I enjoyed writing about Johnny Cash because a) he was a really interesting guy and b) I grew up listening to him. My folks liked country music, and Cash was one of their favorites.

My only regret was that I didn’t find a place in the book to mention that Cash liked to fish in northern Saskatchewan. Normally, I never pass up an opportunity to sneak a little Saskatchewan into a book.

Herewith the introduction and first chapter of Johnny Cash: The Man in Black.

And, of course, a link to where you can buy it.

Johnny Cash: The Man in Black

By Edward Willett

Introduction

On January 13, 1968, a gray, gloomy Saturday, Johnny Cash entered Folsom State Prison in Repressa, California. With him were a crowd of musicians, technicians, photographers and reporters. Cash was about to do something no one had ever done before: record a live album in front of a crowd of prisoners.

With more than 3,500 inmates crowded into five enormous cellblocks, Folsom State Prison, the state’s second-oldest, held some of California’s worst offenders. About 2,000 prisoners assembled in the dining hall to hear the first of two shows. Armed guards patrolled overhead on walkways. The prisoners couldn’t be left in darkness, so the bright neon lights remained on throughout the concerts.

Marshall Grant, Cash’s long-time bass player, intended to bring Cash onstage with a big dramatic introduction as he always did, but Cash’s new producer, Bob Johnston, had other ideas. “All you gotta do,” he told Cash, “is walk out there and jerk your head around and say ‘Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.’”[1] Cash, he thought, “needed to assert control right from the start.”[2]

Cash took his advice. He walked out, grabbed the microphone, and said, “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”

It would become one of the most famous phrases in the history of American music.

The audience of prisoners exploded. Cash’s songs kept them at a high pitch of excitement and appreciation. He sang songs they could identify with, songs about prison and crime, loneliness and separation–and a few just for fun.

Unlike an audience on the outside, the prisoners didn’t just respond at the end of the song. Instead, they applauded whenever they heard a line they particularly identified with. Five tape machines running simultaneously in a truck in the prison yard captured their noisy appreciation and helped make not just a great live album, but what is generally considered one of the best live albums ever made.[3]

The album sold six million copies. It reached number 13 on the pop charts. It led directly to the equally popular Johnny Cash at San Quentin, which in turn led to Johnny Cash hosting his own television show on ABC. In 1969, Columbia Records announced that Johnny Cash had sold more records in the United States that year than the Beatles.

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison also solidified the public’s perception of Johnny Cash as an outlaw, a rebel who followed his own path, no matter what the cost.

Thirty years later, his reputation as a rebel with a cause–the cause of the ordinary man–led to an amazing comeback, as he released acclaimed albums that found a whole new audience among listeners who hadn’t even been born when he recorded at Folsom Prison.

But the Folsom Prison recording itself was an amazing comeback. At the time he recorded it, many people thought Johnny Cash was already washed up, a has-been who looked old before his time due to years of hard touring and drug abuse.

For Johnny Cash, the road to Folsom Prison and beyond was a rocky one. It began in the darkest years of the Great Depression, in one of the hardest-hit states: Arkansas.

Enjoy! And if you feel so inclined, here’s a link to the Amazon page where you can purchase the book.

Janis Joplin: Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

Introduction

On Saturday afternoon, June 17, 1967, a band with the unlikely name of Big Brother and the Holding Company took to the stage of the Monterey International Pop Festival at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, eighty miles south of San Francisco.

Big Brother’s lead singer, a young woman named Janis Joplin, was nervous. She’d been singing with Big Brother for a year, and so far the group hadn’t made much headway. They weren’t a top draw even in San Francisco, their home town. Now here they were facing their biggest audience yet. Forty thousand people had turned out for the festival, but they were there to see Otis Redding and British imports like The Who and Jimi Hendrix. They weren’t particularly interested in Big Brother, which was why the band had been given a slot on the program on Saturday afternoon, hardly prime time at a rock concert.

