.

Angelina Welde Grimke (1880-1958)

A well-known feminist in the District of Columbia, Grimke was a journalist, playwright, poet, lesbian, suffragist and teacher. Grimke wrote for several journals such as Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Educated at Wellesley College, Grimke’s literary works exposed her ideas about the pain and violence in black women’s lives, and her rejection of the double standards imposed on women.

Charlotta (Lottie) Rollin (1849-unknown)

After the Civil War, the woman suffrage movement split into two separate organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) —a more radical group and the more mainstream American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Rollin joined the AWSA. During Reconstruction, Rollin became active in South Carolina politics working for congressman Robert Brown Elliott. Rollin spoke on the floor of the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1869 in support of universal suffrage. By 1870, Rollin chaired the founding meeting of the South Carolina Woman’s Rights Association and was elected secretary. Several of Rollin’s family members — sisters Frances, Kate and Louisa also were active in promoting women’s suffrage at both the state and national levels.

Mary Ann Shad Cary (1823-1893)

Cary was perhaps the first black suffragist to form a suffrage association. During the 1850s, she was a leader and spokesperson among the African American refugees who fled to Canada after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. In 1853, she founded the Provincial Freeman, a newspaper dedicated to the interests of Blacks in Canada. Cary spoke at the 1878 convention of the NWSA applying the principles of the 14th and 15th Amendments to women and men. She called for an amendment to strike the word “male” from the Constitution. In 1871, Cary unsuccessfully tried to vote in Washington, but she and 63 other women prevailed upon officials to sign affidavits attesting that women had tried to vote. In 1880, she organized the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association, which promoted suffrage and educated people on finance and politics.

Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1855–1948)

A journalist, Mossell, wrote a women’s column in T. Thomas Fortune’s newspaper, The New York Freeman. Her first article, “Woman Suffrage” published in 1885, encouraged women to read suffrage history and articles on women’s rights.

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)

Wells, who worked with white suffragists in Illinois, founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first suffrage group for black women. They canvassed neighborhoods and educated people on causes and candidates helping to elect Chicago’s first black alderman. In 1913, Wells and some white activists from the Illinois delegation traveled to Washington to participate in the historic suffrage parade where women gathered to call for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. Black suffragists were initially rejected from the event. Wells and other suffragists including white suffragists like Stanton wrote letters asking the parade to allow black women to participate. Event leaders acquiesced, requiring black suffragists to march in the back of the parade to assuage the feelings of white women in the movement who did not want them there. Despite the conditions, black suffragists participated. However, Wells refused to march at the back.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

In 1896, Terrell and fellow activists founded the National Association of Colored Women and Terrell served as the association’s first president. After the passage of the 19th Amendment, Terrell turned her attention to civil rights.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)

Anna Julia Cooper was a prominent African American scholar and a strong supporter of suffrage through her teaching, writings and speeches. Cooper worked to convince black women that they required the ballot to counter the belief that ‘black men’s’ experiences and needs were the same as theirs.

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

Known as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” because of her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks continued to work for civil rights which included voting rights. Parks served as an aide to Congressman John Conyers and used her platform to discuss many issues, including voting rights.

Charlotte Vandine Forten (1785 –1884)

An abolitionist and suffragist, Forten came to Washington in the late 1870’s with her husband, James Forten, a wealthy sail maker and abolitionist. She was a founder and member of the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, many of whose members became active in the women’s rights movement.

Harriet Forten Purvis (1810 – 1875)

Daughter of wealthy sailmaker and abolitionist reformer James Forten and Charlotte Forten, Forten Purvis and her sisters were founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and members of the American Equal Rights Association, where Harriet served as a member of the executive committee. Affluent and educated, the sisters helped lay the groundwork for the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in October 1854 and helped organize the Philadelphia Suffrage Association in 1866.

Margaretta Forten (1806 -1875)

Forten was an educator and abolitionist. She and her mother, Charlotte Forten and her sister, Harriet, were founders and members of the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Harriet “Hattie” Purvis (1810-1875)

A niece of the Forten family of reformers, Purvis was active in the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association and a member of their executive committee. Between 1883 and 1900, she served as a delegate to the National Woman Suffrage Association. She also served as Superintendent of Work among Colored People for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, championing reforms.

Sarah Remond (1826-1887)

Remond was an antislavery lecturer and physician. The Remonds were a noted abolitionist family, well known in antislavery circles and, as a child, Sarah had attended abolitionist meetings. She was an activist in the Salem and Massachusetts Antislavery Societies, and a member of the American Equal Rights Association, where she served as a guest lecturer, and toured the Northeast campaigning for universal suffrage. Discouraged by the split in the women’s suffrage movement after the Civil War, she left the United States, becoming an expatriate in Florence, Italy, in 1866, where she studied medicine.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an early abolitionist and women’s suffrage leader. She was one of the few African American women present at conferences and meetings about these issues between 1854 and 1890. She also wrote protest poetry that referenced which included musings about voting rights.

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842 –1924)

Ruffin was a Massachusetts journalist and noted abolitionist before the Civil War. She joined the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in 1875 and was affiliated with the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was a black woman’s club leader in Massachusetts and the wife of George L. Ruffin, one of the woman’s suffrage representatives from Boston in the state legislature. She challenged the opposition to woman’s suffrage in Boston, writing an editorial co-authored with her daughter, Florida Ridley.

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961)

Burroughs, an educator, church leader and suffrage supporter, devoted her life to empowering black women. She helped establish the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in 1909.

Ella Baker (1903-1986)

Civil rights activist and freedom fighter, Ella Baker played a key role in some of the most influential organizations of the time, including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1964, SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to both focus national attention on Mississippi’s racism and to register black voters. Baker and many of her contemporaries believed that voting was one key to freedom.

[justamusicpodcast]

Episode 6 out today!

We’re talking about Blues music

Transcript under the cut

Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

And boi unless you’ve had that talk with ur kids about systemic racism you might wanna let them sit this one out because we’re gonna be touching on a bunch of terrible racist shit this week Because we’re gonna be talking about the Blues and various different type of blues musics. I’m actually really excited to talk about it too because blues, as you guys will find out in the future is kinda the basis for a lot of other, what one might consider more modern, genres of American popular musics. So this one’s gonna be important for ur earholes and ur brainholes. Just like last time I will be airing a sensitive content warning for some graphic descriptions of violence and I will put the time stamps in the description for y’all for when that starts and ends. 

