Yet Another Blog by Bob: and couple of songs

I've been posting here so infrequently that I ought to mention why: As part of my media history research I've started yet another blog, JHeroes.com -- Newspaper Heroes on the Air, and it's taking most of my blogging time.

I'm exploring how newspaper reporters were portrayed in "popular culture" for a series of articles and maybe a book. The blog will help me sift through and comment on more than 30 years of old time radio: dramatic series, dramatized biographies and historical series.

Why? Partly because I like the storytelling of radio. At its best, it let your imagination paint the pictures, instead of some Hollywood special effects department. Professionally, I'm curious whether any "old media" (newspapers) and "new media" (radio) competition showed up in radio stories, or whether radio simply reflected how important newspapers were in daily life back then.

I also wonder whether radio dramas put newspaper reporters in a better or worse light than Hollywood movies of the same era, including whether radio had strong women reporter characters like the movie portrayals of Hildy Johnson, Torchy Blane and Lois Lane. (For more about the radio version of Lois, and her reaction to that upstart Clark Kent, see this second half of this blog entry.)

So... this old "boblog" blog has slipped off my radar for the past few months. So has music -- the main thing I write about here.

Here's one coincidence: An episode of one of the best old-time radio shows about crime-fighting newspapermen also featured one of my favorite blues singers and guitar players, Josh White.

Listen to Big Town: The Prisoner's Song on another old-time radio blog.

Josh sings original blues songs that parallel the story of the radio play; to be part of the scene, he plays a prisoner on death row.

"He's going to the chair..." the guy in the next cell says. "They let him have his guitar. He wanted it instead of his supper."

Incidentally, Josh White's song here is not "The Prisoner's Song" -- that's just the title of the "Big Town" episode.

The other "The Prisoner's Song" was a huge heart-breaking hit in the early days of recorded music, for Vernon Dalhart (a No. 1 hit for 12 weeks in 1925-26).

Since then has been re-recorded many times. I even remember my mother singing it, sometimes just the line, "If I had the wings of an angel..." when she needed a quick escape from whater was getting her down.

Bells to celebrate many seasons

Mostly I'm celebrating the discovery that Ellen Kushner's "Sound and Spirit" radio program is available online. I used to be a regular listener to her wonderful mixture of music and stories, but lost track of it when I moved from one NPR/PRI station's listening area to another.

Her website has players and "embed" code for individual episodes. This is my first try at embedding one in a Blogger page. Utterly painless... Odd that it looks like a video player when only audio is involved. The program logo didn't show up properly when I first posted this, but the audio plays -- and that is the point.

Appalachian music themes at Radford University

Strange coincidence... I just discovered that the RU InterLibrary Loan department I've been using a lot this summer is also home to another banjo player who recently began blogging about Appalachian musical culture under the library's auspices.

Bud Bennett's first few entries look great, from highlighting the library's music collection to pointing out the existence of County Sales in Floyd, an old-time-music record distributor that he and I both discovered, as Bud says, "Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, far from the New River Valley..." (He links to a Roanoke Times story about County that I missed a couple of weeks ago.)

Running into Bud's blog (while on an Interlibrary Loan visit to the library's website) reminded me that I've been neglecting this blog... even more than I've been neglecting my other five or six blogs and Websites.

The most recent things I've posted about music have been some tweets about a local journalist-musician's (highly recommended) new book, which I'll recommend to Bud by posting them here again:

Ralph Berrier's reading at the Radford Public Library even had yodeling! And applause for it -- and his writing... http://bit.ly/9bifS0 http://twitter.com/bobstep/status/21443549249

Rave for Ralph's book: "No matter. If he has yet to master the fiddle, he rarely hits a false note on the page." http://on.wsj.com/cldNOy http://twitter.com/bobstep/status/20497180615

Local journalist fiddler finds fame & WSJ byline with 'If Trouble Don't Kill Me' Book Excerpt - http://bit.ly/boQAK4
http://twitter.com/bobstep/status/20496948825

Speaking of trouble... This week's Roanoke Times headline about an Appalachian music fan with a Radford University connection was less celebratory, but at least it does have a happy ending:

The university is officially yanking the name off one wing its arts and music building, the part that has been called Powell Hall from one end (and Porterfield Hall from the other).

A few years before I got here, an Appalachian Studies class at the university pointed out that the building's namesake John Powell, along with being a composer and champion of Appalachian music, was a notorious racist.

Plans to drop the name were postponed along with plans to renovate the building, until a call from a Roanoke Times columnist reminded the performing arts school's dean of the issue recently, calling Powell, "a terrible and persuasive racist whose work harmed uncounted Virginians."

Dean Joe Scartelli, now acting provost, got the Board of Visitors to act quickly (if belatedly), officially dropping the name last week. I hope the university facilities folks and website editors scrub it away soon, without whitewashing the historical fact that the school let the name stand for 43 years. Was the naming of the building a conscious act of "whiteness" in 1967? That was a big year in the Civil Rights movement, with an important Virginia case before the Supreme Court, the ironically named "Loving v. Virginia," and a future publisher of the Roanoke Times and Radford board member -- covering the "Mississippi Burning" case for The New York Times.

For anyone not familiar with RU and its arts facilities, here's one last coincidence or bit of irony: While plans to renovate Porterfield/Powell were on hold, the school built a fine new performing arts center next door and named it for Douglas & Beatrice Covington.

Along with being a patron of the arts, Dr. Covington, Radford's fifth president, was the first African-American to head a predominantly white university in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Juxtaposition

I noticed on Facebook that the Carolina Chocolate Drops are in Scotland. Can't find anything of them doing Robert Burns songs, but I wouldn't be surprised if they bring some back...

