Today, The Grandma has been listening to somemusic. She has chosen MikeSeeger's songs, the American folk musician and folklorist who was born on a day like today in 1933.
Mike Seeger (August 15, 1933-August 7, 2009) wasan American folk musician and folklorist.
He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes.
Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, producedmore than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings.
He desired to make known the caretakers of culturethat inspired and taught him.
Seeger was born in New York and grew up in Maryland and Washington D.C. His father, Charles Louis Seeger Jr., was a composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist, investigating both American folk and non-Western music. His mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a composer. His eldest half-brother, Charles Seeger III, was a radio astronomer, and his next older half-brother, John Seeger, taught for years at the Dalton School in Manhattan. His next older half brother was Pete Seeger. His uncle, Alan Seeger, the poet who wrote I have a rendezvous with Death, was killed during the First World War.
Seeger was a self-taught musician who began playing stringed instruments at the age of 18. He also sang Sacred Harp with British folk singer Ewan MacColl and his son, Calum. Seeger's sister Peggy Seeger, also a well-known folk performer, married MacColl, and his sister Penny wed John Cohen, a member of Mike's musical group, New Lost City Ramblers.
The family moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after his father's appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C., Ruth Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Ruth Seeger's arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s are well regarded.
At about the age of 20, Mike Seeger began collecting songs by traditional musicians on a tape recorder. Folk musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, and others were frequent guests in the Seeger home.
In 1958 he co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, an old-time string band in New York City, during the Folk Revival. The other founding members included John Cohen and Tom Paley. Paley later left the group in 1962 and was replaced by Tracy Schwarz. The New Lost City Ramblers directly influenced countless musicians in subsequent years.
The Ramblers distinguished themselves by focusing on the traditional playing styles they heard on old 78rpm records of musicians recorded during the 1920s and 1930s. Tracy was also in Mike's other band, Strange Creek Singers. So was Mike's former wife, Alice Gerrard. She was Alice Seeger in that band and sang and played guitar in it. The other people in Strange Creek Singers were bass player and singer Hazel Dickens and banjo player Lamar Grier. Mike sang and played guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, and harmonica in the band.
Seeger received six Grammy nominations and was the recipient of four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including a 2009 National Heritage Fellowship, which is the United States government's highest honour in the folk and traditional arts. His influence on the folk scene was described by Bob Dylan in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. He was a popular presenter and performer at traditional music gatherings such as Breakin' Up Winter.
Eight days before his 76th birthday, Mike Seeger died at his home in Lexington, Virginia, on August 7, 2009, after stopping cancer treatment.
The Mike Seeger Collection, which includes original sound and video recordings by Mike Seeger, is located in the Southern Folklife Collection of the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Saturday afternoon is usually a typical day to watch a western film on TV. Today, The Grandma has been watching The True Story of Jesse James (1957), a film performed by Robert Wagner. Hollywood versions of TrueStory are never accurate and in that case, any similarity to the true is purely accidental.
The Grandma has been thinking in how many films about far west stories are totally wrong and out of real events, especially those films with a broken and distorted point of view about Native American Tribes. The film explains its particular vision of Jesse James, the American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla, and leader of the James–Younger Gang who become a myth in the 19th century.
The Grandma loves folk music and she has compared the film with Pete Seeger and The Ramblin' Riversiders' songs written about the figure of Jesse James, versions much more similar to the original and true story of this man, who is a legend of the American history currently and commited his first confirmed bank robbery on a day like today in 1869.
Before watching The True Story of Jesse James, The Grandma has been reading a new chapter of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic while she has been listening to Bruce Springsteen with Session Band's Jesse James.
Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847-April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla, and leader of the James–Younger Gang.
Raised in the Little Dixie area of western Missouri, James and his family maintained strong Southern sympathies. He and his brother Frank James joined pro-Confederate guerrillas known as bushwhackers operating in Missouri and Kansas during the American Civil War. As followers of William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, they were accused of participating in atrocities against Union soldiers and civilian abolitionists, including the Centralia Massacre in 1864.
After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, Jesse and Frank robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains across the Midwest, gaining national fame and often popular sympathy despite the brutality of their crimes.