First though, I wanna issue an apology for being away so long, I tend to work on this podcast in my free time, and currently I’ve had none of that what so ever. It just so happened that October worked out this year that it was thanksgiving and my birthday and then a bunch of big projects due then Halloween and now I’m working on my fucking thesis proposal, I’m actually recording this episode at 1:35 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, so needless to say all this in combination with trying to deal with my depression hasn’t been a cake walk but we’re making it work. I will likely run up against a similar time issue during the first couple weeks of December because that’s when all my final papers are due. After that thought I should have smooth sailing for about a month. I wanted to make sure I had an episode out this week because as I think… well everyone… is aware the American election took place this week and understandably people were stressed as shit about that. So I think we could all use a little music right now. 

Ok so Like all fuckin things we need to know where blues came from. Now blues is actually a lot older than a lot of people are gonna be expecting, like really damn old. Like pretty much everything in academia (and I mean EVERYTHING, at least in the humanities), the dates are contested, but it seems that the blues, or at least what began as the blues, started in and around the 1860s. For those who didn’t listen to last week’s episode on slave songs, spirituals, and gospel, or just those who don’t know their American history too too well, the 1860s marks a very important time for black people, many of which at that time had been enslaved, because in 1865 the thirteenth amendment was amended into the American constitution. For those who aren’t aware, the thirteenth amendment as stated by the national archives of the United States of America reads as such: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Now this of course was fantastic news of course! And for some people, this might be where you think oppression in the Americas ends for Black people but you would be incredibly wrong! Because this is the period where we see the start of a phenomenon referred to as sharecropping. Sharecropping or crop sharing as it’s known otherwise is considered part of what we historians sometimes refer to as the Jim Crow economy of the American South after the civil war. But what is Jim crow economy, what did it come from, why is it bad, why is sharecropping bad, how does any of this relate to the blues? Well lucky for u lil turnips imma tell ya.

  Jim Crow culture is something that I imagine most North Americans will have even the most basic knowledge of but for those that don’t the name Jim Crow as applied to economy, laws, and any other part of American culture during these time periods refers to sets of crazy fucking racist laws written and unwritten that kept black people subjugated under the whims of the government as well as their fellow white countrymen. The term Jim crow itself is reference to a song often featured in the supremely racist minstrel shows of the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s referred to as “Jump Jim Crow” in which a white man in black-face sings in a parody centric dialect about the life of a charicaturishly uneducated back-woodsy Black man named, you fuckin guessed it, Jim Crow. The significance of the Crow being that it was a pejorative term for black individuals which can actually dated back to the early mid 1700s. Now I wanna preface the excerpt of it with the fact that I’m uncomfortable listening to this, I understand if others are too. The thing is that acknowledging these uncomfortable things and knowing about them is necessary in order to understand the type of historical impact that they had. “So laura, you must obviously support statues being raised to commemorate things like slavery and secessionism!” Absolutely not. Where statues and monuments exist to praise the efforts of individuals, the listening to and learning about songs in a teaching context like this very podcast are meant to educate. Statues commemorating culture surrounding one of the worst atrocities to have taken place on American soil should never have been erected in the first place let alone celebrated. One is meant to celebrate while the other is to educate because one is a historical primary source that lets us think critically about the history, the other is a tertiary celebration. The purpose of listening to a clip like this is then to educate and understand a piece of actually history, not to replicate and enjoy. The version of the song that I have is sung without the charicaturish accent but uses the original words but with all that in mind here’s a bit of Jump Jim Crow:

In terms of laws I’m sure just about everyone knows separate drinking fountains and schools but this really permeated pretty much every sphere of life for Black peoples especially those in the south. I say especially those in the south but not exclusively those in the south because racial segregation, although not as supported by law but more socially, also existed in the Northern States as well as in Canada. Anecdotally, my mother grew up in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio, she remembers going into Cleveland when she was a kid when Cleveland was still a very racially segregated city, Black peoples lived in, shopped in, and attended schools in certain areas of the city and white people in other’s. My grandmother who was also raised in the area even remembers Black people having separate lunch counters if any at all in some of the larger department stores in the area.

It might also be handy when I mention the south to actually talk about what the south and particularly the deep south is for y’all outside of America. So when we talk about the south we are talking about a geographically bounded area just not the area that one might think of by looking at a map because where you might be thinking like ah just take the country and cut it in half, and the bottom half is the south that wouldn’t be correct. So, from the United States Census Bureau itself the south we’re talking about is Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Now some who live in the surrounding areas such as Kansas might also consider themselves as being from the “south” somewhat culturally but those states previously listed as the official ones. When we talk about the DEEP SOUTH however, that range closes a little more, and that would mainly just include Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and sometimes Texas and Florida due to their involvement as part of the confederate states of America, meaning states that were on the south side of the civil war. 

Also briefly just so we’re clear, again this is for those people who didn’t receive the best education on Slavery and the Civil War in general but to be clear, the civil war was fought over primarily states rights to use and perpetuate slavery. The common narrative you hear a lot in protests by those on the right, who would like to uphold the institutions set out by their forefathers in the creation of the abominable act, is that the civil war was primarily fought over states rights. What they then so often forget to elaborate is that those rights were perceived as the right to govern themselves independently so that they may still be able to employ slave labour in the operation of their economies and also to expand further westward to continue and be able to use slavery out in those areas as well. 