A documentary about the festival was being filmed by D. A. Pennebaker that weekend for ABC-TV, but the cameras weren’t pointed at the stage when Big Brother and Janis Joplin launched into “Down on Me, “Road Block” and “Ball and Chain.” Instead they were pointed at the audience, where they captured the overwhelmed response of Mama Cass of the hit group the Mamas and the Papa. “Mouth agape, her ears were in music lover’s heaven,” wrote Laura Joplin, Janis Joplin’s sister, in her book Love, Janis.[i]

When Big Brother finished its set, the audience exploded. The organizers were dumfounded. Critics were ecstatic. Jazz critic Nat Hentoff wrote that Janis’s performance left him limp and feeling that he’d been “in contact with an overwhelming life force.” Greil Marcus, another critic, noted that Janis went so far out that he wondered how she ever managed to get back.[ii]

“When I sing,” Janis Joplin once said, “I feel, oh, I feel, well, like when you’re first in love…I feel chills, weird feelings slipping all over my body, it’s a supreme emotional and physical experience.”[iii]

At Monterey Pop, the audience felt the same way when they heard Janis Joplin perform. Brought back for an encore to ensure that this time, their performance would be filmed, Janis and Big Brother wowed the audience again.

For Janis, it was vindication. Letting her feelings take hold, letting it “all hang out,” in the slang of the time, had been something she’d always been counseled against, something that had led to taunts and ridicule in high school and beyond. But now, she said, “I’ve made feeling work for me, through music, instead of destroying me. It’s superfortunate. Man, if it hadn’t been for the music, I probably would have done myself in.”[iv]

Before Monterey Pop, few people had heard of Janis Joplin.

Afterward, almost everyone had. For the next three years, like a falling star, she would blaze a trail of outrageous behavior and incredible music across the pop-culture sky of 1960s America.

But then, also like a falling star, her light would abruptly go out.

Chapter 1: Frilled Frocks and Bridge

The short but eventful life of Janis Joplin began in what might be considered the most unlikely of places: Port Arthur, Texas.

Port Arthur, located in southeast Texas just off the Gulf of Mexico and just west of the Louisiana border, was founded (and named) by Kansas railway promoter Arthur E. Stilwell. Stilwell wanted to link Kansas City to the Gulf of Mexico by rail, because he had just launched the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad. He and his backers acquired land on the western shore of Sabine Lake, a freshwater lake just inland from the Gulf and connected to it by a natural opening known as Sabine Pass.

Stillwell wanted the new city to be both a major tourist resort and an important seaport. A canal was cut along the western edge of the lake, connecting the site of the new town to deep water at Sabine Pass. Port Arthur was formally incorporated in 1898.[v]

Because Stillwell wanted Port Arthur to be a tourist destination as well as a major port, he planned beautiful broad boulevards and avenues and grand homes along the lakeshore. But early in the twentieth century Stillwell lost financial control of the project to John W. Gates, a Wall Street speculator whose nickname was “Bet-a-Million” and who had made his fortune selling barbed wire across the West. (The company he formed eventually became the giant corporation U.S. Steel.)[vi]

Gates extended and deepened the canal so that ships could sail it all the way to the cities of Beaumont and Orange. Unfortunately, that cut off Port Arthur from the lakeshore, ruining the view of the expensive lakeside homes and reducing Port Arthur’s appeal as a tourist destination.[vii]

That appeal faded further as Port Arthur became inextricably linked to the burgeoning Texas oil industry. By the 1960s, the town buildings seemed almost lost among the huge oil refineries, storage tanks and chemical plants. And since in those days natural gas was simply released into the air, the whole “Golden Triangle,” as the region encompassing the towns of Port Arthur, Orange and Beaumont is known, smelled like rotten eggs. Reportedly, at Lamar Tech, the college Janis Joplin would some day (briefly) attend, the fumes from a nearby sulfur plant were sometimes strong enough to melt the girls’ nylons.[viii]

But oil also means money, and good jobs, and it was the need for both that brought Janis’s parents to Port Arthur before she was born.

The flapper and the bootlegger

Dorothy East and Seth Joplin met in Amarillo, Texas, on a blind date. Dorothy, the daughter of Cecil and Laura East (nee Hansen), was known in Amarillo for her beautiful singing. She particularly liked Broadway show tunes, and in high school she won the lead role in a citywide stage production. The Broadway director the organizers brought in told Dorothy he could get her work in New York, but he recommended against it, because “those people just aren’t your kind of folks.”[ix] She took his advice and instead applied to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Disappointed that the university had only one voice teacher, who only taught opera, she returned to Amarillo after a single year and began helping at a radio station, KGNC. She was known as a “free spirit,” scandalizing her parents by adopting the “flapper” styles of short hair, close-fitting dresses, snazzy hats and high heels. She also smoked and once accidentally swore on-air.[x]

In other words, she showed flashes of the same rebelliousness for which her daughter would later be notorious.