The James brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876, when as a result of their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, several members of the gang were captured or killed. They continued in crime for several years afterward, recruiting new members, but came under increasing pressure from law enforcement seeking to bring them to justice.
Jesse James
On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was shot and killed by Robert Ford, a new recruit to the gang who hoped to collect a reward on James' head and a promised amnesty for his previous crimes. Already a celebrity in life, James became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death.
Despite popular portrayals of James as an embodiment of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, there is no evidence that he and his gang shared any loot from their robberies with anyone outside their close kinship network. Scholars and historians have characterized James as one of many criminals inspired by the regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the Civil War, rather than as a manifestation of alleged economic justice or of frontier lawlessness. James continues to be one of the most iconic figures from the era, and his life has been dramatized and memorialized numerous times.
Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present-day Kearney. This area of Missouri was largely settled by people from the Upper South, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and became known as Little Dixie for this reason. James had two full siblings: his elder brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. His father, Robert S. James, farmed commercial hemp in Kentucky and was a Baptist minister before coming to Missouri. After he married, he migrated to Bradford, Missouri and helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. He held six slaves and more than 0.40 km2 of farmland.
Robert traveled to California during the Gold Rush to minister to those searching for gold; he died there when James was three years old. After Robert's death, his widow Zerelda remarried twice, first to Benjamin Simms in 1852 and then in 1855 to Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James family home. Jesse'smother and Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Zerelda and Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves, who served mainly as farmhands in tobacco cultivation.
The approach of the American Civil War loomed large in the James–Samuel household. Missouri was a border state, sharing characteristics of both North and South, but 75% of the population was from the South or other border states.
Clay County in particular was strongly influenced by the Southern culture of its rural pioneer families.
Farmers raised the same crops and livestock as in the areas from which
they had migrated. They brought slaves with them and purchased more
according to their needs. The county counted more slaveholders and more
slaves than most other regions of the state; in Missouri as a whole,
slaves accounted for only 10 percent of the population, but in Clay County
they constituted 25 percent.
Jesse & Frank James
Aside from slavery, the culture of Little
Dixie was Southern in other ways as well. This influenced how the
population acted during and for a period of time after the war.
After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Clay County became the scene of great turmoil, as the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory bred tension and hostility. Many people from Missouri migrated to Kansas to try to influence its future. Much of the dramatic build-up to the Civil War centered on the violence that erupted on the Kansas–Missouri border between pro- and anti-slavery militias.
After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, guerrilla warfare gripped Missouri, waged between secessionist bushwhackersand Union forces which largely consisted of local militias known as jayhawkers. A bitter conflict ensued, resulting in an escalating cycle of atrocities committed by both sides. Confederate guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners, and scalped the dead. The Union presence enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions, and banishment of Confederate sympathizers from the state.
The James–Samuel family sided with the Confederates at the outbreak of war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobbs Army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861. He fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James–Samuel farm looking for Frank's group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they lashed young Jesse.
As a result of the James brothers' activities, Union military authorities forced their family to leave Clay County.
Though ordered to move South beyond Union lines, they moved north across the nearby state border into Nebraska Territory.
After Bloody Bill Anderson was killed in an ambush in October, the Jamesbrothers separated.
Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky, while Jesse went to Texas under
the command of Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants. He is
known to have returned to Missouri in the spring. At the age of 17, Jesse
suffered the second of two life-threatening chest wounds when he was
shot while trying to surrender after they ran into a Union cavalry
patrol near Lexington, Missouri.
At the end of the Civil War, Missouri remained deeply divided.
The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions:
anti-slavery Unionists, identified with the Republican Party;
segregationist conservative Unionists, identified with the Democratic
Party; and pro-slavery, ex-Confederate secessionists, many of whom were
also allied with the Democrats, especially in the southern part of the
state.
The Republican-dominated Reconstruction legislature passed a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves.
Frank & Jesse James
It temporarily excluded former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread clashes between individuals and between armed gangs of veterans from both sides of the war.