The reason that we hear about these Jim Crow laws particularly in the South is because where the Northern states and Canada did have (and still continues to have) some violent racist issues, the Jim Crow south was specifically really bad. And I mean fucking abominable. Though Black people were free from being directly owned, society at large and all it’s trappings found new ways to oppress them. This started with Black Codes which were individual state law codes that dictated where Black peoples could move, for how long they could stay, restricted their rights to vote (or made it extremely difficult to vote via poll taxes, literacy tests, etc), as well as where they could work, and in some cases even if their children could be taken away from them on the basis labour needs. So I really can’t drive home the point enough of how much life sucked for Black peoples under Jim Crow laws and economy in the southern states, to call it any less than abominable would seem to understate it in a major way. In the 1880s Jim Crow laws hadn’t started to be rolled into large southern cities yet so many Black peoples were inclined to move into them because life was actually slightly easier for a short while. White people being offended and upset at this, because “how dare a black person just try to live their lives in my good white pure Christian neighborhood,” then fully supported Jim crow laws being rolled out to remove them from areas where white people would normally interact with them. This included but was not limited to, barring them from public parks entirely, having entirely different theaters at one point and then segregated theaters after a while with separate entrances based on your race, restaurants, bus and train stations, water fountains, restrooms, most building entrances in general, elevators, amusement park ticket windows, public schools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, elderly care homes and even fucking cemeteries. Of course being treated as diseased subhuman parasites is never enough for the racism machine that is the public conscious at this time so there was also a lot of violence both systematic and grassroots that accompanied this era. 

And here’s where I’m going to have to issue a sensitive content warning because I’m about to describe some truly heinous shit in a whole second. So by violence, I mean very public and very culturally accepted violence, similar to what we’re seeing more and more of in the states again. As many will know now in the light of the many many many police shootings of unarmed, unthreatening black people in the states, the police traditionally haven’t been on the side of black citizens. This is due to a number of reasons, for one, on the most basic of levels the police serve to protect the interests of those in power, in our case that means the property and lives of middle to upper class (mostly) white Americans. The natural extension of this is that many police forces in the states, especially in Southern states started out as slave catching forces bringing back runaway enslaved people to their owners. So as time progressed and Black peoples became a “free” population this still meant protecting mainly middle to upper class white people from the “threat” of black people. This was enforced in a number of ways, such as arresting black individuals found breaking these rules, framing black people for crimes committed by others and arresting them for population suppression, and turning a blind eye to the grassroots violence perpetrated by non-black citizens, which very often were white citizens. An example of just straight up police brutality can be found in the case of Isaac Woodard JR. who was viciously beaten by police only hours after being honorably discharged from the fucking military on February 12 1946. The bus driver driving Woodard and some of his fellow soldiers called the police after Woodard asked the bus driver if there might be time for him to use the restroom as they approached a rest stop. When the police arrived, the bus driver accused Woodard of drinking in the back of the bus and he was hauled off, dragged into an alley and beaten with nighsticks. That night he was thrown in the town jail, by morning he had been beaten so severely he was left permanently blind in both eyes. 

And that grassroots violence is just as nasty, really fucking nasty. The violence could be perpetrated for things as small as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, entering a white neighbourhood, “talking back to” the wrong person. Since black men have always been are still to some degree subject to the stereotype that they are all sex incensed monsters, being left alone in a room with a white woman could be enough to incite violence against them. In the Mississippi delta during the season where share cropping debts were settled up, there was a sharp uptick in violence against and killings of black people. If you were white, because let’s be real here some white people definitely were on the side of their oppressed countrymen, you could be hung on the basis of being an N-word lover, which could range from being found to being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a person of colour, to just being fucking friends with them. The violence was often varied too, where kidnapping and hanging someone either with or without brutalizing them first (also known as a lynching) is the form most commonly associated with Jim Crow era violence less extreme but still horrible harassment could perpetuate in any form. Mississippi had the highest amount of lynchings from 1882-1968 with 581. You might think that is a low number but first, similarily to when we were talking about slavery in the last episode, 1 lynching is too fucking many, and secondly these are only the ones that were officially recorded. Since lynchings didn’t always happen in broad daylight and since law enforcement really didn’t care about Black individuals, there were almost certainly more that happened that just never were recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. 79% of lynching happened in the South. So as I said before though, lynching was not the only form though, beatings were also entirely all too common forms of violence perpetrated against blackf people to make them scared and thus more compliant. A good example of this is the case of Emmet Till a 14 year old boy who made the mistake of playfully flirting with a white woman, who was beaten nearly to death, had one of his eyes gouged out, was then shot in the head, and tied to some cotton mill equipment before his body was thrown in a river. This wasn’t even that long ago, the beating happened on the 28th of August 1955. 

THE next parts are also gonna be not great but there wont be anymore descriptions of graphic violence, so I’m calling an end to the sensitive content warning. So the then how does sharecropping play into all this and what does it have to do with the blues (we’re getting there babes I promise.) So as I explained previously, sharecropping was a part of the Jim Crow economic era. It was part of the era of reconstruction meaning the period of rebuilding after the civil war. How it worked was that let’s say for a second, come with me into the theater of the mind for a second, take a seat, close your eyes, take a deep breath, Ok so lets imagine for a second you’re a farmer in the south, the civil war has kinda left you in a spot, if you’re black, you’re starting off without an awful lot, you don’t have any generational wealth you don’t have property likely aside from maybe a relatively small plot of land (but this was uncommon,) you probably didn’t have much if any equipment because that would have been way too expensive, and the land you may have had may have been of shitty quality. So what could you do to earn yourself a living?! Well you would go to a landowner, and ask him rather kindly if you might be able to work the land they lived on in exchange for some of the profits of the crops that you would produce. The landowner would provide you with the tools, seed, housing, land, store credits at local shops in order to subsist offa for food and other supplies and sometimes a mule in order to help you work the land seeing as motorized machinery was still few and far between in the united states at this point. The issue of this system is that how much you receive for you labour, the cut that you actually get from selling crops, that you grew with ur own backbreaking labour, is more or less decided by your landowner. And as I mentioned last episode, those who’ve ever had to rely on the benevolence of a boss for any period of time knows that this shit ain’t gonna cut it. So often you would end up underpaid, underfed, and in a debt hole that lasted as long as you did. If it sounds like legal slavery that’s kinda because it was. You would basically remain in indentured servitude to the landowner for as long as you were a part of this system. Like don’t get me wrong there were people who managed to not be a part of it but it was an incredibly largescale problem. 