Seth Joplin was the son of Seeb (who ran the Amarillo stockyards) and Florence Joplin (nee Porter). At the time he met Dorothy East, he was taking a break from engineering studies at Texas A&M—studies he never finished: a lack of money forced him to give up his schooling still one semester shy of a degree. A bit of a rebel himself, he made bathtub gin during the last days of Prohibition and smoked marijuana (which was legal then). While courting Dorothy, he took the only job he could find, as a gas station attendant. Dorothy worked as a credit clerk in the local Montgomery Ward department store, eventually becoming head of the department.[xi]

In 1935, in the depths of the Depression, Seth got a break: his best friend from college recommended him for a job at the Texas Company (later Texaco) in Port Arthur. Dorothy quit her job to follow, and soon found work in the credit department at Sears. With two incomes they were finally able to afford to marry, which they did on October 20, 1936.

Seth worked at the only Texaco plant that made containers for petroleum. When the Second World War broke out, his job was considered so vital that although he was called to join the armed forces three times, each time he was deferred.

Shortly after Seth and Dorothy married, Dorothy’s parents’ marriage broke up. Dorothy’s mother, Laura, and her younger sister, Mimi, came to live with Seth and Dorothy. Needing more space, they bought their first house, a two-bedroom brick bungalow on the edge of town. For fun, Dorothy and Seth liked to cross the Sabine River and party in the bars in Vinton, Louisiana.

In mid-1942, Dorothy became pregnant. Janis Lyn Joplin was born at 9:30 a.m. on January 19, 1943.

Janis Joplin makes her entrance

Janis was three weeks early and weighed only five and a half pounds, but she throve. After all, she had parents, a grandmother and an aunt doting on her. (However, Laura and Mimi moved out to a place of their own when Janis was three.)[xii]

As a child, Janis wasn’t rebellious at all. In fact, Dorothy Joplin said later she was easy to care for—not too docile, but not overactive, either—and cheerful by nature.

Janis’s mother, who believed a mother’s place was at home, quit her job to look after Janis full time. She made her beautiful dresses and blouses with ruffles and ribbons and frills, and took her to the First Christian Church for church school, which Dorothy eventually taught.

Seth, who started work at 5:30 a.m., got to spend time with his daughter when he got home in the afternoon. Janis would wait for him on the front porch, he’d give her a hug, and they’d sit and talk.

One day Dorothy overheard her husband telling Janis about making bathtub gin in college. “’Is that the proper topic for a conversation with a child?’ she asked him later,” Laura Joplin, Janis’s younger sister, wrote in her biography of Janis, Love, Janis. “Pop refused to argue the point; instead, he quit spending the evening time visiting with Janis on the front step. Janis was crushed and never knew why.”[xiii]

Janis’s mother introduced her daughter to music well before she started school. She bought an old upright piano and taught Janis how to play it. “She and Janis sat on the piano bench together, with Janis singing the simple nursery songs Dorothy taught her,” Laura wrote. “Janis often lay in bed at night singing those songs, over and over, to put herself to sleep.”[xiv]

But Janis’s father found the noise of a child practicing scales annoying. As well, Dorothy had recently undergone an operation to remove her thyroid gland. The operation destroyed her singing voice (although her speaking voice was fine). Seth Joplin thought having the piano around would be too emotionally painful for his wife, so the piano was sold, ending Janis’s first flirtation with formal musical training.[xv]

In 1949, after two miscarriages, the Joplins had a second child, Laura Lee, and moved to a larger three-bedroom house at 3130 Lombardy Drive, in a neighborhood called Griffing Park. Four years later, in 1953, Janis’s brother Michael Ross was born.

Janis was bright, friendly and inquisitive. Laura wrote, “She had a full face, small, twinkling blue eyes, a broad forehead that Mother always said showed her intellect, and fine, silky blond hair that had a soft curl in it…People might have found her features plain if a buoyant spirit and zest for life hadn’t overshadowed her looks. She was a child who liked people. She always made strangers welcome. Her sensitivity to others showed in a considerate willingness to go out of her way to include others in play.”[xvi]

Aside from singing herself to sleep and singing in the church choir (and, in junior high school, in the Glee Club), Janis showed no particular aptitude for or interest in music. She was much more interested in art. She began to draw as soon as she could hold a pencil. Her mother even arranged private art lessons for her when she was in the third and fourth grades.