(One of these is here for comparison...)

In the company of great writers... a Droid blog experiment

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Maybe I do write like Vonnegut, maybe I don't. But the first paragraph I used to test this promotional text-analysis site iwl.me -- which produced the result above -- actually came from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

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Warning: Geeky section begins here, but I get back to "writers" after next horizontal rule.

This blog item began as an experiment in posting a code snippet online using Blogaway, a Blogger editor on my Droid phone, to see if that attractive "I write like..." box would appear the way the promoters intended.

The bad news: The Droid blog editor converted the HTML tags of the badge's "code for your blog" widget into their encoded-character equivalents, which disabled the code. That is, it created new code to put the symbols like < and > on screen instead of interpreting them as part of the behind-the-scenes HTML code. Instead of the "I write like Kurt..." box, you got something that looked like the garble on the right.

I also wasn't able to edit the code in the"Edit HTML" window of the regular Web interface to Blogger using the Droid's browser, small screen and pull-out keyboard.

The good news: Once I got back to the Mac the fix was a simple copy-and-paste operation.

Bottom line: You'd think a phone using Google's Android operating system would have an elegant and powerful built-in app for editing blog posts in Google's Blogger system. If it does, I haven't found it.

To be fair, Blogaway does seem fine for more conventional posts, but I don't think I'll try it with code again soon. It'll take a while for the eyestrain to wear off after this first attempt.

Here's more information on the program for other Droid users:

http://www.androidguys.com/2009/12/16/app-review-blogaway-android-blogger-client/

http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-beanie-blog-znnx.aspx

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Back to the "I write like..." writing-analysis page... For more background on the iwl.me page, see this interview with Dmitry Chestnykh. Rocket science or not, it's fun to play with. If I give iwl.me the text of any page I've written about the Web, with URLs and computer jargon, including the page you're reading, it says I write like Cory Doctorow. I tried again with a few paragraphs from my home page that talked about teaching and my coming to Radford, and I was back to being Vonnegut. When I pasted in a short paragraph about newspapers (which appears under my grandmother's picture on http://stepno.com), this was the text:

That's probably a Sunday Boston paper or Springfield Union. The past week's Daily Hampshire Gazettes are stacked on the radiator in this photo taken by my father. I started delivering the Gazette in junior high school and still remember columns by Arthur Hoppe making me laugh--the first byline that ever stuck with me.

and this was the report:

I write like
James Fenimore Cooper

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Now that makes me feel old. I wonder what did that? Maybe those old New England places and newspaper names kicked the analysis into "Last of the Mohicans" mode? Anyhow, it's nice to see some variety in the reports. I grabbed a New York Times story about the Supreme Court's conservative shift (by Adam Liptak), and iwl.me said it sounded like Stephen King. Just scary, I guess.

Final test: I went over to http://craphound.com and grabbed a few paragraphs of Cory Doctorow's blog.

It says he writes like Ben Franklin.

No it doesn't. I made that up. You can't always get things to come out as ironically as you want. It said he writes like Cory Doctorow. Except when he writes like Kurt Vonnegut.

Linking around a Web of ragged memories

As a pre-college-graduation present to myself many years ago, I bought a guitar from a guy who bought it from another guy, named Dave Lindorff... whom I have just stumbled upon, thanks to a Web link to some of his journalistic work. And one link does tend to lead to another.

I'm not sure I ever heard Dave play -- although I did learn a tune or two from his brother Gary. And I don't think I knew that Dave and I both chose journalism as a career some 40 years ago.

Strangely, though, one of the first songs I played on that old red sunburst Epiphone Frontier, with its pickguard decorated in cactus flowers and lariat loops, was "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag," which Dave apparently updated a few years ago and still has on his MySpace page, playing roughly the same guitar part... which I guess we all learned from some combination of Country Joe, Jim Kweskin and Dave Van Ronk.

I still use the same guitar lick, which works on a medley I start with "Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" -- not as politically meaningful, but timeless in its own way.

Mr. Lindorff, however, is now down in my record book as the only person I know of to attempt "City of New Orleans" on the Appalachian autoharp.

(As for the Epiphone, I traded it years ago for a Martin with a fatter fingerboard, but I saw one just like it at Gruhn Guitars last month and was momentarily tempted...)

Bluegrass jam in the evening; strawberry jam in the morning

The River City Grill, 103 Third Ave. in Radford, Va., isn't just a new home for the Monday night fiddle and banjo jam... It has great food (judging by my first two meals there), a working wifi connection... but no website yet, so I managed to post a Twitter tweet about it with a link to some place with the same name in Irvington, NY. Duh.

Whether by Web or by 5 minute walk, I hope Radford University's seniors find the place in time for graduation on Saturday. If they do, maybe they'll be inspired to re-enlist for master's degrees so they can be regular customers.

Until River City Grill gets a website of its own, I'll post whatever relevant links I find here:

• The Radford Fiddle & Banjo Jam home page


• Absorb Bluegrass: Good trouble in River City
  
  
• The tourism folks already have the Fiddle & Banjo Jam on the map; we just need to get the pin moved a few doors down the street and around the corner to Third Avenue.

Those first two meals I mentioned: Crab cakes and a salad for dinner; generous vegetarian omelet for breakfast. RCG had its grand opening last Saturday and the menu says it'll be open 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. This being final exam week in a soon-to-be-deserted college town, I have my fingers crossed...