Posted on 01/04/2005 12:59:58 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
Band's version of one-time Presley tune hits sour note with some
MADISON, Wis. - As if the incoming Legislature didn't have enough problems, a high school band's rendition of a tune that was an Elvis Presley hit decades ago drew a complaint from a newly elected member of the Senate.
The Richland Center High School band played "An American Trilogy" at the Senate's inaugural ceremony at the Capitol Monday - the first day of a session expected to be dominated by battles over budget-cutting, a tax-freeze amendment and a myriad of other issues.
Sen. Spencer Coggs (D), who is black, said he was SHOCKED, as were his family and other guests, to hear the strains of the Southern anthem "Dixie" played in the Senate chamber as part of the trilogy, along with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "All My Trials."
Coggs, a Democrat from Milwaukee, complained in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center.
"Whether the slight was intentional or not, the selection was not appropriate," he wrote, noting that "Dixie" is often associated with slavery.
"While now it should be unnecessary to suggest, in the future a list of songs should be submitted prior to a performance and the list should be reviewed for its appropriateness," he said. "It is unfortunate that this special day was marred by such an unnecessary event."
Schultz had invited the band and choir to play at the ceremony.
He said the complaint caught him by surprise.
"A simple apology is what's needed," Schultz said, "and I will certainly be happy to do that."
He said he wasn't aware of every musical selection the band prepared for the event, and the piece has some historical significance.
"But I want everyone to feel included. If Sen. Coggs felt offended, I would want to extend my hand in apology."
http://www.wisconsinstatejournal.com
OH! AMEN!! Ido agree with you. I love that song, "Dixie"! Never knew it was Politically Incorrect until recent years. THis whole da-m thing is reminding me more and more of Chairman Mao's re-writing of HISTORY when the Communists took over in China many years ago.This Country had better be careful where they go re this Politically Correct crap!
I understand he has a bad habit of borrowing other people's toothbrushes (that is, when he gets around to brushing his teeth).
I wouldn't want your teeth in my cup anyway...so there !!!
ROTFLOL!
You are SUCH a mess. ;o)
You aren't TOO demanding, are you, bourbon? ;o)
"Beautiful...is that called a widow's walk on top?"
That's exactly what it looks like to me, wardaddy.
Absolutely beautiful, AAM!
I've been to Eufaula...lovely little town.
My ggg grandfather Edward Young was born in NYC in 1802, but had the good sense to leave and move south. He married a Georgia girl and moved to Eufaula, where he built the first bridge over the Chattahoochee (and charged a pretty penny to cross it.) He built the house, and it was later owned by his daughter Ann Beall Young and her husband S.H. Dent (Dent's Battery, CSA). My great grandmother Nan Beall Dent Long also lived in the house with her three children after she was widowed. When I climbed into the cupola, I found my great-aunt Jack's name scribbled on the plaster in a childish hand, dated when she was about 7 years old.
It's a fine, well built house in the Italianate style - central hall with a straight staircase with a landing halfway up, four large rooms to the sides (two each) on the ground floor (not counting the kitchen extension) and four large rooms upstairs plus a front room. The architectural archaeologists (or whatever they are called) did some paint chip detective work and restored the house to its original pre-Victorian colors (of course they all were painted white in the McKinley era). Next project is restoring the fountain out front to working order.
You've hit on what's probably the main feature of the Italianate style of American architecture -- popularized in the 1840s and 50s by an architect named Downing (things were slow to reach what was still the Alabama frontier in those days!) The heavy cornice brackets under the roof overhang are the other feature that you always see.
The Greek Revival style was much more popular, and most of the houses you see on the Eufaula tour of homes are in some variation or other of that style.
My cousin Sue had these bright red T-shirts printed up with "LONG-DENT REUNION" in huge white letters, with an outline map of Alabama around them.
One of the items on the agenda was a cemetery tour, so out we all went in our bright red T-shirts to Greenview Cemetery. We were looking at relatives' plots (believe me, there are more of us in Greenview than any place else in Eufaula now - I bet our relatives take up at least a third of that cemetery!) when somebody noticed that the gravestone of Uncle Henry Augustus Dent, USN (who was with Dewey at Manila Bay!) had his birthdate on it . . . and it was that very day!
You have to imagine about 75 people in bright red shirts gathered around an old-fashioned flat gravestone singing at the top of their lungs, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE HENRY! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!"
Any passersby must have thought that the Young Communist League had hit town and was having a rally in the cemetery . . . but actually early on a Saturday morning in Eufaula there WEREn't any passersby . . . which was just as well. A great time was had by all, and I hope Uncle Henry appreciated his birthday song . . .
I think I can arrange everything for you,
except the WSJ. The Vicksburg Post will
have to do!
:)
Thank you for the pic of your
family's beautiful, gracious home.
I'd love to tour it!
Just as I suspected...
bourbon is manored gentry...
(spoiled). :)
It'll be kid friendly.