Janis also loved to read, a love that continued throughout her life. She learned to read before she entered school and had a library card even before that.

Janis Joplin: her own tall tale?

Dorothy Joplin said that Janis particularly loved magical, fantastical tales. (In one of the letters in Laura Joplin’s book Love Janis, Janis recommends J.R.R. Tolkien’s books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to her younger sister.)

“She studied about the theater. She studied ‘tall tales of America,’” Dorothy said. She wondered if some of the over-the-top accounts of her own escapades Janis told the press once she became famous were her own versions of those tall tales.

“She’d spin these tales. It was so far out that you were supposed to understand that it was that way. She tried the same thing with the press–in my opinion. And it backfired.

“I overlooked that marvelous capacity of hers to trust people.”[xvii]

Janis even began writing her own plays in the first grade and staging them with her friends as puppet shows in a puppet theatre her mother built for her in the back yard.

A “strikingly timid child”

Janis entered junior high with a good but unspectacular academic record. Several of her childhood friends moved out of town when she was in the sixth grade, and she had to ride a bus to the junior high, which was further away than her grade school had been. She found the rowdy kids on the bus frightening—she was a “strikingly timid child,” Myra Friedman wrote[xviii]—but once she started traveling to junior high via a car pool instead of on the bus, she adjusted quickly. Her mother didn’t remember any behavioral problems at all. “I even worried about it a little,” she said. “She never did anything for me to correct!”[xix]

The limitations of Port Arthur meant that finding something interesting for the whole family to do took some imagination on the part of Janis’s father. He hit upon taking them down to the Post Office to look at the Wanted posters. “It was a little unusual,” he agreed later, “but it was somewhere to go. That wasn’t the real reason, the Wanted Men. We’d just roam around the deserted building and read about all the people who were wanted for murders. We’d go any unusual place we could.”[xx]

Everyone who knew Janis when she was a child praised her when Myra Friedman interviewed them not long after Janis’s death. “Janis helped out in the library; Janis helped out at the church. Janis won an artwork contest for the cover of a junior high publication; Janis did posters for the library. Janis was cooperative; Janis was shy. Janis was ‘just like everybody else,’” she wrote.[xxi]

But in junior high, as Janis approached adolescence, signs began to appear that perhaps Janis wasn’t “just like everybody else” after all. Her teachers began to give her unsatisfactory marks in work habits and citizenship because she “talked too much and didn’t get her work done on time,” her sister Laura noted. “…She was more inquisitive and energetic than the school program allowed.” [xxii] She was also, according to her friends, naïve and gullible, someone who could be led to believe all kinds of preposterous stories and who was always eager to please other people.[xxiii]

Janis did all the things expected of a proper young girl in Port Arthur in the 1950s. She joined the Junior Reading Circle for Culture, and Tri Hi Y club, and the Glee Club, which gave her her first public singing opportunity outside of church: she sang a solo in the Christmas pageant. She even took bridge lessons. (Bridge was a passion of her parents’.) In fact, she met her first boyfriend, Jack Smith, when they played bridge together in the seventh grade in the Ladies Aid Society’s ‘Bridge for Cultural Improvement’ club.[xxiv]

Despite occasional problems with talking too much in class or doodling when she should have been taking notes, Janis seemed destined to sail smoothly into Port Arthur society, following the course prescribed for young ladies: high school, university, marriage, house, kids.

But in high school, smooth sailing gave way to stormy waters.

In the book, a kid names Kit gets plucked from his hand-to-mouth existence busking on the streets of a nasty little city on a nasty little planet and turned into Andy Nebula, the next “Sensation Single,” all on the strength of a computer’s analysis of what teens want.

Looks like I might have been on to something. A new study from Emory University suggests that if you record the brain activity of teens while they’re listening to new songs, you can make a pretty good stab at predicting the eventual popularity of those songs.

The study was conducted by Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist (no, I’d never heard of such a thing before, either) and director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy, and Sara Moore, an economics research specialist in his lab. The results are being published by The Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Back in 2006, as part of a study into how peer pressure affects teenagers’ opinions, Berns collected 120 songs by relatively unknown musicians without recording contracts from MySpace pages. Then he had 27 kids, aged 12 to 17, listen to the songs while their brains were being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The teens were also asked to rate each song on a scale from one to five. Unknown songs were used to ensure that the teens were hearing them for the first time.