It’s important to note that this wasn’t just a black phenomenon either, white tenants of sharecroppers existed and in incredibly large numbers as well. By 1900, 36 percent of all white farmers in Mississippi were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers (by comparison, 85 percent of all black farmers in 1900 did not own the land they farmed). This all sucks for various reasons but like partially because there was this whole other plan proposed that after the war, all the land that had been seized from slave owners would have been divvied up to the newly freed slave populations. It was colloquially known as the 40 acres and a mule plan but yeah unfortunately never happened cause fuckin president Andrew Johnson was like ”WELL AKSHULLY SWEATY I THINK THE LAND SHOULD GO BACK TO SLAVE OWNERS BECAUSE UHHHHHH” AND THEN IT DID AND THEN WE ENDED UP WITH SHARE CROPPING. But anyway that’s sharecropping. And of course I could go onto describe how all of this still affects black people in the united states and how the effects of systematic racism are still being felt generations later but… we’re gonna save that for a different episode. FOR NOW THOUGH, WHY IS THIS ALL IMPORTANT, WHY DID I TAKE ROUGHLY 3000 WORDS TO TELL YOU GUYS ABOUT THE HORRORS OF RECONSTRUCTION ERA SOUTH!? Well because we’re talking about the blues, and what does it mean when you have the blues, it means that you’re sad as hell, given all that I’ve just described to you is it no wonder that the blues emerged as the soundtrack to the lives these people lived?

So then what is blues? Well as I mentioned last time, blues sort of develops out of the field holler/spiritual tradition. A fair amount of field hollers, a type of work song that enslaved peoples would sing in fields while they were doing their work, were about regular ass things for regular ass peoples; this dude stole my girl, im gonna find me a girl to love, life sucks and im gonna sing about it, life doesn’t suck so much but I’m still gonna sing about it. Blues then tended to explore more themes related to the sadder points of those stories but in similar ways and styles. So where did blues come from specifically, what makes it a different genre than a field holler or a spiritual, and that’s a great question so let’s get in it.

Let’s say for a second you went through a real shitty period in your life, you significant other named steve dumped you, your pet armadillo, also named steve, died, ur mom (also coincidentally named steve) has taken away your showering privileges, you’ve forgotten how to speak ur native language and to top it all off you just burnt your gotdamn mac and cheese. You spiral into a deep situational depression that lasts quite a little while. During this time you listen to one album on repeat just over and over again, you know it all inside out and backwards and diagonal, you know every instrumental part by heart, you’ve got the lyrics tattooed on your ass, the whole 9 yards. And then you start working your way out of it, slowly but steadily the days start getting brighter, you move out of your abusive mother’s house, you find a new partner or get comfortable being single, you appropriately morn the loss of ur pet armadillo, hell you even learn to make a better mac and cheese, things aren’t all fixed, and life isn’t breezes and cakes but it is ever so slightly easier than it was before, at least you have ur freedom right? BUT NOW, everytime you listen to one of those songs from that album it mentally brings you back to the way things used to be and it’s not great. Well that’s kinda what happened with blues music but, ya know, infinitely worse. Essentially, black people wanted a new sound to accompany this new life and so they fuckin made it and it’s great.

The similarities of blues to field hollers and spirituals are relatively easy enough to hear if you know where to look which isn’t really surprising given that blues is the evolution of it. For example the basic structure stayed pretty similar, simple rhyming schemes, simple harmonies, melismatic vocal structures in places, and many times the lyrics were often very similar to those forms before them.  But it goes even further than that! Most of the early blues melodies were directly derived from their spiritual predecessors. So for some comparison here’s some songs, first one is gonna be a field holler, next one is gonna be a spiritual, and then the last one is gonna be a blues song mmk? And here we go:

AND ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT WAIT, JUST CAUSE IM FUCKIN, OOO BABE, OK, SO WHEN I WAS RESARCHING THIS FUCKING EPISODE I WAS TRYING TO FIND GOOD AUDIO CLIPS TO USE, AND LEMME TELL YA MAN YOU WOULDN’T THINK SPIRITUALS WOULD FUCKIN EXIST OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY OF FUCKING CONGRESS CAUSE APPARENTLY THEY HAVE A GODDAMN STRANGLEHOLD ON ALL BLACK SPIRITUALS EVER RECORDED BY THE LOMAX’S. The thing is is that fuckin copyright at least in the states is supposed to run out 75 years after the death of the recorder or fucking owner of the rights, which it certainly has been for Alan Fucking Lomax BUT NOOOOOOO, I HAVE TO NEARLY PURCHASE A GODDAMN CD IN ORDER TO GET YOU GUYS A FUCKING ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF MUSIC THAT CAME OUT LIKE 100 YEARS AGO. To be clear I refuse to buy anything for this podcast other than my recording equipment, but man researching this podcast is big joab hours, god just keeps fuckin testing me. Just slap my ass and call me a pickle, ok, rage is over, time for songs:

These freed populations wanted a new music, a music that fit their current situation better, that didn’t rely on the imagery of the past in order to get across the situation they were in. And so that’s what blues did, it was a new sound for a new era and even more importantly it was a sound entirely their own. Whereas field hollers and various other types of music sung by enslaved peoples were by definition their invention, many of them still borrowed heavily from the dominant cultures of their oppressors, and so in creating blues what they had was something they could 100% call their own. Even if they didn’t own the land they worked/lived on, and had few rights to the crops they sewed and reaped, they did have blues, and that’s something beautiful. 

But when does it become a thing, like when does blues start becoming a thing? And that’s a hard part. Like any cultural phenomenon it’s hard to fuckin say, there’s some accounts that say 1865 like the fuckin second the civil war ended, then there’s some that attribute it to the 1920s. Most of the sources I’ve looked at put it around 1890-1910. It originates unsurprisingly in and around the Mississippi Delta Region and East Texas where you have a lot of farmland and thus a lot of poor folks just trying to scratch out a living for themselves. AND SO THE BLUES BECOMES A THING AND IT’S COOL AS HELL AND IT DEVELOPS IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS! And I’m sorry that I’m not gonna get enough time to do every subgenre of blues, but we’re gonna look at 3 of the big regions or subgenres of blues. 