Jesse recovered from his chest wound at his uncle's boardinghouse in Harlem, Missouri north across the Missouri River from the City of Kansas' River Quay, changed to Kansas City in 1889. He was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda Zee Mimms, named after Jesse's mother. Jesse and his cousin began a nine-year courtship that culminated in their marriage. Meanwhile, his former commander Archie Clement kept his bushwhacker gang together and began to harass Republican authorities.
Jesse James did not become well known until December 7, 1869, when he and most likely Frank robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri.
The robbery netted little money. Jesse is believed to have shot and killed the cashier, Captain John Sheets, mistakenly believing him to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson during the Civil War.
The 1869 robbery marked the emergence of Jesse James as the most famous survivor of the former Confederate bushwhackers. It was the first time he was publicly labeled an outlaw; Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden set a reward for his capture. This was the beginning of an alliance between James
and John Newman Edwards, editor and founder of the Kansas City Times.
Edwards, a former Confederate cavalryman, was campaigning to return
former secessionists to power in Missouri.
Six months after the Gallatin robbery, Edwards published the first of many letters from Jesse James to the public, asserting his innocence. Over time, the letters gradually became more political in tone, as James denounced the Republicans and expressed his pride in his Confederate loyalties.
Together with Edwards's admiring editorials, the letters helped James become a symbol of Confederate defiance of federal Reconstruction policy. The high tensions in politics accompanied his outlaw career and enhanced his notoriety.
On September 7, 1876, the opening day of hunting season in Minnesota, the James–Younger gang attempted a raid
on the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. The robbery
quickly went wrong, however, and after the robbery, only Frank and Jesse James remained alive and free.
Jesse James Wanted
In 1879, the James gang robbed two stores in far western Mississippi, at Washington in Adams County and Fayette in Jefferson County. The gang absconded with $2,000 cash in the second robbery and took shelter in abandoned cabins on the Kemp Plantation south of St. Joseph, Louisiana. A law enforcement posse attacked and killed two of the outlaws but failed to capture the entire gang. Among the deputies was Jefferson B. Snyder, later a long-serving district attorney in northeastern Louisiana.
By 1881, with local Tennessee authorities growing suspicious, the brothers returned to Missouri, where they felt safer. James moved his family to St. Joseph, Missouri in November 1881, not far from where he had been born and reared. Frank, however, decided to move to safer territory and headed east to settle in Virginia. They intended to give up crime. The James gang had been reduced to the two of them.
With his gang nearly annihilated, James trusted only the Ford brothers, Charley and Robert. On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Fords and Jameses went into the living room before traveling to Platte City for a robbery. From the newspaper, James had just learned that gang member Dick Liddil had confessed to participating in Wood Hite's murder. He was suspicious that the Fords had not told him about it. Robert Ford later said he believed that James had realized they were there to betray him. Instead of confronting them, James walked across the living room and laid his revolvers on a sofa. He turned around and noticed a dusty picture above the mantle, and stood on a chair to clean it. Robert Ford drew his weapon, and shot the unarmed Jesse James in the back of the head. James's two previous bullet wounds and partially missing middlefinger served to positively identify the body.
The death of Jesse James became a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role. Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. Crowds pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit. The Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities and were dismayed to be charged with first-degree murder. In the course of a single day, the Ford brothers were indicted, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to death by hanging, and were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden. The governor's quick pardon suggested he knew the brothers intended to kill James rather than capture him.
The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and added to James's notoriety.
After receiving a small portion of the reward, the Fords fled Missouri. Sheriff James Timberlake and Marshal Henry H. Craig, who were law enforcement officials active in the plan, were awarded the majority of the bounty. Later the Ford brothers starred in a touring stage show in which they re-enacted the shooting. Public opinion was divided between those against the Fords for murdering Jesse, and those of the opinion that it had been time for the outlaw to be stopped.
Suffering from tuberculosis, then incurable, and a morphine addiction, Charley Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884, in Richmond, Missouri. Bob Ford operated a tent saloon in Creede, Colorado.
On June 8, 1892, Edward O'Kelley went to Creede, loaded a double-barrel shotgun, entered Ford's saloon and said Hello, Bob, before shooting Ford in the throat, killing him instantly. O'Kelley was sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was subsequently commuted because of a 7,000-signature petition in favor of his release and a medical condition. The Governor of Colorado pardoned him on October 3, 1902.