Three years later, while watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters, Berns suddenly heard a song he recognized from that study (“Apologize,” by One Republic), and realized that it had become a hit.

And then he had a brainstorm. “It occurred to me,” he said, “that we had this unique data set of the brain responses of kids who listened to songs before they got popular. I wondered if we could have predicted that hit.”

He went back to the data he’d collected in 2006 and ran a comparative analysis—and discovered a statistically significant correlation between the brain responses in his group of adolescent study participants and the popularity of the songs, as measured by their sales figures from 2007 to 2010: brain responses could predict about one third of the songs that would eventually sell more than 20,000 copies.

The majority of the songs were flops (as, let’s face it, most songs are), with hardly any sales at all. Only three of them were certified hits, with more than 500,000 unit sales. Interestingly, the data was even better at predicting flops than successes: about 90 percent of the songs that drew a mostly weak response from the teens’ neural reward centers went on to sell fewer than 20,000 units.

Meanwhile, the teens’ conscious ratings of the songs did not correlate with the songs’ future sales at all.

Put simply, they were probably thinking too hard: as Berns puts it, “You have to stop and think, and your thoughts may be colored by whatever biases you have, and how you feel about revealing your preferences to a researcher.” Your brain, on the other hand, is entirely honest: you can’t lie to an fMRI.

Berns is the first to admit that this research is just a “baby step.”

“I want to know where ideas come from, and why some of them become popular and others don’t,” he says. “It’s ideas and the way that we think that determines the course of human history.”

But somewhere, you know there’s a record executive already trying to figure out how run brain-scans on focus groups. Because who wouldn’t want to take the guess work out of manufacturing a hit song?

Let me save them the trouble. I have just at this moment come up with the lyrics for a sure-fire number-one hit:

“You said you’d always be my guy/You left, your brain scan tells me why/When I’m with you you always lie/But you can’t lie to fMRI!”

Lady GaGa, call me. We’ll talk.

In real life, alas, music is primarily an auditory rather than visual experience. Although there is certainly interest to be had in watching a musician live (and, as I wrote recently, what we see may even influence our impression of the sounds produced, at least when it comes to percussionists), we’re generally able to enjoy music just fine, and sometimes better, without any visual component at all: hence the people you see closing their eyes at symphonies. (Not the snoring ones, the other ones.)

But a number of researchers have found ways to make music visible—perhaps not quite in Disney fashion, but in a fascinating way all the same.

Chief among these is Bernard Richardson of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in Wales.

For many years, the school’s “acoustic group” has used a technique called “holographic interferometry” to study the vibrations of musical instruments. These vibrations are tiny: on the order of a micron (one thousandth of a millimeter). A hologram is a record of a light field, the light bouncing off of an object in all directions, created using a laser. A hologram allows the light field to be reconstructed so that the eye sees the object, apparently in three dimensions, even when the object itself is no longer present.

Holographic interferometry as applied to musical instruments involves creating a holographic record of the light bouncing off the vibrating instrument using a laser beam that has been split into an illuminating beam and a reference beam. The areas that vibrate the most show up as patterns of interference, basically dark bands on the image.

The results are both beautiful and informative.

As Richardson puts it, “Guitar-making is a compromise between stiffness and flexibility. The struts on the underside of the soundboard help to create a lightweight but strong plate which creates lots of sound in response to the vibrations of the strings. At low frequencies, the guitar plate moves back and forth not unlike the piston of a loudspeaker.”

In the holographic images, at low frequencies (low pitch) there’s a bright line near the ribs: that’s a “nodal,” or non-moving, line. This mode of vibration, Richardson says, creates large volume changes in the air and thus produces a lot of sound.

At higher pitches the plate of the soundboard divides into distinct patches separated by nodal lines. Not as much sound radiates from these modes, but they color the sound: and since these patterns are different for different instruments, the shape of these patterns is a visual representation of the unique voices of various stringed instruments.

As the frequency continues to increase, the vibrating patches between the nodal lines get smaller and smaller. “Studies of these vibrations and the way they convey energy of the vibrating strings as sound to the listener can assist makers to ‘fine tune’ the tone quality of their instruments,” Richardson comments.

But it’s not just string instruments whose sound can be visualized. I played various brass instruments in high school: primarily trumpet and French horn, but I tried my hand at everything at one point or another, including trombone…which was why a story headlined “Shock wave from trombone filmed” on the BBC News website caught my eye.