With my herd, how
else could it be? :)
Amazing stories mom. I love old architecture everywhere but Southern is close to home.
The Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed most paths from antebellum prosperity to today.
There are precious few Southern "dynasties" like in New England or Texas.
The Union troops seemed to have been given a lot of latitude in destruction particularly in Missississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Middle Tennessee....and the Shenandoah Valley of course.
My wife's great great grandad was one of Tennessee's largest landowners and married to WP Barksdale's sister and they lost it all...everything. They went back to hardscrabble.
Most of my kin were hardscrabble Mississippi piney woods. My maternal grandma had some gentry hueguenot kin around Columbus Miss....Majure family.
Mississippi is still relatively the same bloodlines it was at the time of the war with little new blood having come in over the years sans some Yankees after the war and whatnot so nearly everyone down there has a "history" of some sort that they know....like your's...maybe without something still standing. Nashville is way diluted now....at least 25% Yankee I'd guess.
In the end....it's still dust in the wind but I enjoy the continuity. With the advent of new easy technology to preserve and access records, it should be a breeze for folks 200 years from now to know everything about us as thier ancestors ...if they care....some folks give not one whit about such.
Regards and thanks for sharing.
Heh..heh. Many a morning I remember being awakened by my daddy singing 'Martha White' at the top of his lungs while making some cracklin bread with Martha White corn meal.
"The only way I can get Martha White's Self-Rising Corn Meal is in a care package from my mother.*"
That's what momma's are for :>)
"There is NO other corn meal, IMO."
Argueably that's true unless ya happen to get hold of some fresh stone ground meal.
".....but it makes my mother feel needed. ;o)"
The least we can do for our parents is to make them feel needed.
Regards
/jasper
Grandpa Long (whose son married Grandpa Dent's daughter Nan) got back from the war, the Yankees had burned his house and barns and stolen everything but one old blind mule. His foreman, Bas, had taken Grandpa Long's favorite saddle horse and hidden him in the swamp. They basically started over with nothing.
Both families did all right eventually, though. Grandpa Dent went back to banking after awhile, and Grandpa Long became a general merchant. They were reasonably prosperous middle class folks. We still own some of the land (at least my dad and his cousins do), but it's only used to grow kudzu on . . . :grin:
Mom's family on her mother's side were merchants from Charleston and were hit pretty hard by the aftermath of the war, but her father's side were all small tradesmen - shoemakers and plumbers and folks like that. People ALWAYS need shoes and plumbing, so they did all right too.
With the lyrics cleaned up and a more inclusive message presented, I believe Rap can take it's place beside other music that originated here in the USA.
I'm a redneck hillbilly too, and I liked rap when it first came out (Sugarhill Gang, Run-DMC, etc.). Rap doesn't have to have obscenities or "whitey"-bashing. That's just what has gotten all the publicity, and I believe the filth has sort of displaced original stuff.
Actually, rap really does have sort of a pre-modern history in Black America. If you read your Uncle Remus you will find him reciting the rhyme
Ol' Man Jackson fines confraction fell down stairs to get satisfaction. Big Bill Fray, he rue de day . . . "And so on. And the outrageous names used by rappers are probably just modern versions of the pseudonyms used by blues artists (Memphis Slim, Speckled Red, etc.) which are in turn related to the Cousin Jodys and Grandpa Jones's of hillbilly music.
Actually, I think a lot of us rednecks liked rap when it first came out. Several years ago there was this FM station in my neck of the woods where people called in every night and requested a song. And I tell you, this obscure rap record entitled Jam on It by a group called Nucleus (I think) was number one for nights and nights and nights and nights and nights, and it wasn't from brothas in the hood calling in, either.
Perhaps the most harrowing rap I've ever heard was by a group that otherwise was one of the very worst offenders when it came to filth and indecency. Geto Boys had this hit entitled Mind Playing Tricks on Me, and I have never forgotten it. It made chills go up and down my back, and it didn't have a single solitary curse word in it. It's too expletive deleted bad (pardon my Breton) that such raps have been completely buried under a sea of profanity and hatred (and yes, I resent it every bit as much as any other poor cracker how the behavior in urban Blacks that liberals laud is identical to the behavior they ridicule in rural Southern whites).
There's actually a rural Southern white rapper out there who calls himself Bubba Sparxxx. He's from LaGrange, Georgia, and supposedly he defends the poor rural white South in his rhymes the way urban Blacks defend their community. Unfortunately, he's a "gangsta" rapper, a colleague of Dr. Dre, and a liberal (he was one of the "artists" who signed the petition against going to war with Hussein a couple years ago).
I know . . . this post had nothing to do with the original topic of the thread, but it's not every day you meet a fellow redneck who'll admit to liking early rap!
Thanks pal- Happy New Year to you and yours!
Dat's reawlly fubby.
[D-mn, where are those dentures??? Hold on a second.]
I mean, that's really funny.
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