James's original grave was on his family property, but he was later moved to a cemetery in Kearney. The original footstone is still there, although the family has replaced the headstone. James's mother Zerelda Samuel wrote the following epitaph for him: In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here. James' widow Zerelda Mimms James died alone and in poverty.
Today is Mariona Bond's birthday and The Bonds are ready to celebrate it. The family is spending some days in Ireland with Corto Maltese. The Grandma, who is recovering from some injuries caused by fire, and Bruce Springsteen are arriving for joining to the family who has prepared a great Irish party to its beloved member.
Folk music is one of the most beautiful elements of the Irish folk. Irish people are proud of their roots and culture and they demonstrate they're Irish wherever they are. Ireland is the craddle of incredible singers and composers like Van Morrison,Enya, Damian Rice,Sinead O'Connorand groups likeClannad, The Corrs, The CranberriesandU2.
In 2006, Bruce Springsteen created a big band folk music to tribute PeteSeeger, one of the best American folk singers and composers. American folk music has its roots mainly in Irish and African cultures. Meanwhile Country Music has its origins in Ireland and was expanded by the American Irish communities; Gospel and Blues appeared in the US thanks to the Afroamerican people.
The Bruce Springsteen with The Seeger Sessions Band Tour, afterward sometimes referred to simply as the Sessions Band Tour, was a 2006 concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen and The Sessions Band playing what was billed as An all-new evening of gospel, folk, and blues, otherwise seen as a form of big band folk music. The tour was an outgrowth of the approach taken on Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessionsalbum, which featured folk music songs written or made popular by activist folk musician Pete Seeger, but taken to an even greater extent.
Bruce Springsteen & Pete Seeger
The tour began on April 20, 2006, with the first of four rehearsal shows at Asbury Park Convention Hall as well as a promotional appearance there on ABC's Good Morning America. Then came a successful performance before a non-Springsteen crowd at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on April 30, in a city still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Katrina; Springsteen voiced discontent over government handling of the aftermath of Katrina, much to the satisfaction of the handkerchief-waving audience.
The tour's first proper leg then began in May with 10 regular concerts and one special television concert in Western Europe; the first was at The Point Depot in Dublin on May 5. On May 14, the tour arrived to Badalona in Barcelona. The Grandma remembers that concert with great emotion. It was an incredible folk music party. A return to the United States for the second leg saw 18 concerts from late May to late June, ending at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey on June 25.
Springsteen said in various languages during the latter stages of the European leg of the tour, See you in the fall! Accordingly, the tour's third leg consisted of 27 shows in Europe again, during October and November. This leg was sometimes dubbed The American Land Tour 2006, after a new Springsteen song that was being played as well as the We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions –American Land Edition reissue of the album. It began on October 1 at the PalaMalaguti in Bologna, Italy, and concluded on November 21, 2006 at the Odyssey Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland. No further American shows took place.
After some
days with the Amish Community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, The Grandma decided
to return to Barcelona to celebrate her birthday with her family and with a
special guest star: Joan Baez, who sang (19-20 March) in the Palau de la Música
Catalana.
The Grandma
enjoyed a lot of the great performances of her friend, Joan, who played some special songs (Viatge a Ítaca, No serem moguts or Rossinyol) and another
special song for all The Collins Family: There but for fortune.
Joan sang in
English, Catalan, Spanish, Arabian and Jewish showing a great knowledge of all
of these languages.
It was
impossible to choose one song in the middle of all of them but, Diamonds and
Rust continues being the most beautiful one for The Grandma, who still believes
in the idea of improving our real world and full it of respect, tolerance,
diversity and friendship.
Pete Seeger & Joan Baez
The Grandma
is a great fan of American Country Folk and Joan Baez is one of her myths.
Pete
Seeger, who died last year, is the other. She likes their letters and poetry
and their soft and beautiful voices which have been the social movements’ voices
since the 1960’s, great lights between grey clouds and dark skies.
For other hand, The Collins Family continues its preparation of the Cambridge Exams. The Grandmaoffers them a new interesting webpagefor practising readings: British Council Webpage.
I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace;
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