Back in 1995 Mico Hirschberg of the Eindhove University of Technology posited the notion that trombones are capable of producing intense pressure waves that could even briefly exceed the speed of sound. Now Kazuyoshi Takayama and Kioynobu Ohtani from Tohoku University’s Institute of Fluid Science have confirmed that idea: not only that, they’ve captured it visually.

They used a technique called schlieren photography that can image variations in the refractive index (the speed of light in a given medium) in air. Shock waves create a stark, sudden change in the refractive index…and sure enough, in their video (which looks rather romantic, actually, since it’s of a trombone playing in front of a big round white background that looks like the full moon), you can see curved shock waves issuing forth from the instrument’s bell.

The researchers measured the pressure at the instrument’s mouthpiece, in the middle of its length, and at the output, and discovered that a train of compression waves built up through the trombone’s length, emerging from the bell as shock waves that travelled briefly at about one percent above the speed of sound.

Such shock waves presumably issue from the bells of other brass instruments, too, especially trumpets…

Just like in Fantasia.

I always heard that film was “ahead of its time.” Guess this is the proof!

(The photo: Regina Lyric Light Opera’s 1989 production of The Music Man, featuring the song “Seventy-Six Trombones.” I played Charlie Cowell, the rather villainous anvil salesman. I’m not in the photo.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Willett Duo with their rendition of “Steamed-Rice Mommy’s Coming to Town,” inspired by the gripping real-life saga of…supper.

It provides 100 percent of your dailycuteness requirement!

Click to play: Steamed Rice Mommy’s Coming to Town

(The photo: Me and Alice, of course.)

By “that,” I mean the process of getting this new computer up and running to my satisfaction. Yes, the new monitor arrived last week, and I spent a few happy (well, mostly happy) hours with plug-ins and cables and drives (oh, my!), losing hours of productivity in order to get a device that is supposed to enhance my productivity to the point where I can actually be productive on it. But it is ever thus, and things seem to be in good working order now, with the old computer still standing by and ready to go in case I suddenly realize I’ve forgotten to transfer something I really need. (Which has already happened about three times.)

But that “that” isn’t the only “that” that I meant when I said “that” was fun. The other “that” that was fun was Regina Lyric Musical Theatre‘s annual fundraising brunch, the first of two installments of which took place on Sunday at the Hotel Saskatchewan Radisson Plaza.

I’ve been involved with Regina Lyric Musical Theatre (formerly called Regina Lyric Light Opera Society, and henceforth to be referred to simply as “Lyric” for the sake of my typing fingers), for (gulp!) more than 20 years ago.

Back when I lived in Weyburn, I was one of the founding members of Crocus 80 Theatre (formed in 1980, in case you couldn’t guess), and eventually rose to the presidency of that august community theatre troupe. When I came to Regina in late 1988 I naturally expected that my ongoing theatrical activities would be focused on Regina Little Theatre, one of the oldest little theatres in Canada…but, see, Lyric did musicals. And I sing. And so…Lyric became my primary theatrical home, rather than RLT (though I have acted in and directed RLT productions over the years).

I was almost immediately drafted to the board of Lyric, and eventually became president, and for many years, I was in every single Lyric production. I can’t say that any more, and I’m no longer on the board, but I continue to be publicity director and I also design posters and programs (oh, and look after the website). And I do perform frequently with Lyric…which is what I was doing Sunday.

Lyric’s musical brunch is a terrific event that offers a great brunch, followed by more than an hour of Broadway-based entertainment. It’s been directed for many years by Jane Ursan (although I directed it a couple of times about a decade ago), and each year she puts together a fabulous line-up of songs, all built around a theme. Sometimes it’s been a particular composer (Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein), but this year it was called From Camelot to Cabaret: The 1960s Broadway Revolution, and featured songs from the amazing shows of that decade. The show features songs from Camelot, Bye, Bye Birdie, Do Re Mi, The Fantasticks, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, 110 in the Shade, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Oliver, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl, Sweet Charity, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and many more, finishing with a rousing rendition of a medley from Hair. (That medley is notable from my point of the view for the fact that I play tambourine on “Let the Sun Shine In.” Tambourines, I have discovered, hurt. The palm I banged it against was sore for a day, my right arm felt like it would fall off, and one night at rehearsal I came within about two minutes of tambourining of developing a blister on my thumb. Considering that, as someone joked the other day, the tambourine was invented so bands had an excuse to put a pretty girl on stage, the fact I’m playing it is odd, to say the least!)