So blues first of all have all those things that I mentioned before simple rhyming schemes, like ABAB or ABCC, simple harmonies, Call and response is definitely a thing that still happens in this specific style, but then they also have blues notes, for those who missed the last episode, blues notes are notes within a standard scale that are “bent” (or at least that’s how they were initially described.) These notes are lowered by a semitone making the overall colour of the sound a bit darker and more… emotional, sad? Like we ascribe emotions to the way things sound and that might be western centric, I’m actually gonna have to look into it later, but for western listeners we’re gonna read the emotion in these tones as sad. So the notes specifically are lowered the 3rd  5th and 7th degrees of a regular scale. I’m going to play you guys an example of blues scale in just a second but the guy playing the example is using the pentatonic version of the scale meaning only 5 notes of it.

In terms of instruments the most standard you’re going to find in any blues band is at it’s most basic one guitar and a person singing. You could even make an argument that just singing could be blues if you’re using a blues scale but usually there will at least a guitar and one dude singing. The rest of the intstruments are gonna depend on the region you’re playing from. So remember the moaning thing I mentioned last time? The moaning style vocals? Not pioneered by but made popular by a man that went by Blind Lemon Jefferson? This one:

Well he falls under the Mississippi/Texas type of blues which we’re gonna call texasippi. It differs from other types of blues in the united states for a couple reasons but one of them is that moaning style of vocals, in other parts of the country the style where the blues vocals function similarly to other styles of singing, clean and clear, no moaning. Another cool thing that texasippi blues also does is they incorporate a lot of metal into the way they play their guitars. Not like the heavy screamy kind that’s come to be MY fave, but like actual metal objects! How they incorporate this is through the strings of the guitar specifically causing a little extra twangy buzzing when the strings resonate but also a sort of pleasing screech when they’re shifted up and down the strings like this:

but what did they use to make this sound? Well just about anything small enough and metal you could thread between the strings or held against them while playing, this coulda been bottle caps, pocket knives, silverware. Remember, we’re still talking about a type of music that was very much being played by people without very much or no money, so you’re using what you can to make it. Nowadays you can purchase wee cylanders made of glass or metal that go over ur fingers that you press up against the strings to create the desired effect. In addition to this, something that’s pretty regional to the blues in this area is the harmonica. I’m assuming most of you know about the harmonica and have heard it but for those who don’t, the harmonica is a squanky reed instrument that you play with your mouth. I would tell you the physics of how it works but fuck if I ever studied physics. Basically when you blow in it, it vibrates the reed and makes a note depending on the holes you blow into, and when you suck air in it, it makes other sounds! They can be very very large or very very small thus changing how low or high the sound is respectively. They were invented somewhere in the early 1800s in Germany we think and they sound something like this:

How were harmonicas introduced into blues music? Well turns out, much like some of the other instruments we’ll see in a hot minute, harmonicas were often carried by soldiers during the American civil war, even President Abraham Lincoln himself was reported to have carried a harmonica with him in his coat pocket and would play it as he “found it comforting.” Thing about the harmonica was that it was relatively easy to make and it was extremely cheap to buy in comparison to other instruments at the time, even better was that you really didn’t need lessons to figure out how to make it sound good. So during the reconstruction period, as industrialization rapidized in America, and harmonicas became more available, and previous soldiers reminisced about the songs they heard played in their camps during the civil war, more and more people started picking up the harmonica. And so poor southern americans were able to incorporate the instrument into this new music they were developing like this:

Also I would big time recommend just watching the video for that song, dudes just sittin there legit just suckin on his harmonica at some point, that’s what I fucking call dedication bud. The cool part about blues from the texasippi way is then during the great migration, the phenomenon that I mentioned last episode, where black southerners just start heading northwards, is that the blues travels with them too. Just briefly on the great migration, remember all the shitty stuff I discussed earlier, the lack of work, sharecropping, lynching and what have you? That’s why the great migration takes place. Basically black people all around the south are going jesus fucking christ shit sucks let’s get out of here and find somewhere better to be, and so they do, and about 6 MILLION Black Americans head north to where it’s… better. I mean there’s definitely still racism and all sorts of jim crow era laws and practices up north but it is still some degree better than the south. So this great migration is how texasippi blues music then comes to be transplanted into Chicago, and turns into Chicago blues. 

“BUT LAURA” YOU SAY, UR HANDS CLENCHED INTO FISTS AT UR SIDES, “IF TEXASIPPI BLUES IS THE SAME AS THE ONES IN CHICAGO THEN HOW’RE THEY DIFFERENT!?” YOU CRY WITH TEARS FORMING AT THE SIDES OF YOUR EYES. And you’re right b, they are the same so why are they different? Well ya gotta remember that time does funny stuff to music similarly as it does with language and just abut anything else, things change over time, AND, things get invented over time. And time as we’re moving into now is like 30s and 40s era. So in the case of Chicago blues we get the additives of the piano, which has been around for some time but people are now just being able to put into their blues music due to becoming more financially stable, BUT WE ALSO GET THE COOL NEW INVENTION OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR. Now there is some speculation over the invention of most things throughout history, for example, y’all might be familiar of Thomas Edison not actually inventing the lightbulb and being a bit of a dick about things, so when I talk about inventors of things, unless otherwise stated, please take it with some amount of a grain of salt. So Paul H Tutmarc may have been the first person to invent the first electric guitar when he managed, by some feat of science, which I will not explain because science is for wizards and freeks and while I am both of those I am not at all qualified or able to explain it, but essentially he managed to electrify a Hawaiian guitar! He supposedly invented this sometime in the 1930s. Here’s an example of what that sounds like:

Very Spongebobby… spongeboblike…spongebobesque… so EITHERWAY the electric guitar, as well as the electric bass is invented and so those are then infused into Chicago blues. In some cases you will also get the addition of drums and saxophone, but it is the electrified elements as well as the piano that really characterize the biggest difference between Chicago blues and texasippi blues. Overall, it sounds like this:

Something you also probably heard in there was just the level of intensity, the volume or what I’m gonna call the perceived volume, is louder. Whereas the songs of the texasippi blues is a little softer, quieter, very much just dude and his guitar volume, Chicago blues is gonna sound a little louder and a little more intense at most times. This is due to blues clubs becoming a big thing during this time period. And why shouldn’t they? In diaspora communities, that is communities consisting of people from a similar ethnic or national background, you often get patterns of similar settlement. So in our case, when Black Americans started moving northward, they would often settle in similar communities or move into similar communities based off of their ethnicity. Afterall you wanna be able to live in places where people understand your experience. There’s also the element of racism of course, homeowners associations making it hard for Black folk to move into white neighbourhoods and of course school segregation which didn’t end until the 1954. So while in some cases there was def an element of wanting to feel safe in a community of people who understand you, there’s also a big ol element of racism as there pretty much always is when we talk about anything. Seriously ur gonna be surprised at how far reaching and fucking just convoluted and stupid racism is, especially when we get into like Europeans being racist against other Europeans. So since we have all these people moving up north they need to be entertained, we all need entertainment after-all, but lo and behold! They can’t go to white clubs in a lot of cases because fucking racism (unless you are a performer in which case sometimes you can go to white clubs but only to perform, I’m gonna get more into that when we have our jazz episode.) So we start having blues clubs and because they’re a club and there’s drinking and talking and what not, often these songs tend to be a little louder or more rowdy to compensate. 