Most years I’ve sung a solo, but this year for a change I was in a trio, “Two Ladies” from Cabaret (“Biddle-dee-diddle-dee, two ladies, biddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee, two ladies, biddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee, and I’m the only man…ja!”), a song whose character is best summed up by pointing out it takes place entirely behind a blanket and I finish it shirtless and with my face covered in lipstick.

It’s a fun song, and it was particularly fun because one of the the two ladies who sang it with me was my real-life lady, my wife, Margaret Anne.

And what made that special was that, although there are many reasons I am fond of Lyric, the reason that stands head and shoulders and an Everest-sized mountain peak above the others is that it was through Lyric that I met Margaret Anne.

And , in turn, means that without Lyric, I would not have my amazing, beautiful, wonderful daughter, Alice…whose picture, looking pensive, adorns the start of this post.

If you happen to be in the Regina area, I hope you’ll consider coming out to this Sunday’s repeat performance. Brunch is at 12 noon, and the singing follows at about 1:15. Tickets are $45, and available from Bach & Beyond in the Golden Mile Centre.  I’d love to see you there!

Biddle-dee-biddle-dee-dee!

The photo: My daughter, Alice, age 9.

Narrator Ezra Knight

Narrator Ezra Knight does an absolutely fabulous job, not surprising considering what an accomplished actor he is. In fact, as I started listening to the book, I had to get out my print copy because it sounded so good I actually thought they must have rewritten the introduction–but no, those were my words!

According to a letter the publisher sent along with the two copies of the audiobook I received, this is the first Enslow Publishers title to be recorded as a full audio book. I feel honoured!

Also, I’m really enjoying listening to my own book. I usually read my own stuff out loud. Nice to hear someone else for a change!

It’s the official US Army Song Book from the Second World War. It begins, as you’d expect, with the Star Spangled Banner (three verses!), but the complete contents is eclectic, to say the least:

1. The Star Spangled Banner
2. Alma Mater
3. Aloha Oe
4. America
5. America, the Beautiful
6. Anchors Aweigh
7. The Army Air Corps
8. Song of the Army Engineer
9. Auld Lang Syne
10. Battle Hymn of the Republic
11. Bombed
12. The Caissons Go Rolling Along
13. Parody Field Artillery Song
14. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
15. Casey Jones
16. Cindy
17. Colombo
18. Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean
19. Crash On! Artillery
20. Dixie
21. Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes
22. Arms for the Love of America (The Army Ordnance Song) by Irving Berlin
23. For Her Lover Who Was Far Away
24. For Sev’n Long Years
25. God Bless America
26. God of Our Fathers
27. Good Night, Ladies!
28. Home, Boys, Home! & The Infantry (there are two number 28′s: a SNAFU, I guess)
29. A Home on the Range
30. Honey Dat I Love So Well
31. I’ll Tell You Where They WEre
32. The Infantry (different than the previous one by this name)
33. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
34. I’ve Been Workin’ on de Railroad
35. Juanita
36. K-K-K-Katy, plus parodies of the chorus of K-K-K-Katy, such as “K-K-K-K. P., Dirty old K.P., That’s the only Army Job that I abhor…” or the even more evocative “C-c-c-cootie, Horrible cootie, You’re the only b-b-b-bug that I abhor…”)
37. The Last Round-Up
38. Let Me Call You Sweetheart
39. The Man on the Flying Trapeze
40. The Marines’ Hymn
41. The Mintrels Sing of an English King
42. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga
43. The Mountain Battery
44. My Buddy
45. My Wild Irish Rose (plus a parody, “My wild eyed cadet,/He ain’t learned nothing yet,/He noses her down/When close to the ground…”)
46. The New River Train
47. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
48. Oh! Susanna
49. The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be
50. Old Joe Clark (not a song about the former Canadian Prime Minister)
51. Old King Cole (with a modified chorus glorifying the “Fighting Infantry”: each chorus adds another rank, so the final chorus runs, “The Army’s gone to hell,” said the generals;”What’s my next command?” said the colonels;/”Where’re my boots and spurs?” said the majors;/”We want ten days’ leave,” said the captains;/”We do all the work,” said the shavetails;/”Right by squads, squads right,” said the sergeants;/”Beer, beer, beer,” said the privates,/”Merry men are we./There’s none so fair as can compare/With the Fighting Infantry.”
52. The Old Plantation
53. On, Brave Old Army Team
54. Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag
55. Pop! Goes the Weasel
56. The Raw Recruit
57. Red River Valley
58. She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain
59. Slum and Gravy & Sons of Randolph (there are two number 59s)
60. Smiles
61. Song of the Signal Corps
62. A Stein Song
63. Tammany
64. There’s a Long, Long Trail
65. Where Do We Go From Here?
66. Yankee Doodle
67. You’re in the Army Now

It’s an interesting mixture of sentimental old favorites, patriotic  songs, and songs poking fun at Army life. I like, for one example, Bombed:

We were bombed last night, bombed the night before

And we’re going to be bombed tonight as we never were bombed before.

When we’re bombed, we’re as scared as we can be,

They can bomb the whole darn Army if they don’t bomb me.

CHORUS

They’re over us, over us,

One little cave for the four of us,

Glory be to God, there are no more of us

Or they’d surely bomb the whole darned crew.

But I think my favorite part of the book is the warning you can see on the image of the inside front cover:

“This book is the property of the United States Government and its contents may be used only with the military services.”

Which means, of course, that every time since 1941 that anyone has sung “Home on the Range” or “That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” they’ve been breaking military regulations.

I’ve sung both many times myself. I feel so ashamed.

But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek them out.

Which raises an interesting question. Do we perceive music differently when we watch it being played than we do when we are only listening to a recording?

Michael Schutz is both a noted percussionist and a noted researcher. Currently an assistant professor at McMaster University, he runs a research lab dedicated to studying the cognitive science of music, and the visual component of music is something he’s very interested in.

As he notes in an article published by the Acoustical Society of America, “while purists may argue that music is an auditory experience and therefore visual information is irrelevant, the enormous investment in clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects in live concerts demonstrates audiences clearly respond to and appreciate visual information as part of the musical experience.”

“Clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects” is rather too broad a collection of items to serve as the focus of a practical experiment, so Schutz decided to look at a much narrower question, i.e., “Do the gestures used by percussionists have any musical value irrespective of their acoustic consequences?”

This has long been a matter of debate. Some percussionists are adamant that using a sharp wrist motion produces a more staccato sound than a fluid motion. Others are adamant that gestures don’t matter: a percussion instrument will make the same sound if struck with the same amount of force no matter what gesture is used to produce the blow.

It turns out that they’re both right–or both wrong, depending on how you look at it–because there’s a difference between sound (acoustics) and the way that sound is experienced (perception).

Schutz and colleagues conducted two experiments. In the first, they recorded a world-renowned percussionist performing notes using long and short gestures on a professional-quality marimba. Participants rated the duration of each note twice: once while viewing the gesture, once just by listening.

The result: notes produced by long and short gestures were indistinguishable when judged by audio alone, but were judged to be significantly different when the accompanying gesture was seen…even though the participants had been specifically instructed to ignore visual information when making their ratings. Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it…alters the way the note sounds.”

Earlier studies had suggested that visual information does not influence ratings of note length, but Schutz suspected his experiment revealed such an influence because of the particularly strong visual connection between the gesture of the marimba player and the sound produced. He predicted the results would only apply to percussive sounds, where the motion producing the sound is clearly visible.

To test that prediction, the researchers paired the original videos with notes produced, not only by the marimba, but by piano, French horn, clarinet and voice. A second set of participants followed the same procedure as before…and found that non-percussive sounds were unaffected by the visuals…not too surprising, since we obviously know that a man hitting a marimba won’t produce the sound of someone singing. (Interestingly, some visual influence was found in the piano…which is technically a percussive instrument.)

All of which seems to indicate that, at least for percussion, there is a very strong link between the sight of a live musician playing an instrument and the listeners’ perception of the sound…and that watching a percussionist play live is a very different experience from listening to a recording.

Percussionists, Schutz suggests, use this “musical illusion” to “align audience perception with performer intent.”

Quite likely, other musicians make use of similar illusions. Pete Townshend’s wind-milling arm may not produce any different sound from an electric guitar than the less flamboyant display of another musician–but that’s not the way we perceive it.

Our brains are so strongly affected by visual stimuli that we literally cannot ignore them…which means that, while recorded music has its uses, it can never replace the impact of hearing, and seeing, music performed live.

Bonus: no silly, uncomfortable earbuds required.