On the other end of the country we also have my favorite flavour of blues which is the New Orleans blues. I’m definitely 100 percent biased when I say this but why does everything in New Orleans just sound better? If I had to guess it’s the multiculturalism and thus people bringing in tonnes of different ideas, but it’s hard to quantify awesome so we’re just gonna leave it there. BUT YEAH so we have texasippi blues that travels down the river (cause things rarely travel up a river) and hits New Orleans. But again, if we’re talking about the same style of blues then what makes it different? A lot hunny, a lot. So as we talked about in our last episode there’s a lot of different cultural elements at play in Louisianna culminating in some cool ass musical styles and changes. It’s also absolutely something we’re gonna talk about when we go back and do the Jazz episode cause lord knows New Orleans jazz is just as fuckin hot and dangerous (like serious lemme just go fuckin hangout with you guys down there, that’s all I want, musical tour of louisianna) I will say though that the line between jazz and blues does tend to get a little blurry though when we’re talking about New Orleans Blues so just hold onto ur femurs there yall and strap in. 

So New orleans blues is different from other types of blues again by incorporating horns and piano into the music, most notably this will be the trumpet cause trumpets after the civil war just kinda leached out into the general public and since people got used to them in that capacity they became sorta naturally engrained into the soundscape of the music of the area. “but laura doesn’t Chicago also have horns?!” and ur right man they absolutely do, but there’s even more. So where texasippi blues relies on a rather standard rhythms in most cases, the New Orleans Blues scene takes from some of that different heritage and combines Caribbean inspired or based rhythms. We can find a good example of the inspiration for those rhythms in another genre of music that was popular at the same time, Calypso. Calypso is a genre of music which we will look more in depth in the future but just really generally for now it is popular in the Caribbean as well as certain parts, South America (particularly Venezuela), Mexico, and of course New Orleans during this time. It is usually up-beat and relies a lot on emphasizing the offbeat, and these are all things that we hear being incorporated into New Orleans blues during the time. So when we hear blues from New Orleans, one of the things we can usually use to tell the difference is merely just the upbeat tempo of things and slightly more rhythmically complex manner in which it existed. In fact Blues in New Orleans was so fuckin different it actually started what we know of as R&B or rhythm and blues which sounds like this:

Just a quick detour, I fuckin love like, blues and jazz names. The Man I played just there was Roy Brown but man the names really take off on occasion my personal favorite being Guitar Slim Jr., but we also got Fats domino (sometimes just known as fats, or the fat man), we god fuckin Professor Longhair, we got a dude who just goes by the name sugar boy, like… guys…. What happened to nicknames like that, I wanna walk around and when people see me comin at a distance they just point and go oh lord here comes swamp papa, like, that’s livin man, I dunno what to tell you but that’s absolutely livin. 

Anyhow, what ur gonna notice, or maybe you didn’t notice but I’m gonna tell you and you can go back and notice is that blues, (along with jazz but we’re gonna get to that) as it goes on and evolves starts sounding a lot like early rock and roll music, and that doesn’t happen by coincidence. Also you’re probably noticing that blues at least as far as it goes for the Chicago variety and the New Orleans variety we talked about, sound a hell of a lot like Jazz and again we’ll get more into the specifics later. The thing is when we talk about invention, whether it be music, or physical things, or even sometimes schools of thought and ideas is that things get borrowed and changed and moulded into something else by other people. Hell the phenomenon of something being invented in multiple different places at the same time is so common enough that it even has a name, it’s called multiple discovery. Generally people in North America prefer a more black and white “this thing was developed at this time and this place by this person because definitive reason definitive reason definitive reason.” Because we have this weird sense of individuality and crediting individuals with discovery as opposed to a group or the society itself as maybe it should more rightly be. This means that in our endless want to categorize and systematize and ize all these things, particularly things like music, it gets sorta difficult to discern what is what and why and how. Of course we’ve already seen this with spirituals and gospel, and now we’ve seen it with blues/jazz/and early rock.

I just wanted to bring it up sooner than later because, especially as we move into more modern north American Genres, and honestly genres from various other places throughout the world. I wanted to bring this up now before we go any further in this podcast because as we get into more modern genres and hell maybe even with this episode I imagine I might get some rather angry mail from elitests who will smash their foreheads on the keyboard in absolute blind fuckin dismay and rage accusing me of putting the wrong genre lables on the wrong songs. The thing is though, like most art, or definitions in life, things are salient. Just because music fits one genre doesn’t mean it only fits within that genre, in the case of the Rhythm and Blues song by Roy brown that I played earlier, while it is definitely Rhythm and Blues there’s also gonna be other people who strongly consider that Rock and Roll. And that’s alright! Music doesn’t have to rigidly fit into one genre, we give things genre titles or group things into genres to help more easily understand their histories and identify other things that sound like it! All music is going to have variation, and in the case of rhythm and blues, a style of blues that very much informs early rock, you’re going to have cross roads like that. So instead of getting defensive, maybe take some time to think about how cool it is that music exists on an ever evolving spectrum.

So with that, that’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next time where we’re actually gonna do something a little different. Next time we’re gonna look at the Minstrel show which I’m subtitling right now, “why we don’t wear black face.” In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical questions or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at justamusicpodcast@gmail.com

List of Music: Jump Jim Crow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjIXWRG09Qk

Belton Sutherland's field holler (1978) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CPJwt14d5E&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=2

Wash Dennis & Charlie Sims - Lead Me To The Rock - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmPqmLovNms&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=4

Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEw0ek2BhJE

Blind Lemon Jefferson – Black Snake Moan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You gotta move - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU&feature=emb_logo

Red River Valley -Traditional - Harmonica solo by Kyong H. Lee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKM4bn4kS-0

Sonny Boy Williamson - Keep it to Yourself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtRxJDb3vlw

Paul Tutmarc performs - My Tane - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUOms5y6cmI

Buddy Guy - First Time I Met The Blues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1jruvTBleY

Roy Brown - Mighty Mighty Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhp8jMykAVg

Technical Clip I used: PianoPig (on youtube) - Minor Pentatonic vs Blues Scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz0b-At1ys

[davewalthertravels]

Who wants to do this trip? Book it through Walther Travels now.

ITINERARY

 

DAY 1 ARRIVE IN NEW ORLEANS

Welcome to New Orleans! At 6 pm, meet your Tour Director and traveling companions for a welcome drink.

DAY 2 NEW ORLEANS–WAVELAND–BAY ST. LOUIS–BILOXI

NEW ORLEANS City sightseeing with Local Guide this morning, followed by free time for lunch.

WAVELAND Visit the Ground Zero Hurricane Museum.

BAY ST. LOUIS Free time.

BILOXI Free time this afternoon before a regional dinner at a local restaurant.

 Breakfast

Dinner

DAY 3 BILOXI

BILOXI YourChoice Excursions include one of the following activities of your choice:



FLOAT: For the Birds

Follow us into the wild at the gateway to the Pascagoula River -the largest free-flowing river in continental U.S.--with a visit to the Pascagoula River Audubon Center. Through the efforts of The Nature Conservancy, this 70,000-acre wildlife sanctuary is home to a wealth of protected wildlife, including animals and plant life unique to the region, and more than 300 species of migrating birds. Watch for bald eagles, blue herons, pelicans, and the swallow-tailed kite, to name just a few in this beautiful bayou paradise. Your visit includes a 2-hour kayak float trip to spot the magnificent birds that call these waters home.



GAZE: Artistic Vision

A guided tour of the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art celebrates the innovative and creative spirit of its namesake, Mississippi master ceramist George Ohr, aka "The Mad Potter of Biloxi." Predicting the ultimate recognition of his artistic genius, Ohr created innovative ceramic designs from 1883 to 1910, which became central to the artistic heritage of the Gulf South and American Art at large. More than 100 years later, Ohr is considered an early pioneer in the American modernist movement. In a tribute to Ohr's contributions, famed artist/architect Frank Gehry designed an award-winning museum campus of bold, intriguing, and self-contained buildings to offer visitors separate exhibits that together create a unified vision through an expansive brick plaza and majestic Southern live oaks on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.



DELVE: Maritime Mississippi Queens

Experience an ocean of exhibits at the Maritime & Seafood Museum. Dive deep into the history of shrimping, oystering, recreational fishing, wetlands, marine resource management, charter boats, marine blacksmithing, wooden-boat building, net making, catboats/Biloxi skiff, shrimp-peeling machine and an in-depth collection of historic photographs and artifacts. Relive the traditions of the Mississippi Gulf Coast as you step on board an authentic replica of a Biloxi Schooner for a 2½-hour sailing. These "White Winged Queens" sailed the Coast from the late 1800's to the early 1900's.

Afternoon sightseeing includes a guided tour of Jefferson Davis’ home and presidential library, Beauvoir. Free time this evening.

 Breakfast

DAY 4 BILOXI–MONROEVILLE–MONTGOMERY

MONROEVILLE Sightseeing in the hometown of authors Truman Capote and Harper Lee includes the Old Courthouse Museum in the “Literary Capital of Alabama.” Learn how Monroeville served as the inspiration for Lee’s 1961 Pulitzer-Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird,” examining the historical prejudice of the deep South and loosely based on the life of the author’s father—a state legislator and county lawyer who defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Free time this afternoon.

MONTGOMERY Free time this evening.

 Breakfast

DAY 5 MONTGOMERY

MONTGOMERY The capital of Alabama, Montgomery is historic as an important place in the fight for voting rights, with the Alabama State Capitol Building having served as the ending point of the third march for voting rights from Selma. See the sights with a Local Guide this morning, including the State Capitol Building, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Civil Rights Memorial, and the Rosa Parks Museum. Take a docent-led tour of the courthouse where Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. first legalized the desegregation of buses in 1956 and ruled the march from Selma was a legal protest to be allowed in 1965 (based on availability). Next, enjoy true Southern comfort food with lunch at Martha’s Place—born of one woman’s dream to overcome personal adversity and give back to others in her native Montgomery. Feed your soul with authentic, made-from-scratch Southern specialties—from fried chicken to fried green tomatoes, to black-eyed peas and pecan pie. Free time this evening.

YourChoice Excursions include one of the following activities of your choice:



DELVE: Moving Memorials

Go deeper into the history of the U.S. Civil Rights movement with a visit to two important sites. Visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first memorial of its kind, which recognizes the thousands of enslaved black Americans who suffered lynching -many of which went unreported or unprosecuted. Gain a deeper historical perspective with a visit to the Legacy Museum, highlighting injustices from slavery to mass incarcerations, located near one of the most notorious slave-auction sites 19th-century America. Be moved by the exhibits reflecting the effects of racial injustice of the past and its impact today.



STROLL: Everything Old is New Again

Walk through Old Alabama Town on a guided tour to see history preserved in more than 50 authentically restored and refurnished 19th- and 20th-century homes and structures spanning six blocks in downtown Montgomery. Stroll the nostalgic neighborhood and be transported in time, with interpreters available along your route to shed light on the historic preservation here. Take an inside tour of the block's 1850s centerpiece, the Ordeman-Mitchell-Shaw House, and follow your complimentary map and guide to see the 1895 Adams Chapel School; the 1892 Corner Grocery Store; and the stunning, circa 1850 Ware-Farley-Hood House.



CLAP: Lovesick Blues

Home to country music legend, Hank Williams, Montgomery is also the home of The Hank Williams Museum. Visit the museum on a guided tour for a glimpse into this country-music legend's life and legacy through the most complete collection of Hank Williams memorabilia. Hear how Williams' classics like "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and "Hey, Good Lookin" continue to influence musical artists today.

 Breakfast

Lunch

DAY 6 MONTGOMERY–SELMA–BIRMINGHAM–FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS)

MONTGOMERY Travel the National Historic Trail of 1966 between Montgomery and Selma, which served as the route of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1965 Voting Rights March.

SELMA Join your Local Guide to visit the National Voting Rights Museum and the Slavery and Civil War Museums. Also visit the historic Brown Chapel A.M.E Church and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge—a National Historic Landmark and site of the infamous “Bloody Sunday”—where over 600 non-violent marchers, led by the late Freedom Rider and Congressional Representative John Lewis, were brutally attacked by police while attempting to cross the bridge.

BIRMINGHAM Free time this afternoon before continuing to Muscle Shoals.

FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS) Free time this evening.

 Breakfast

DAY 7 FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS)

FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS) Join in a guided sightseeing tour of Florence—“the gem of the South”—and learn about the “Muscle Shoals Sound” produced here since the 1960s with state-of-the-art recording studios for iconic artists and producers. See the old town and the home of W.C. Handy—the “Father of the Blues.” See the original Muscle Shoals Sound Studios building, and tour the Alabama Music Hall of Fame with a docent. Enjoy free time this afternoon.

YourChoice Excursions include one of the following activities of your choice:



GAZE: Symmetry in Motion

Visit the Rosenbaum House on a guided tour of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The only Wright structure in Alabama, the house offers rare access to the prolific architect's design with free time to explore the grounds and shop for mementos.



DELVE: A Miracle in the Making

Take a guided tour of Ivy Green, birthplace of Helen Keller. Where she lived and learned in what would become an incredible story of tenacity and triumph with teacher Anne Sullivan. Born without sight or hearing, Keller overcame her disabilities to become one of the world's most inspirational women. See her living quarters and the well where her first breakthrough began a life of achievement as a baccalaureate, activist, and author. Now a museum, Keller's home at Ivy Green was the setting for her autobiography, "The Story of My Life" -adapted for stage and screen as "The Miracle Worker."



CLAP: Laying Down Tracks

Tour the Florence Alabama Music Enterprise (FAME) with a guide. See where Rick Hall created a blend of Southern soul music, which became the hailed as The Muscle Shoals Sound." A who's who of musical greats have recorded here -from Etta James to Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, and the Rolling Stones, to name a few. The studio - home to more than 80, "Top 10" records - continues to be in demand by countless musicians today.

Farewell dinner this evening featuring live music.

 Breakfast

Dinner

DAY 8 FLORENCE–NASHVILLE

This morning, travel to Nashville International Airport or the Westin Hotel Downtown. Please schedule departing flights after 1pm.

 Breakfast

[scotianostra]

9th October 1900 saw the birth in Edinburgh of Alastair Sim, the actor best known for his character and comedy roles.

He was the youngest of Alexander and Isabella Sim's four children. His father was a tailor who owned his own shop on Lothian Road, it is still a shop selling running gear nowadays.To use a suitable phrase for his father, I like the jib of the man, Alexander was one of a group of professional people in Edinburgh who noted the plight of wounded Veterans returning from the front who had little or no prospects of suitable accommodation or employment ahead of them. They founded the Scottish Veterans Garden City Association during the 1st World War and, under the chairmanship of Lord Salvesen, paid for the construction of houses for the use of returning servicemen.

Alexander Sim was offered, but refused, a knighthood.

For a time, the family lived above the shop, but as Alastair entered school, the business picked up enough that they were able to move to a house in Craigleith. Young Alistair was educated at Bruntsfield Primary, James Gillespie's High School and George Heriot's School. He worked for his father then another Edinburgh tailor but showed little aptitude and decided to enter Edinburgh University, studying analytical chemistry, but his further education was cut short when he was called up to the army. After the war he returned home and announced to his parents he was going to take up acting, this wnet down like a lead balloon and there was a falling out, Alistair left the family home and spent a year in the Scottish Highlands with a group of jobbing workers.

On returning to Edinburgh Sim took post in the burgh assessor's office. In his spare time, he entered poetry reading classes, winning the gold medal for verse speaking at the Edinburgh Music Festival.This led to him taking a job as a Fulton lecturer in elocution at New College, part of the University of Edinburgh.

Alastair Sim began working as a stage actor in 1930, taking on minor roles. His deep talent was soon discovered, and he was cast as Othello that same year. In 1932, he met and married Naomi Plaskill, his muse and wife for life. The couple had one child, a daughter named Merlith. It wasn't long before Sim moved to films in supporting roles. One of his more memorable characters was that of Detective Sergeant Bingham in the film series Inspector Hornleigh. His on-screen presence was so dominant that he has often been credited with "stealing the scene" from the film's star actors.

Throughout the 1940s, Sim was cast in several lead roles; he starred in the thriller Green for Danger, the comedy The Happiest Days of Your Life and Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright, among other major films. One of Sim's better-known portrayals was that of Captain Hook in the production of Peter Pan, a role he reprised six times during his career. In a national cinema poll in 1950, Sim was voted the most popular film actor in Britain.

I think quite a few of us will remember Alastair Sim in a slightly different role to those I have already pointed out, growing up before we had all the TV channels we have now and watching the old black & white films and the classic Belles of St Trinians where he played headmistress Millicent Fritton.

Looking through his other roles, I spotted he played the notorious Dr Knox, not once-but twice. For those who don't know, the doctor of note was a professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University, he paid Messrs Burke & Hare for fresh cadavers to demonstrate the human anatomy at the University.

I mentioned Alistair's father refusing a knighthood, and it pleases me to tell you he too refused the offer of becoming Sir Alistair Sim in the early 70's.

He died of cancer in August 1976, insisting that his body be used for medical research - and that there should be no memorial service for him. His widow lived until 1999; she published a memoir, Dance and Skylark: Fifty Years with Alastair Sim in 1987. There is a plaque, commemorating Sim's birth, outside the Filmhouse Cinema in Lothian Road, Edinburgh, only a short distance from where he was born above his father's shop.